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Jan Jarboe Russell

The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America's Only Family Internment Camp During World War II Hardcover – January 20, 2015

by Jan Jarboe Russell (Author)

4.4 1,225 ratings

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The dramatic and never-before-told story of a secret FDR-approved American internment camp in Texas during World War II, where thousands of families—many US citizens—were incarcerated.

From 1942 to 1948, trains delivered thousands of civilians from the United States and Latin America to Crystal City, Texas, a small desert town at the southern tip of Texas. The trains carried Japanese, German, Italian immigrants and their American-born children. The only family internment camp during World War II, Crystal City was the center of a government prisoner exchange program called “quiet passage.” During the course of the war, hundreds of prisoners in Crystal City, including their American-born children, were exchanged for other more important Americans—diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, physicians, and missionaries—behind enemy lines in Japan and Germany.

Focusing her story on two American-born teenage girls who were interned, author Jan Jarboe Russell uncovers the details of their years spent in the camp; the struggles of their fathers; their families’ subsequent journeys to war-devastated Germany and Japan; and their years-long attempt to survive and return to the United States, transformed from incarcerated enemies to American loyalists. Their stories of day-to-day life at the camp, from the ten-foot high security fence to the armed guards, daily roll call, and censored mail, have never been told.

Combining big-picture World War II history with a little-known event in American history that has long been kept quiet, The Train to Crystal City reveals the war-time hysteria against the Japanese and Germans in America, the secrets of FDR’s tactics to rescue high-profile POWs in Germany and Japan, and how the definition of American citizenship changed under the pressure of war.

Print length

416 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Scribner
Publication date

January 20, 2015
Dimensions

6 x 1.2 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

9781451693669
ISBN-13

978-1451693669
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, January 2015: By now, most Americans past high school have learned something about the internment of Japanese-Americans after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1940; until recently a not-much-discussed piece of history—the internment of citizens mostly born on our soil—was, to many, a blight on the human rights record of the Roosevelt administration. But what The Train to Crystal City makes clear is that Executive Order 9066, which paved the way for internment of Japanese Americans, was just one of the questionable human rights decisions the wartime administration made. According to this dramatic, copiously detailed but still very readable account, a camp in Crystal City, Texas housed American-born children of German and Italian descent as well as Japanese, and many of those children were traded for “more ostensibly important Americans – diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, and missionaries” who were stuck behind enemy lines. (The program was dubbed the “quiet passage.”) How did such a thing happen? To find out, author Jan Jarboe Russell looked into government files (surprise: Eleanor Roosevelt did not agree with her husband the president and publicly abhorred internment of “Oriental looking people,” suggesting that it was un-American) and interviewed now-adult survivors who had been in the camp as children, most notably a Japanese-American girl named Sumi and a German American one named Ingrid. Though the two never met, their stories, taken together, celebrate the pluck and resilience on the part of many survivors. They also paint a vivid picture, all too applicable today, of a country beset by wartime fear, bigotry and governmental misguidance. --Sara Nelson

Review

"Mind-boggling...TheTrain to Crystal City combines accounts of terrible sorrow and destructionwith great perseverance…Readers [will] wish these stories weren’t true.” ― The New York Times

“Russell movingly focuses on human stories coming out of one camp that held both Japanese and Germans,outside Crystal City, Tex....Poignant.” ― New York Times Book Review

"Americans—and particularly Texans—should read Jan Jarboe Russell’s The Train to Crystal City... Ultimately, The Train to Crystal City is about identity, allegiance and home, and the difficulty of determining the loyalties that lie in individual human hearts." ― Texas Observer

“Poignant, even shocking…a valuable look at a dark stain on America’s Second World War.” ― Newsday

"In this quietly moving book, Jan Jarboe Russell traces the history of one unusual camp that housed detainees from Japan, Germany, and Italy, along with their families, many of whom were American-born." ― Boston Globe

"There are obvious parallels between Crystal City and today's Guantanamo Bay detention facility and between the anti-immigrant sentiment then and now, but Russell wisely resists the urge to connect the dots. Her story is harrowing enough on its own." ― Chicago Tribune

“A must-read for those interested not just in history, but in human nature….The Train to Crystal City is compelling, thought-provoking and impossible to put down.” ― Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Engrossing…Russell documents in chilling details a shocking story of national betrayal.” ― Kirkus

“This is an informative, disturbing, and necessary reminder of the dangers produced by wartime hysteria.” ― Booklist

“Both scholars and generalreaders interested in World War II will agree, this book is a gripping storyfrom start to finish.” ― Library Journal

“Russell pulls no punches describing the cost of war and the conditions internees endured....a powerful piece.” ― Publishers Weekly

“The Train to Crystal City is a story ofheartbreaking dislocation, of lives smashed and ruined, and of almostunbelievable human endurance, resilience, and determination. Jan Jarboe Russellhas written a powerful book that will leave you shaking your head in disbelief.” -- ―S.C. Gwynne, New York Times bestselling author of Rebel Yell and Empire of the Summer Moon

“Jan Jarboe Russell has exposed a corner of American history that few knew existed, one that is at once bitter and transformative. The glory of this book is in the many human details so skillfully sketched, which add another chapter to the unending tally of war.” -- Lawrence Wright, author of Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1451693664
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Scribner; First Edition (January 20, 2015)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781451693669
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1451693669
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.29 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.2 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,000,446 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,893 in WWII Biographies
- #9,371 in World War II History (Books)
- #18,172 in U.S. State & Local History

