The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (44 page)

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After Eb Fuhr married his Crystal City sweetheart, Barbara, in 1948, the couple moved to the Midwest. Barbara worked as a secretary and put Eb through college and an MBA program at Ohio State University in Columbus. After graduation, he was hired as a salesman for the Shell Oil Company and had a successful business career. He applied for citizenship, but because he had been interned in Crystal City, the process took seven years. No one could understand why he was interned. Finally in 1955 he was naturalized. After he retired from the Shell Oil Company he began to speak in public about his experience and that of other Germans in Crystal City. Although the abuse of the rights of the Japanese and Japanese Americans has been well documented, Eb was angry that the consequences of the government’s internment of more than ten thousand German and German American civilians had never been acknowledged. “This shameful chapter in American history did not just happen to the Japanese,” he said. “I was
a kid when I was arrested. I hadn’t done anything wrong. Our family, one of the last to leave Crystal City, paid a very heavy price. All ethnicities, including Germans, who were wrongly held as prisoners deserve redress.” After fifty-six years of marriage, Barbara, who shared his frustration over the government’s refusal to make amends, died in 2004.

After the Civil Liberties Act that granted reparations to the Japanese was passed in 1988, Arthur Jacobs, a German American who was in Crystal City with Fuhr, filed a class-action lawsuit. Jacobs charged the act ignored German and German American enemy aliens and their families who had been treated the same in Crystal City. The Jacobs lawsuit contended that Germans were discriminated against on the basis of their ethnicity as Germans and as children of Germans. The US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC, turned down Jacobs’s lawsuit on the grounds that the Japanese were detained on the basis of their race, while Germans were detained in smaller numbers based on potential security risks. Since then, numerous bills have been filed in Congress calling for the establishment of a commission to review the treatment of Germans and German Americans who were interned, but none of the bills have passed. Like Fuhr and the Eiserloh family, Jacobs continues to press for the US government to acknowledge the internment of German immigrants and their children between 1941 and 1948.

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The world into which Ingrid was dragged with her loved ones on January 8, 1942, the date of her father’s arrest, engulfed her. While Johanna, her mother, Lothar, her brother, and Ensi, her sister, found ways over the years to redeem the past, the other three members of the family—Ingrid; her father, Mathias; and her younger brother, Guenther, never did. For those three, the calamity never ended.

When Ingrid and Lothar returned to the United States in 1947, under the guardianship of Mathias’s sister, they settled in the Los Angeles area. At seventeen, Ingrid briefly enrolled as a high school junior in Reseda, a community in Los Angeles, but was too far
behind in her studies to excel and dropped out. Her early dream of studying music vanished. Instead, she worked as a housekeeper for two families in Beverly Hills. In her spare time, she rode horses in Reseda and in time purchased a mare named Dolly, who had a star on her forehead. One of her friends in the riding group introduced her to Mack Leetham, a twenty-one-year-old private in the Army. They married when Ingrid was only nineteen years old.

On November 15, 1948, Mathias Eiserloh, who was still in Germany, filed the first of many applications for a reentry visa from the Immigration and Naturalization Service for himself, Johanna, and the two younger children, Ensi and Guenther. The request was repeatedly denied.

After graduating from Van Nuys High School in Los Angeles, Lothar joined the US Air Force. Given his success with the American GIs in Idstein, the choice of a military career seemed inevitable. He trained as a pilot and in 1955 was granted a top-security clearance to receive nuclear-weapons training. Perhaps because of Lothar’s valued status, his parents and two younger siblings were finally granted visas and returned to the United States later in 1955.

When they arrived at Ingrid’s home, it had been almost nine years since they had last seen each other. By then, Ingrid had two daughters: Diana, five years old, and Debbie, a one-year-old. Ingrid later had a son, Darrell. “When Dad got out of the car, I was startled by how thin he was,” recalled Ingrid. “Then Mom, Ensi, and Guenther got out, and I grabbed her and we were all crying and laughing at the same time.”

By then, Mathias was sixty years old and could not find work as a civil engineer. He took a low-paying job as a draftsman at a bridge company near Los Angeles and purchased a small tract home about fifty miles from Ingrid’s home. Two years later, he and Johanna purchased a coffee shop in downtown Los Angeles, but the restaurant failed. Johanna took odd jobs as a maid in a small hotel and as a seamstress. At family gatherings, no one talked about what had happened during the war. However, Mathias was anxious and always looking
over his shoulder. He didn’t want to be reminded of the past. “By then,” recalled Lothar, “my father was a broken man.”

One evening in 1960, Mathias went to a corner grocery store to buy cigarettes and groceries. He had a heart attack, collapsed, and died in the store at age sixty-five. Ingrid, Lothar, and Ensi scraped together the money to cover the cost of their father’s funeral. By then, Ensi had graduated from high school and worked odd jobs. She had hoped to go to college, but instead secured a real-estate license and went to work full-time.

Life was not kind to Guenther, who was born on the train from Crystal City to Jersey City in January 1945 as his family headed to Germany. After he graduated from high school, he enlisted in the Navy but neglected to follow orders and was discharged. At the age of twenty-three, he was an ironworker in New Jersey, earning union wages. Returning home late one night, Guenther failed to negotiate a traffic circle; his car jumped the curb and hit a tree head-on, and Guenther was instantly killed.

On November 19, 1961, a year after Mathias’s death, Johanna became a US citizen. Her citizenship, according to Ensi, was a partial absolution from her family’s mistreatment during the war. However, Ensi said Johanna found it a bitter pill to swallow when she read newspaper articles about the Japanese internment with no mention of the Germans who were also interned. “That’s what brought my mother to tears,” recalled Ensi. “It made her feel invisible—like a nonentity—as far as the internment saga goes.”

