The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (32 page)

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the possibility of escape for Jewish refugees trapped in Germany was for all practical purposes closed. At that point, the waiting list for German nationals seeking US visas numbered 310,000. The quotas for citizens of Hungary, Romania, and Poland were even smaller than for Germans. Most Jews from those countries were not even eligible to apply.

In the end, millions of Jews in Europe unknowingly faced a death sentence because of the visa restrictions. The most famous case is that of the family of Anne Frank. In 1941, the Frank family—Otto, Edith, Anne, and Margot—had not yet gone into hiding in Amsterdam. In an effort to secure an American visa, Otto contacted a friend, Nathan Straus Jr., whom Frank had met thirty-three years earlier. Straus had been put in charge of the New Deal’s United States Housing Authority, which had an $800 million budget for public housing. When Straus, in a position of power in Washington, tried to secure visas for the Frank family, he was turned down. “The State Department,” Breitman and Lichtman wrote, “had already cut off most visas to Jews.”

By 1941, Roosevelt was in his third term and had adopted a more activist position with regard to the Jews. He announced that Nazi
war criminals would be held accountable for the organized killings in concentration camps. He created the War Refugee Board, which brought together the Departments of War, Treasury, and State to help rescue Jewish remnants. He appointed Harrison, who had quit his position as INS commissioner in protest of the restricted visa policies of the United States, to the War Refugee Board.

On June 29, 1944, the War Refugee Board considered a proposal to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz to slow down the deportation of Jews and to bomb the crematoriums and gas chambers there as well. Allied planes were already in the area—industrial complexes and oil refineries near Auschwitz had been bombed. The successful bombing would have destroyed the Nazi machinery of death. While prisoners would have been killed, the perpetrators would also have died. But the War Department opposed the plan for a variety of reasons. Those in charge of operations thought they had greater-priority military targets than the concentration camp, and the proposal was rejected. How successful it would have been is a matter of ongoing debate. The massacre of Jews in Auschwitz and in other camps continued. From early January 1945 until Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, Nazi troops, in the final phase of genocide, murdered 250,000 additional Jews.

In the face of so much death, the handful of Jews spared in the January 1945 exchange, including Irene and Jacob, had defied overwhelming odds. Indeed, the chances of Irene and Jacob being hit by lightning were greater than their chances of escaping genocide. During negotiations between Berlin and Washington for the exchange, Irene was saved by her father’s lucky ruse, the false passports from Ecuador. These had made her eligible for exchange for a German with a Latin American passport from Crystal City. The legitimate American passports of Henri, Jacob, and Marie Wolf were tickets to that family’s salvation.

In November 1945 the Wolf family—Henri, Jacob, and Marie—were released from camp. They boarded a Liberty ship, one of the hastily built cargo ships that
Time
magazine called an “ugly duckling”
because of its crude construction, and slowly made their way to the port of New York. For them it was truly a “Liberty ship,” as Roosevelt had christened such vessels at the launch ceremony in 1941, where FDR citied Patrick Henry’s 1775 speech: “Give me liberty or give me death.” He predicted that the Liberty ships would bring freedom to Europe. Four years later Roosevelt’s prediction had come true. The war in Europe had been won.

In less than two weeks, the ship carrying the Wolf family pulled into New York Harbor. “U-S-A!” said Jacob out loud. “U-S-A!” From the deck of the freighter Jacob saw the panoramic lines of skyscrapers, so straight they looked like soldiers standing at attention. At the pier, the Wolfs went through customs and were soon standing on a windy corner with crowds of harried people waiting for a bus. The air of freedom was electrifying.

The Wolfs went straight to a small apartment in Brooklyn that had been arranged for them by relief workers at the Philippeville camp, who had also arranged a job for Henri as a foreign-language teacher. In New York, Henri told Jacob and Marie they had three days to get accustomed to the neighborhood. On the fourth day, both Jacob and Marie enrolled at Eramus Hall High School, a celebrated school in Flatbush where such celebrities as the actress Mae West and the detective novelist Mickey Spillane had preceded them. Two weeks later, Jacob was playing soccer for Eramus Hall, where he was now known as Jack. For the Wolf family, liberty had arrived.

