The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (16 page)

The Eiserlohs lived in C Section, off Eleventh Avenue, near the
German bakery. Every morning they awoke to the smell of freshly made dark German bread. Because of Johanna’s fragile medical condition, they were assigned a coveted five-hundred-square-foot bungalow with an inside toilet, a kitchen, and one bedroom, the best living quarters available in camp. Others lived in duplexes, triplexes, and tar-papered Quonset and Victory Huts with communal toilets and showers. All of the quarters had heaters, kerosene ranges, portable ovens, and square-shaped iceboxes.

At only a hundred pounds, Johanna was as thin as a fragile bird. Her limbs were stalky. Sometimes she had dizzy spells. When she took a step, Ingrid watched to see if she would fall. But in the evenings, she pinned her auburn hair to the top of her head, put on an apron, and fixed her attention on the task ahead: preparing the family meal. Before the war, Johanna had been loquacious and efficient. Over the weeks and months in Crystal City, evenings found her in her small kitchen with her husband and children around her, Johanna became that way again. She washed fresh vegetables, baked chicken and roasts in the tiny stove, and poured her children tall glasses of milk. (Every morning teams of internees delivered twenty-five hundred quarts of fresh milk from the cows on the farm to the children in camp. Blocks of ice were delivered daily as well.) This was the pact Johanna had made with the American government: in return for life behind barbed wire, she had the pleasure of her family all gathered at the same table.

Sometimes the Eiserlohs ate at the Café Vaterland, a restaurant and beer garden staffed by internees, many of them professional chefs and bakers. After dinner, Johanna and Mathias would linger at the table with other German couples. When the sun went down and the temperatures cooled, many couples walked with their children around the perimeter of the fence. The sweet smell of oranges and lemons from the camp orchards filled the air. “We felt safe on those walks,” recalled Ingrid. “It was the happiest time of the day.”

Provisions of the Third Geneva Convention governed the treatment of internees. Every aspect of daily life—the amount of food,
allotted living space, payment for work—was prescribed by the convention rules, which were monitored by the International Red Cross. As a result, no one went hungry in Crystal City. Though most internees ate at home with their families, there was a mess hall as well. An average menu for a single day—breakfast: stewed prunes, bran flakes, toast with oleo (a colloquial term for margarine) and syrup, coffee/milk; lunch: beef stew, potatoes, cabbage, bread with oleo and syrup again; and dinner: spaghetti, string beans, cooked carrots, pickled beets, and, again, bread with oleo and syrup. Breakfast was served at 7:30 a.m., lunch at 11:00 a.m., and supper at 6:00 p.m. sharp.

Many of the employees, including the bachelor O’Rourke, ate regularly at the mess hall. The price was right: for $6.67 per month, employees could eat one meal a day. Many of the employees, whose civilian ration cards did not permit them to eat large quantities of meat, sugar, and coffee, complained that internees in the camp enjoyed a better life inside the fence than they had outside it.
“Selling these employees on the internment program was an obstacle in itself,” wrote O’Rourke, who recorded that he felt “squeezed” between the demands of internees and those of the employees, who believed that “anything received by the internees was too good and too much.”

For food, clothing, and other necessities, the internees were issued camp tokens made of pressed paper or plastic and quarter-shaped, like casino chips. Children from six to thirteen, such as Lothar and Ingrid, received $4 in chips a month, two- to five-year-olds such as Ensi received $1.25, and adults received $5.25 a month. Internees were allowed to work only eight hours a day, at ten cents an hour, thus making no more than eighty cents a day.

The camp had two stores, one for the Germans and the other for the Japanese. Each supplied thousands of items, including soap, shoestrings, boxes of buttons, yards of gingham, candy, soft drinks, peanut butter, spaghetti sauce, beer for the Germans, and sake for the Japanese. Mathias was never out of cigarettes, with the German store carrying three popular American brands: Lucky Strike,
Philip Morris, and Chesterfield. From morning till night, internees piled goods into handmade wooden carts and took them home. Both stores were well managed, and by the end of 1943, O’Rourke reported the combined gross sales of the stores was an impressive $200,000.

