The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (41 page)

Barbara rehearsed her valedictorian’s speech with Eb. He was in the audience on graduation night when Barbara stood behind the podium and delivered a thoughtful reflection on the hardships of confinement as well as her hopes for the future. “The graduation marks the climax in our lives; it is as though we, like wanderers through life, have reached a peak, a hill on which we can rest and look back upon the journey which has brought us to this point,” said Barbara. “True enough, school and home life in recent years
have not been the usual kind. But an internment camp has become a home to us and a camp school has furnished us with the educational structure for the future. But certainly these peculiarities, these very extraordinary circumstances, which have tinged our everyday lives could not change the educational ideals which school and home have inculcated in us.”

The history of America is the history of overcoming hardships and that was never more true than during World War II. Despite what Barbara called “peculiarities,” she emerged that night as a strong voice of American optimism. After four years of internment, Barbara and her parents had little future ahead of them in New York.
Nonetheless, Barbara encouraged her classmates to recognize the strength they had acquired from the difficulties of internment in Crystal City. “Always along the way we have been able to meet the challenge of unfamiliar situations with confidence and the wise and patient guidance of parents and teachers,” she said. “What they have given us thus far will be the backbone of the spiritual and mental life which lies ahead of us.”

O’Rourke had always evinced a concern and affection for the young people in the camp, and Barbara Minner’s inspiring speech must have given him a sense of accomplishment in his efforts to create educational opportunities for them. But not all stories ended so well as Barbara Minner’s. Beyond the strategic and legal issues O’Rourke had to deal with in the process of phasing out the camp, there were profound emotional challenges involving individual cases.

Among the most tragic situations was the case of the Fukuda family from San Francisco. By the spring of 1946, the memorandum that O’Rourke had presented to Fukuda when the imposing Konko minister had arrived in Crystal City in January 1944, forbidding Fukuda from holding positions of power in camp, had long since been set aside. Fukuda had since served as principal of the Japanese School, worked as a printer and a projectionist, and delivered ice. To the remaining Japanese in camp, Fukuda had become unofficially known as the mayor of Crystal City.

Fukuda now faced a difficult war on two fronts: a legal battle to avoid deportation to Japan, and the medical crisis of his son Yoshiro. It had been almost two years since Yoshiro had been diagnosed with chronic kidney disease, and the ten-year-old boy had survived crisis after crisis. During the winter and spring of 1945, the camp newspaper carried a story about Yoshiro’s need for transfusions, and many people had donated blood. On January 17, 1945, an abscessed tooth was pulled to remove an infection from the boy’s body. On May 1945, Dr. Martin had performed a tonsillectomy for the same reason. Yoshiro was given large doses of vitamins.

In August 1945, Yoshiro returned to the Fukudas’ bungalow, number 26 in the T section of camp. He weighed only forty-eight pounds. On Dr. Martin’s orders, the boy ate a high-protein diet of meat, eggs, and fish. At dawn, the family carried him outside so that he could watch the sunrise. They gave him sponge baths, and when he complained of stomach pain they applied a hot-water bottle.

Nothing seemed to help. In Dr. Martin’s case notes, he reported after a visit to the bungalow that Yoshiro “slept long periods” and was “very listless.” He gave him a shot of penicillin and asked how he was feeling. “No complaints,” responded Yoshiro. Though Dr. Martin warned Fukuda and his wife, Shinko, that Yoshiro’s condition was critical, the family held out hope for many more months.

On March 11, 1946, Fukuda received a deportation order signed by Clark, the attorney general. Fukuda was not surprised. He had never hidden his personal loyalty to Japan. He was the embodiment of
Yamato Damashi
—faithfulness to the Japanese spirit and homeland. However, Fukuda continued his fight to stay in America. His children were all Americans, and he wanted to fulfill his mission to spread the Konko faith in America. He insisted that he was not—and never had been—a threat to America.

With his deportation order in hand, Fukuda went to O’Rourke and asked for help in gaining a reprieve. O’Rourke told Fukuda that he knew him to be a “good husband and father,” but he could do nothing to keep him from being deported to Japan. The government’s file on him was long and, in O’Rourke’s words, “very unfavorable.”

