The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (45 page)

On the right, Shinko, who is pregnant, cradles her son Hiroshi and is surrounded by her other children and other women from the Konko Church in San Francisco. Ten weeks following Pearl Harbor, Shinko and her children, smiling and well dressed despite their uncertain future, were part of the roundup and removal of 120,000 Japanese, two-thirds of them American. Photo by Dorothea Lange.

Guards patrolling the perimeter of the Crystal City Internment Camp. From 1942 to 1948, the government imprisoned German, Japanese, and a few Italian “enemy aliens” and their families in this Texas town.

Inside the ten-foot-tall barbed-wire fence, Japanese American children play in the dust near the tiny cottages in the Japanese section of the camp.

A guard on horseback patrols the fence line of the 290-acre camp, a physical reminder to the internees of their twenty-four-hour surveillance and crippling confinement.

In 1942, the president and the first lady used this photograph of themselves seated together on a porch at the White House on their Christmas cards. By then, FDR’s focus had shifted from the policies of the New Deal to the prosecution of the war. While Eleanor disagreed with his policies on internment, she reluctantly accepted them.

On November 6, 1942, Earl Harrison, the commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, traveled to Crystal City to consider the former migrant-labor camp as the site for the INS family internment camp. After World War II came to a close in Europe, he toured the Nazi concentration camps on President Truman’s orders.

Behind the fence line and the guard tower was the Federal High School. Here, facing east, is the American School, which offered an accredited education. There were also Japanese and German Schools.

This is an aerial view of the camp, from the north. The swimming pool is visible in the upper lefthand quadrant.

In the summer of 1943, German internees dredged and leveled an existing reservoir and built a combination swimming pool for the internees and reservoir for irrigating the camp’s vegetable gardens and citrus orchard.

In the summer of 1943, Harrison named a career Border Patrol agent, Joseph O’Rourke, shown here, as officer in charge of the camp in Crystal City. When O’Rourke arrived, he was a lonely bachelor, but as head of the camp he became popular with many of the children and teenagers.

Beauticians and barbers, all internees, at work in the German section. Internees labored in nearly every aspect of the building and running of the camp.

Johanna and Mathias Eiserloh were married on Christmas Eve 1923 and settled in Cleveland, Ohio.