The heavy summer dragged on. At twilight, an immense chorus of cawing crows and shrill cicadas filled the air. Wild cats fed on baby birds that fell from nests. One day Lothar saw a newborn crow fall from its nest and ran to save it from the cats. He built a cage for the crow out of an orange crate and fed it droplets of milk. To further protect the bird, Mathias constructed a closed-in porch for the barrack. After that, Ingrid, Lothar, and the baby bird slept on the porch.

The struggle to protect the baby crow reflected the psychological impact of internment. Mangione, the writer who worked for the INS, often received letters from internees. In one letter, an internee described her efforts to save and rescue a bird.
“No living thing should be locked up,” said the letter writer. “When I am free, I want to live in a house without locks, even without doors. It will be a house made up of windows and the view must not be obstructed by anything, not even mountains.”

In August, Johanna and Mathias had a scare. The driver of a sprinkler truck pulled up in front of their house to water a section of the road. Looking out of his rearview mirror to back up the truck, the driver saw a small group of young children running behind his vehicle to stand under the sprinkler, as if enjoying a waterfall. The driver yelled at the children to move, but two-year-old Ensi, her blond hair bleached white by the sun, among them, did not hear the warning. The driver backed up and Ensi fell to the ground. When the driver stopped the truck, he heard Ensi crying and found her curled underneath the truck, hands over her tiny ears. Fortunately, the wheels had missed her. The driver rushed her to the camp hospital, where she was treated and released.

One of Earl Harrison’s good intentions was to recognize the INS’s obligation to offer an American education to the children confined in the Crystal City camp, the majority of whom had been born in America. Three types of schools were established in the internment camp: the American School, called the Federal School, the Japanese School, and the German School. Each provided an elementary, junior high, and high school education. The assumption was that most students would attend the Federal School, which offered an American-style education and was fully accredited by the Texas State Board of Education. State-certified teachers were hired for the Federal School, and classes were taught in English. In the Japanese and German schools, internees taught students in their native languages. The German leaders who had instigated the flag controversy also pressed German parents to register their children in the German School. Most parents complied.

All through the summer of 1943, Mathias and Johanna, Ingrid’s parents, had debated the issue. Johanna preferred that Ingrid and Lothar be enrolled in the Federal School for an American education. After all, they were born in America, as was their younger sister, Ensi. But Mathias pressed for the German School. In return for having their family reunited in Crystal City, Mathias and Johanna had agreed to repatriate to Germany. Neither Ingrid nor Lothar was fluent in German, and Lothar could barely speak it at all. As a practical matter, they both needed to learn the language and the culture
of Germany. Mathias had the strongest argument, but now Johanna was reluctant to repatriate, even though she had agreed to it and signed the repatriation document.

The conflict between Mathias and Johanna was indicative of what happened in Crystal City during the summer of 1943 and well into 1944. Some Germans and Japanese would remain in the camp and adapt to the tiny civilization, run by O’Rourke, while others would either be shipped off against their will or, like the Eiserlohs, be readied for voluntary repatriation in exchange for American soldiers and civilians in Europe and Japan. One practical function of the German and Japanese schools was to prepare the children of enemy aliens as trade bait.

Mathias, like other Germans, feared that if he placed his children in the American School, there would be reprisals from the German leaders in camp. For the duration of the camp’s operations, fewer than twenty-four German parents enrolled their children in the Federal School.
Kazuko Shimahara, a young Japanese American internee, remembered a German girl who was briefly in Kazuko’s class at Federal Elementary School. The German American schoolmate confided to Kazuko how difficult it was for her to come to school because her German neighbors shunned her and her family.

Mathias prevailed, and
on September 7, 1943, when the German School opened in a four-room facility, Lothar reported for fourth grade and Ingrid for seventh. Both struggled with the language. In addition, the school in Crystal City was structured on the German model, stricter and more rigid than an American-style education. Both Lothar and Ingrid took classes in German, arithmetic, botany, and geography. There were no classes in American literature and no music lessons—nothing to satisfy Ingrid’s creative appetites. The teachers, German internees who were mostly uneducated, working-class men, controlled the curriculum. For instance, one of Ingrid’s language teachers was an electrician. The man who taught her mathematics was a farmer.