Meanwhile, Irene stayed in Philippeville waiting for her papers—and her own Liberty ship to America.

Information about the war was slow to reach the internees
in Crystal City. Radios were not permitted, and newspapers and magazines were censored. The newsreels that most Americans watched rapt from their seats in movie theaters weren’t permitted in Crystal City.

For internees the war was experienced in exile. The Buddhists in Crystal City understood it as a
bardo
state—a provisional period between their lives before their confinement, and the dream of freedom after the war. All through the war, trains kept bringing people to Crystal City and transporting others out of camp and on to Germany, Japan, and elsewhere. Life happened between the comings and goings of trains.
By the spring of 1945, 153 babies were listed on the camp’s birth records, including Guenther Eiserloh, Ingrid’s baby brother, now in Idstein, Germany. Seventeen internees had died, including the two Japanese Peruvian girls who drowned and one German boy hit by a truck. School years started and stopped, children morphed into teenagers, loyalties shifted—all ways of passing transitional time inside the fence.

O’Rourke often said that he wanted the children in camp to have happy memories of Crystal City and grow up to be what he repeatedly called “good American citizens.” There were happy memories—school plays, picnics, family gatherings—but the teenagers in camp knew the fence meant that they were regarded as criminals, that their government considered them, as well as their parents, dangerous. It meant they lived in a government cage.

Students in the Federal High School sometimes asked O’Rourke why their “enemy alien” parents were scapegoated by the government and why they, as American citizens, weren’t free to come and go from camp. O’Rourke, a career Border Patrol agent with little flair for philosophy, had no satisfying answer. “You’re victims of a lousy war,” he told them. “You’ve got no choice but to make the best of it.” Once O’Rourke told Jerre
Mangione, the press aide to former INS commissioner Harrison, “My family is the people in this camp.” This lonely, heartbreaking thing for a man to say indicated that O’Rourke felt exiled as well. If he could only keep the teenagers busy at work or school, he told Mangione, then “they’d all be a hell of a lot more relaxed.”

On April 13, 1945, as newspaper hawkers all over the world shouted the headlines from street corners—“The president is dead!”—those trapped inside the barbed-wire fence in faraway Crystal City knew nothing of how Roosevelt had died in Warm Springs the previous day. A few days later, twenty-year-old Eb Fuhr learned of FDR’s death from an armed guard who escorted Fuhr and other members of the ice crew into town to pick up a load of ice for delivery inside the camp. Over time, the relationship between the guard and the ice crew had grown relaxed, even friendly. Information about world events was about two weeks behind the curve on the grapevine inside the camp, but FDR’s death was impossible for the guard to keep secret. Within hours, word of the momentous event—repeated by the ice crew—had spread to all those living inside the fence. Most of the internees had no context, no way to understand the impact of the death of the president. Eb hoped that it would shorten the war and hasten the closing of the camp. “We just wanted a change in status,” he said. “The reaction in camp was pretty neutral. None of us knew what it meant for us.”

In the Japanese section, Sumi and her friends were busy with end-of-the-school-year activities and worried about being forced to repatriate to Japan with their parents. “I don’t have a strong memory of President Roosevelt’s death,” she recalled. “I assume there was sadness, but I can’t
say for sure. I know that I never heard any official news. It was all word of mouth, lots of it spoken in Japanese and therefore confusing.”

In contrast, a few internees sent letters and telegrams to Eleanor in the White House. “Dear Mrs. Roosevelt,” wrote Gongoro Nakamura, a Japanese internee. “In this hour of your deepest sorrow, I can find no better words than May God Bless you.” Two German internees—Hans J. Brueckner and Werner Fertsch—wrote a more formal letter: “We, the undersigned, by means of these lines wish to express our deep and profound regret over the sudden and unexpected death of the President of the United States, Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt. We feel this loss is so much heavier as the President was called in the midst of his work that he liked to do and which he felt he had to carry out for the future happiness and security of the great nation and the rest of the world.”

If Eleanor Roosevelt read those letters, written by people arrested and indefinitely interned by the government for years in the desert of Texas, they must have struck her as deeply ironic.