Customer Reviews:
4.4 1,225 ratings

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AndreaDilimone

Leaned a lot from this book

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 15, 2023

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Learning more about history

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Nocturnal

Informative and interesting

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 7, 2020

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The writing is a little confusing at points. All the Japanese people I knew growing up, until college when I met a fellow student from Hawaii, were in US concentration camps. I thought it must have been a rite of passage or something that only happened to people of Japanese ancestry. I went to a couple of the hearings too because my parents wouldn't talk about their experience in there. I figured it must be like soldiers who have been in combat, talking to people who were home in comfort and safety will never understand the fear, anger, frustration, confusion. I always wondered why no Italians or Germans had been rounded up--we were at war (WWII) with their original countries too; I figured it must be a racist thing--Italians and Germans are considered white people. So this book was an eye opener. Just the idea that the president of the USA set up a trade program with Japan, Italy, Germany to trade Americans there in those countries and people in America who could be "re"patriated--dragging their American born spouses and kids back to those foreign countries where, by the time they got the agreement set and exchanges began, the war was almost over and those Americans ended up living in countries that had been devastated by the war, towns and cities demolished, farms and everything gone. A lot of the American-born exchange people didn't even speak the language! It's such a low, sneaky, unconscionable thing to do--but it's politicians; we all know they have no hearts or souls, no sense of morality or even humanity. I'm glad the information in the book was experienced first hand by people who had been children but now were old (and dying). Gave some insight into what it must have felt like. I was disappointed that there was almost nothing on Italians rounded up and interned. The difference with Crystal City--what they termed "the only family camp" as if the other 10 concentration camps that held all the Japanese weren't family camps?--was that the fathers were the ones who supposedly were being punished for some unproven act(s) again the US whether true but more likely NOT true. I wish she'd given more on the Italian, and maybe some further reading. I know there is a book called "The Secret History of Italian American Evacuation and Internment During World War II" but it is not in Kindle format, and the arthritis in my fingers makes it almost impossible to hold a book (I don't know why they didn't turn that book into a Kindle format). The one complaint from both Germans and probably Italians who went through Crystal City is that they have been forgotten--but maybe that's because they don't say anything, they didn't tell their children, they just kept it a secret as though it were shameful. The Japanese spoke out and made demands, found out no one blamed them. Maybe if more Americans know about this camp, maybe we wouldn't see the immigrant children being put into similar camps--God, they're just children!

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Wesley H. Higaki

Eye-opening stories

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 1, 2019

Verified Purchase

The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America's Only Family Internment Camp During World War II was written by Jan Jarboe Russell, a Texas journalist, in 2015. It tells the eye-opening stories of Japanese American and German American families ripped from their homes and imprisoned at the Crystal City internment camp southwest of San Antonio, Texas during World War II.
Their stories hit home for me because my mother’s family was interned at Crystal City.
Amid the fear of a Japanese attack on the western United States coast after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered the incarceration of Japanese immigrants and their America-born children living on the west coast in internment camps scattered across the southern and western states. This fact is largely missing or glossed-over in US history classes.
Some of those Japanese immigrants were designated “dangerous enemy aliens”, separated from their families, and imprisoned. My grandfather was one of them and sent to Santa Fe, New Mexico while the rest of the family was sent to an internment camp in Utah.
What is lesser known is that FDR also ordered the incarceration of “dangerous” German Americans and Italian Americans across the US. Moreover, the fear of Axis spies in the western hemisphere was so great that thousands of people of Japanese, German, and Italian descent living in Latin America were kidnapped, had their passports seized, designated as illegal immigrants, and interned in camps in the US.
These “enemy aliens”, mostly men, were considered threats to the United States because they were influential clergymen, lawyers, teachers, social group leaders, doctors, and businessmen. They had their property seized, were imprisoned without due process, and separated from their families.
Some were offered the opportunity to be reunited with their families at the Crystal City family internment camp. The catch was that they (and their America-born children) had to commit to be deported to their country of ancestry (i.e., Germany, Japan, or Italy) to be traded for captured American prisoners of war.
This book retells the compelling, painful, personal stories of the children of these “enemy aliens” supplemented by historical and political perspectives from official records. These are unbelievable stories of persecution, perseverance and survival.
The stories tell how the Crystal City internment camp was an example of how hysteria, fear, and discrimination made America arguably as inhumane as the Nazis. The orders by the president sent American-born citizens to countries to which they had no allegiance. These orders ignored the Constitution and stomped on citizens’ civil rights in the name of national security.
I was impressed by the depth of the research the author must have performed in order to find these individuals and facts presented in the book. Their stories contain intimate details of what the internees experienced. They are painful and upsetting. This book helped me understand what my family didn’t want to talk about during that heartbreaking time.
I give this book four out of five stars because some of the material was repetitious.

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alejandro

Me encanro

Reviewed in Mexico 🇲🇽 on November 30, 2017

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Entretenido, te atrapa desde el inicio, suspenso, misterio, te involucra con los personajes y lsvivencias década uno, así como los lugares y eltiempo

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Crazy Hunter

Jan Jarboe RUSSELL has written a great piece of testimony for this troubled period

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 23, 2016

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A fascinating tale about civilians trapped in the wave of US paranoia about "ennemy aliens" in WW2. Americans loosing their nationality due theit german or japanese origin, german jews sent back to the 3rd Reich, while others are escaping the nazi regime, pack of japanese families extracted from central or south-americans countries although they are totaly integrated and merely speak japanese. Families split, united again , then again separated for reasons beiond any logic. The top is a british wife of a german from central-america choosing to be internated to stay with her husband ! Jan Jarboe RUSSELL has written a great piece of testimony for this troubled period. It did open several doors to me, clarifying the destiny of a german member of my family. Thank you Jan !

Client Kindle

INCROYABLE !

Reviewed in France 🇫🇷 on June 20, 2016

Verified Purchase

Histoire passionnante et méconnue....Episode a peine croyable que ces allemands et japonais renvoyes dans leur pays d'origine ravage par la guerre; recit parfois desservi par un style approximatif

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