At home in Strongsville, Ingrid had been aware of her German
heritage. She enjoyed the oompah-pah bands at the community beer garden, German food, and German operas. But she didn’t identify herself as a German because she was born in the United States. In the German School, she felt pressured to think, write, and speak in German.

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The reality of day-to-day life behind the fence was ineluctable, as sure as night follows day: nothing about it was normal. The political considerations that the Eiserlohs and other families had to take into account in their choice of schools highlighted the continuing tensions on the German side of camp. All that autumn of 1943, conflicts continued.

By October, the tedium of Crystal City was such that Kuhn decided to pass himself off as an informer to the FBI. The Department of Justice was still investigating the Bund, and one of the investigators in Philadelphia wanted Kuhn as a witness. Kuhn agreed.

On October 10, Kuhn left camp under heavy guard and was driven to the Gunter Hotel, an eight-story luxury hotel in downtown San Antonio founded in the 1800s by two wealthy German immigrants. A deputy US marshal and an FBI agent from San Antonio were under orders to entertain Kuhn and “create a friendly frame of mind” for his upcoming testimony in Philadelphia. They took him to dinner and to a rodeo, then went back to the hotel to question Kuhn.

During the interview, Kuhn drank whiskey and regaled them with stories. He described one night in Los Angeles when he addressed a crowd of forty thousand. He grew wistful when he remembered that after his speech, most of the crowd stood and gave the Heil Hitler. He told them that Hitler’s government sent the Bund $1 million a year for their activities. It was an improbable claim—the FBI had no evidence that Germany funded the Bund. In fact, it was the other way around: the Bund sent small amounts of money to Germany.

Soon the wires were whistling between San Antonio and FBI headquarters in Washington. “Can this be true?” scrawled one of
the agents in Washington at the bottom of the report filed in San Antonio. “If it was in fact Kuhn send memo to A.G. at once.” The FBI agent on the ground and the deputy US marshal convinced their superiors that Kuhn’s wild claim had to be a “joke.”

But Kuhn was not finished toying with the FBI. He next told investigators that, on his orders as president of the Bund, monthly reports were submitted about membership and finances to national headquarters in New York. Kuhn claimed that the reports were not destroyed. On October 18, 1943, Hoover himself sent out an urgent wire from Washington to agents in New York. “Department of Justice anxious to procure copies of these reports if possible,” wrote Hoover. “Desire these inquires to be conducted immediately.” The goose chase was on. Nothing substantial was turned up, and Kuhn returned to Crystal City.

By December, Heinrich Johann Hasenburger, considered a troublemaker by O’Rourke, had followed Kolb as the official spokesman for the camp’s German population, despite Hasenburger’s not having been duly elected. A few brave German and German American internees tried to contest his appointment. According to their count, Hasenburger received 149 votes out of 631 cast—a clear indication that the majority of Germans in camp did not want Hasenburger as spokesman. In the January 15, 1944, issue of
Das Lager
, a mimeographed newsletter published by the Germans, Hasenburger demanded a referendum on his leadership. A recount of the election was not held, but Hasenburger assumed the position. One female internee wrote a feverish letter to Washington about Hasenburger’s techniques, calling him an
“Imitation Dictator.” She appears to have been right. Hasenburger kept his position and set out to punish his enemies. Families that opposed his election were, on Hasenburger’s orders, “excluded from the community.” They could not purchase food at the German store or the mess hall, or frequent the barber and beauty shops, or participate in community activities. One entire family whose father refused an order from Hasenburger was deprived of food for four days. When O’Rourke discovered it, the
family was admitted to the camp hospital, which offered protection from Hasenburger.

That fall, Harrison set out his expectations for the kind of conflicts that O’Rourke confronted with Hasenburger and other Germans. Under the heading “Be Patient” in the manual of conduct for INS employees, Harrison wrote, “It is often difficult to be patient and exercise an unruffled self-restraint in the face of scathing verbal criticism, or when threatened with physical violence, but it always enlists sympathetic support and pays dividends. No matter how exasperated the circumstances become, officers must bear in mind they are representatives of our government and must conduct themselves in a worthy manner. To become impatient, sarcastic, hostile or personal in remarks is an admission of weakness and defeat and, needless to say, should never occur.”