Of course, the staff in Crystal City knew about the president’s death. O’Rourke sent out a memorandum to all personnel after the news broke that any employee who wanted to take the day off in memory of Roosevelt was welcome to do so. Many stayed home and listened to broadcasts on the radio.

•  •  •

The morning of his death—Thursday, April 12—Roosevelt awoke at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia, and complained of a slight headache. Later, he sat at a table and went through a large volume of mail. At about 1:00 p.m. the butler arrived to set the table for lunch. Shortly thereafter, Roosevelt complained of a terrific pain in the back of his head and collapsed. At 3:35 p.m. a doctor pronounced him dead of a massive cerebral hemorrhage.

To her regret, on the day Roosevelt died, Eleanor wasn’t with him in Warm Springs. Instead, she was at the White House, preparing for the opening of the United Nations charter meeting in San Francisco,
only two weeks away. Within a half hour after his death, Eleanor was given the news by phone at the White House. She phoned her daughter, Anna, and then sent a wire to their four sons, who were all serving in the armed forces: “Darlings: Father slipped away this afternoon. He did his job to the end as he would want you to do. Bless you. All our love. Mother.”

Vice President Harry Truman was summoned to the White House, and Eleanor gave him the stunning news. Truman paused to collect himself, then asked, “Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Is there anything
we
can do for
you?
” responded Eleanor. “You are the one in trouble now.”

Two hours later, she attended the swearing in of Vice President Harry Truman as president, then boarded an airplane for Warm Springs and arrived at the cottage at 11:25 p.m.

She immediately set to work with FDR’s aides on the funeral arrangements. The following morning Eleanor and her entourage—secretaries, aides, and Secret Service—boarded a train in Warm Springs for the long funeral procession to Washington, DC. Roosevelt’s casket was carried in a separate car. Hordes of people, many sobbing, lined the tracks. People were stunned by the news. Some carried posters of Roosevelt, head thrown back, a smile on his face, his strong, immutable character shining forth. When the train arrived in Washington, Roosevelt’s casket was placed on a black caisson pulled by six white horses and taken to the White House. More than half a million people filled the streets.

All the commentators pronounced FDR’s death ill timed. His first words as president twelve years before his death were “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” In the intervening years, the country had faced many fears, including the Depression and the long war. But at the moment of his death, Berlin was about to fall. The successful Allied bombardment campaign signaled Japan’s inevitable defeat. Victory was within reach but Roosevelt did not live to see it.

•  •  •

In Crystal City, the weather was sultry and hot and life settled into endeavors at normalcy. Eb and his ice crew worked overtime to keep iceboxes full. At Federal High School, fourteen students in the freshman class organized the Service Club and devoted themselves to volunteering. They worked in the school library, distributed school supplies, cleaned blackboards, and repaired desks. The Federal Elementary School published a newspaper every six weeks called the
Yehudi Express.
In 1938, the phrase “Who’s Yehudi?” became popular slang for an invisible person when Yehudi Menuhin, a famous violinist, was a guest on the comedian Bob Hope’s radio program. Another comedian on the show found the violinist’s name side-splittingly funny and repetitively asked: “Who’s Yehudi?” A hit song titled with the same question was released in 1941. According to Toni Tomita, who was on the staff of the newspaper in her sixth-grade year, the students chose the name as a gag, implying that the newspaper was written by people no one seemed to know. One of the stories reminded students that
Johnny Appleseed
, a book they’d studied in class, was an American classic because it told the tale of “unusual unselfishness in which Johnny Appleseed devoted most of his life to activities of service to his unknown as well as known friends.”

The nights in Crystal City were a dreamlike mixture of the past and the present. Lights glowed from the bungalows. Sage was in bloom. Watermelons as large as basketballs grew on the ground. The scent of oranges, lemons, and plums was everywhere. The desert moon was so round and bright it looked like an anchor for the stars.
At the Federal High School, Kathryn Goldsmith, Sumi’s favorite teacher, directed seniors in a performance of
Night Owl
. Among the movie offerings in April was
Passport to Destiny
, a 1944 classic that stars Elsa Lanchester, who plays an English charlady who sneaks into Berlin with the idea of assassinating Hitler. The showing of that movie must have been uncomfortable for at least some of the German internees.