The following month, on April 26, 1946, Yoshiro caught a cold that escalated to pneumonia. Three days later, he returned to the camp hospital. Early the next morning, Yoshiro woke, asked the orderly for his father, and then lapsed into a coma. He died several days later, at 9:15 a.m. on May 1.

Shortly after the boy’s death, O’Rourke came to Yoshiro’s bedside, where Fukuda stood beside Dr. Martin. O’Rourke looked at Yoshiro’s still body and his swollen face and told Fukuda how sorry he was for the loss. With three grown men standing over the bed of a small boy, it must have been difficult to distinguish the degrees of sorrow: that of the preacher from Japan whose God had taken his son, of the doctor who could not cure his patient’s disease, or of the officer in charge who could not spare an American-born child the indignity of death behind a barbed-wire fence.

Two days later, a funeral was held for Yoshiro at Manifold Mortuary in Crystal City. Prior to the funeral, a photograph was taken in front of Harrison Hall of Fukuda, dressed in a dark suit; Shinko; their remaining six children; and a group of about thirty friends. The crowd of mourners stood behind large sprays of carnations. About 7:00 p.m. the group left the camp in several cars under armed guard and drove the short distance to the mortuary. Other drivers pulled to the side of the road, as is the custom in Texas, to allow the funeral caravan to pass. After a brief service, Fukuda left his son’s body at the mortuary to be cremated and he and the others returned to camp.

When the ashes arrived, Fukuda kept them in his bungalow, with the intention of distributing them in San Francisco, if the family ever gained its release. One of the things that Fukuda grieved over the most was that his younger children—Yoshiro, now dead; another son, Hiroshi; Koichi, who had been born at the Tanforan Assembly Center; and Makiko, his only daughter—had no memories of San Francisco. “Instead of the beautiful greenery of Frisco,
they have grown up behind the barbed wire and under the watch tower for so many years,” he wrote. “To lose such a child as Yoshiro was indeed a major tragedy for my family.”

On August 8, 1946, three months after Yoshiro’s death, Fukuda sat down in his bungalow and wrote a formal petition for release from internment to the attorney general. Fukuda’s tone was penitent: “I might have done many mistakes in my conduct and speech in the past which might have been taken to be too strong pro-Japanese. Now I understand that I should have been more careful to live in the foreign country, especially for the sake of my children who are all American citizens. It may be too late to wake up but please excuse me for all my faults in the past and release me to be able to educate my children at the public schools of San Francisco, which reopen at the end of August.”

The petition was denied. Shortly afterward, Fukuda’s two oldest sons—Michisuke, fifteen, and Nobusuke, fourteen—asked to be paroled from Crystal City so that they could return to San Francisco and resume their educations. O’Rourke approved the release, and on September 10, 1946, both of the older sons left Crystal City and returned to San Francisco. “It was difficult to leave our parents,” recalled Nobusuke, “but my father wanted us to go back. We were behind in our education and needed to catch up.”

Fukuda and fourteen other Japanese internees sought the help of Wayne Collins, a persistent defense lawyer in San Francisco who had become the national champion of Japanese internees. Collins filed a habeas corpus petition in federal court in Del Rio, Texas, not far from Crystal City, asking that all fifteen Japanese men be released on parole on the grounds that their internment was unconstitutional. The lawsuit bought Fukuda and the others time.

Meanwhile, Fukuda resumed his duties in the camp. He worked to find a way to keep the Japanese Peruvians who were in Crystal City from being deported to Japan. The government of Peru had refused to accept the Japanese immigrants back in the country, and many had already been exiled to Japan. “I no longer desired to
leave behind in the camp those who were less fortunate,” Fukuda wrote. “I wrote letters and petitions to the government requesting improvements in camp conditions. As a prison needs a religious minister, the camp needed me.”

By then, large numbers of internees had been issued parole papers and had left camp. Each person who left was given instructions to report to the district director of the INS within twenty-four hours after their arrival in the city of their choice. Young men were required to notify draft boards. There were also odd new arrivals. In July 31, 1946, a group of three hundred Indonesian sailors was removed from a Dutch ship by immigration officers in New York and sent to Crystal City under “protective custody.” The sailors, all of whom were Muslims, were prisoners and segregated in a deserted portion of the camp, isolated from the others in camp. They followed their religious customs, maintained their diet, and did hard labor in the camp, taking down abandoned Victory Huts and repairing roads, for which they were not paid. The camp at Crystal City was no longer a family camp, but the only internment camp still functioning as an incarceration facility for problem prisoners.