At eighty-nine Johanna developed Alzheimer’s disease. Ensi, who took care of her, was grateful for her mother’s loss of long-term memory because she no longer remembered the trauma of the war. In time, she forgot she was ever married to Mathias. “One day she picked up a signed photograph of Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, that had been sent to her because my mom was a Reagan volunteer,” recalled Ensi. “She looked at it, pointed to Nancy, and asked, ‘What’s that woman doing with my husband?’ ” Johanna died in January 1997 at ninety-five years of age.

Ingrid and her mother never fully reconciled their differences. By the time Johanna died, Ingrid had had three children and was divorced from her husband. To support her children, she’d worked as a waitress and eventually remarried, but divorced again. Ensi also had multiple marriages and has one son, Kevin. “I harbored a deep, lingering sorrow about my German roots and the memories of what happened to our family,” Ensi said. “It crippled me for years.” Eventually she became a fervent Christian, which has brought her a measure of peace. She lives with her son in an apartment in Anaheim, California.

The only member of the family who flourished was Lothar. He met his wife, Carole, at UCLA in Los Angeles and was married in August 1959. Later, he graduated from San Francisco State University with a degree in political science. Carole earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in education and worked for many years as a teacher. Over their long marriage, they have raised two sons, Eric and Kris, and divide their time between San Francisco and Maui, where they own several residential properties. “My father would sometimes ask me, ‘Why did this happen to us?’ ” said Lothar. “I couldn’t give him an answer. It destroyed a lot of my family. All I knew was that from the moment I left Germany, I was on my own. It was my job to stay alive, build and maintain my own family.”

Like many internees, Ingrid did not often talk of her experiences during World War II. A few times she ventured to tell friends what had happened to her family in Crystal City and in Germany, and they found it hard to believe. Her fear of the government’s power increased with age, and she, like her father, lived her later years constantly looking over her shoulder. The sign on Ingrid’s bedroom door in Honolulu said a lot about what she thought of government surveillance: “If you can’t afford a doctor, go to an airport—you’ll get a free X-ray and a breast exam, and if you mention Al Qaeda, you’ll get a free colonoscopy.”

Yet over two years, Ingrid sat for long interviews for this book. We pored over government documents—her father’s FBI file, her family’s files
from Crystal City, and the January 1945 exchange—establishing a sequence of events. “I’d like to make some sense of all this,” she said.

Prior to an interview with Ingrid in August 2013, I found at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, a document prepared by the Nazis’ Central Registry of Jews that listed two hundred names of Jews in Bergen-Belsen who were slated for exchange in January 1945, when Ingrid and her family were traded into Germany. I had not yet told Ingrid about Irene Hasenberg, whose name was number thirty-eight on the list, but that day on the back porch I handed Ingrid the list and pointed to Irene’s name.

“What is this?” asked Ingrid. “What does it mean?”

I explained that she and Irene were part of the same exchange and told her some of Irene’s story: how her family, all German, secured the false passports from Ecuador prior to their arrest by the Nazis; the unspeakable conditions in Bergen-Belsen; and the tragic death of her father, John, on the train before the exchange took place.

Ingrid’s eyes widened and her frail body began to shake. Slowly, she absorbed the ramifications of the document. During a negotiated exchange in which Germans in America were supposed to be traded for Americans in Germany, Ingrid, born in America, was traded for Irene, born in Germany. With an index finger, Ingrid traced the names of the Hasenberg family on the list: John, Gertrude, Werner, and Irene. After a silence, Ingrid’s hands flew to her mouth and tears fell down her face. “This changes everything,” she said. “It means our family’s sacrifice was worth something. It wasn’t for nothing. Something good came from it. Irene, her brother, and her mother made it out.”

Two months later, I visited Irene in her home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and told her about Ingrid and her family. A small woman with blue eyes, short gray hair, and a string of pearls around her neck, Irene sat at her dining-room table and shook her head in surprise. “I had no idea that American-born children were part of the exchange,” she said. “It’s dreadful. What on earth was Roosevelt thinking?” She asked questions about Ingrid’s siblings and how her parents had weathered the war. When I explained that Ingrid did not often talk about the war, Irene smiled and said she understood.

After arriving in the United States, it was years before Irene spoke about her past. She was too busy trying to build a new life. She graduated from Queens College in New York in 1953 and went on to earn a doctorate in economics from Duke University. While at Duke, she met her future husband, Charles Butter, who was pursuing a doctorate in psychology. In time, both became professors at the University of Michigan; Irene taught public health and Butter taught psychology and neuroscience. They had two children, Pamela and Noah. When Pamela was in junior high school, she prepared a report on the Holocaust and asked Irene to speak at her school. It was the first time Irene had spoken publicly about her experience, and after that speech she continued to speak out. In 1991, she and her brother returned to Germany and visited Bergen-Belsen and found their father’s grave. Eleven years ago, she and five other Holocaust survivors, all women, in Ann Arbor began meeting with six Arab women in an effort to bridge their political and cultural differences. “It’s a work of peace. We so-called enemies meet and listen to one another,” said Irene. “How else can we learn from our mistakes?”

Irene and Ingrid both wanted to meet each other to share experiences, much as Irene’s group in Ann Arbor explored their different perspectives. However, time ran out. For most of 2013, Ingrid suffered from diverticulitis. Unable to keep food down, her weight dropped to seventy pounds. On December 7, 2013, in a hospital not far from Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, exactly seventy-two years to the day after the attack that ignited the war, Ingrid died, without the apology that she deserved from the government.

On a street corner in San Francisco in late February 1942, Shinko Fukuda, holding the package tied with string, and her daughter, Makiko, clutching a doll, were herded into a bus under armed military guard and transported to the Tanforan Assembly Center. The photo was taken by the renowned American photographer Dorothea Lange.