For the other internees, everyday life became more intolerable. The private kitchens in bungalows were no longer allowed. Everyone was required to eat in a main mess hall in the center of camp. Shinko, Fukuda’s wife, was bedridden after Yoshiro’s death with grief and illness. Her friends and remaining children had to bring her meals to her. In the camp hospital, three Japanese Peruvians were admitted with tuberculosis, which triggered a wave of fear throughout the camp and overwhelmed Dr. Martin and his small staff.

In early January 1947, O’Rourke received a telegram from headquarters, reassigning him as deputy operations director of the INS office in Kansas City, Missouri. The job in Kansas City offered freedom from the isolation of Crystal City and a significant pay raise to $9,560, more than $2,000 higher than what he then received. O’Rourke and Mary left Crystal City on January 31, 1947. He drove his Studebaker into town, past the statue of Popeye, and sped onto a two-lane
highway headed for San Antonio and then, dust in his rearview mirror, drove north toward Kansas City.

With Mary in the passenger seat, O’Rourke followed the old Chisholm Trail that was used by cowboys in the nineteenth century to drive cattle from Texas to market in Kansas City. Arriving there on February 4, 1947, O’Rourke reported for work in his new, less complicated job.

L. T. McCollister, the former operations officer who replaced O’Rourke as acting officer in charge in Crystal City, faced a dilemma: he was under orders to close the camp by 1948 and had no solution for the Japanese, Japanese Peruvians, or Germans who were still there.

In Crystal City, only 108 Germans were left, including Eb Fuhr, his brother Julius, and his parents Carl and Anna. The Fuhr brothers worked on a crew that disassembled buildings in the Japanese section. The prefabricated Victory Huts were made of panel sections bolted together in sequence. After the huts were dismantled, the Fuhr brothers took them to nearby Border Patrol stations, where the Victory Huts were refitted with roofs. Border Patrol agents used them to house aliens arrested for illegally crossing the border from Mexico.

The Fuhr family was scheduled for deportation, but was still fighting to stay in the United States. By then, more than two hundred habeas corpus lawsuits had been filed by German internees, including the Fuhrs, to set aside deportations. The argument in these cases was the same advanced by Collins for the Japanese—that is, their homeland, in this case Germany, was no longer an enemy of the United States and thus German citizens could not be classified as enemy aliens. In late 1946, all of the lawsuits were consolidated into one case, the Schlueter case. A federal court judge in New York ruled against the plaintiffs and affirmed Truman’s order. On January 3, 1947, the
New York Times
reported that, based on the court’s decision, seven hundred Germans, including the Fuhr family, would immediately be deported.

In April the Fuhr family was ordered to Ellis Island for deportation. They took a train to New York, and arrived at Ellis Island, where Eb and his family were confined with 207 other German deportees in one massive room. Eb recalled that the confinement on Ellis Island was worse than at Crystal City. “We did a lot of talking and card playing and mostly a lot of waiting,” he said. “In Crystal City, we worked outside. In Ellis Island, we had little exercise. It was crowded and the atmosphere was tense.” Once a week, however, Barbara, his sweetheart from Crystal City, visited him at Ellis Island, and in the presence of armed guards, the couple planned their future.

Suddenly, on July 24, 1947, the US Senate passed a bill that called for an end to all deportations at Ellis Island. Two months later, the attorney general began granting releases to those in custody on Ellis Island, two and a half years after Germany surrendered. In mid-September new hearings were held for the prisoners. Eb, who remembered his hearing in Cincinnati, when his interrogator asked irrational questions about Nazi submarines coming up the Ohio River, wondered what he would be asked on Ellis Island. He entered the hearing room with dread. “From the first moment, I knew this one was different,” recalled Eb. “They weren’t looking for reasons to keep me there. The questions were fair.” The hearing lasted only ten minutes.

When he walked out of the room, his brother Julius was waiting for his own hearing. “Don’t worry,” said Eb. “We’re out of here. This is all over.”