 Good evening, my name is Hailey Holmes. I'm the coordinator of services to adults for the San Antonio Public Library. I want to tell you a little bit about the Mayor's Book Club and then I will be introducing our speaker for this evening. The Mayor's Book Club was created by Mayor Taylor in an effort to unite the community through reading and discussion. This is the sixth edition of the Mayor's Book Club. This spring, Mayor Taylor has chosen The Train to Crystal City by Jan Jarbo Russell, an important and prominent local author who has made a significant impact in San Antonio's literary community. The Train to Crystal City tells the story of a secret World War II internment camp that was located in Crystal City, Texas. From 1942 to 1948, thousands of Germans, Japanese, and Italian immigrants and children, many of them born in America, lived behind barbed wire in the 290 acre camp located at the southern tip of Texas. The Train to Crystal City is a meaningful choice because of the large role that San Antonio plays in the lives of many refugee families. Jan Jarbo Russell was born in Beaumont, Texas and grew up in small towns in the Piney Woods of East Texas. A journalist and author, she is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters in the Philosophical Society of Texas and serves as Vice President of Gemini Inc. San Antonio's Literary Organization. She serves as a contributing editor at Texas Monthly and has written for the Express News. During the spring, the San Antonio Public Library is hosting a number of interactive programs that will encourage community members of all ages to share their thoughts about the Train to Crystal City. For information about the Mayor's Book Club events happening at the library, please visit our website, MySapples.org. I also wanted to make you aware that we have NowcastSA live streaming the event tonight and immediately following the event, you can go to their website, NowcastSA.com and see the presentation. So if you know people that couldn't make it, they can watch it or if you'd like to watch it again, you can go there to see it. So it is with great pleasure that I introduce Jan Jarbo Russell. Thank you, thank you for the library, for inviting me and for it's good to be home and great to be in the library. Thanks to Charlotte Ann for live casting this and I can't even understand what they're doing but I'm certainly grateful for it and thank you all for coming. I was that I always get stage fright that nobody will be here and so I'm glad I'm glad that you're here. In 2010, when I started the research on the Train to Crystal City, I could not have imagined that my book would be so of the moment in today's world. Now, as it has been throughout our history as a country, we face the same perennial questions. Who has the right to American citizenship and who does not have the right? What is the cost of citizenship and which citizens pay the cost and which do not? The emotions that have been provoked in this season are reminiscent of some of the emotions that were in the wake of the surprise attack on December 7th, 1941, sort of hysteria that was going on. Immediately after Japanese airplanes bombed Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed Proclamation 2525 in accordance with the Enemy Aliens Act of 1798. This was the legal basis for incarcerating immigrants from Japan, Germany and Italy and for confiscating all of their property. So, as you heard, my book focuses on the largely unknown camp, the Crystal City internment camp, the only internment camp in the US created expressly for the purpose of housing families of multiple nationality. It was in Crystal City that Japanese Germans and a few Italian fathers who had been arrested as dangerous enemy aliens were reunited with their wives and mostly American born children. The moment that they were reunited with their wives, everyone signed an oath that they would never tell or speak about the camp again because the camp was a secret camp, which is one reason that its history has remained silent until now. The important thing about those lawyer terms that I used is this same act is still in force of 1798 and gives the president the authority to arrest, in turn, or deport any immigrants in time of war. History is repeating itself yet again, which is why I believe it's important to revisit the history that happened in our own backyard in Crystal City, which is 120 miles from where we sit tonight. This is our history as well as the nation's history. I wanted to start with the roundup of the Japanese immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. This is the Fukuda family. For those of us who have read the book, you know the Fukuda family. Reverend Fukuda was a Kongo minister. A Kongo minister was sort of like a Buddhist minister. I don't want to go into the difference between Kongo and Buddha, but he was a missionary and he had the only Kongo church in San Francisco. The first people that were taken after the attack on Pearl Harbor were ministers because they were leaders in their community and the FBI was very concerned that they needed to take all the leaders in the community. So Reverend Fukuda was arrested with the same day as Pearl Harbor. This is his family before the war. I love this picture by Dorothea Lang. Dorothea Lang was a very famous photographer and she took caught this picture of the Fukuda family after Roosevelt said that they all had to be evacuated to war relocation camps on the West Coast. I want you to look at how people are dressed and if I can, if I have to shout I will. And she too is closed. All of the people that were evacuated were tagged. Not to no, no, I guess. All of the people that were arrested were tagged. You can see the tag on them and yet at the same time look how well dressed they are. This is not like going into the airplane today and seeing people dressed like they were hoodlums or something. This is this is the way people dressed in World War II. And also look at the way the Army guy is working with the FBI man with the cigarette as he pushes them on to the bus. Mrs. Fukuda and her children were taken to Santa Rita racetrack in Los Angeles, which was a racetrack. And this is hard. You can see clearly here that she is pregnant. Mckio here at the end to fast forward when Mckio got out of the Crystal City internment camp in 1948 and was taken back to San Francisco. She jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and committed suicide based on the trauma that she had dealt with during the war years. Mrs. Fukuda is pregnant. And when she goes to the Santa Rita camp, she and her children are placed in a group of horse stalls. And she she wrote in her journal that she had no memory of giving birth to the child because the smell of the horse manure was so strong that she was she blocked out but banked out during it. And yet here's the picture that's over my desk where I where I work every day. And it's sort of like the you know mother and baby picture that those that Christians assume with Mary and Jesus. But this is not Jesus. This is this guy named Nob who's now in his 80s. And he loves this picture. But I love the picture because look at the magnificence of Mrs. Fukuda's face at how at how what an a magnificent mother she was. Focuses primarily on two young girls, Sumi Ushigawa and Ingrid Icero. This is Sumi and her parents and her older sisters before the war. Sumi's the one with the white dress. These pictures I don't these are not in the book, but I hope you enjoy them. I really like them. And these were pictures in Christmas of 1945. I don't know exactly when that was. And that's her picture her thing. Sumi was a girl scout in Crystal City. And so I brought this up. You know, the camp did have boys and girls scouts. She calls herself a good scout. And she really, she really was a good scout. Her father, the FBI had three criteria for arresting dangerous enemy aliens. If you were arrested, you were not told why you were arrested. You're not allowed a lawyer. The terms of your internment were indefinite. And so you and they never would tell you why you were arrested. The FBI had three criteria. The first one was if you were like a member of the or a leader in the American Nazi Party, you were arrested, which kind of makes sense. We can probably agree with that. And the same with the Japanese, I had some kind of son thing that they view or arrested that then you were taken. The category B was the most important one you had to do with the father's work. If the father was doing work that the government thought could be harmful to us, then they were arrested, like the fact that the ministers were arrested as leaders of it. Mr. Sumi's father was a photographer in Los Angeles who did a lot of work for the studios. And in those days, the photographers, I mean, photographers with cameras were like cell phones. You know, there was a concern that that the Japanese might be taking photographs of enemy Bay of our bases. They had its idea that in the in the Valley of California, that Japanese farmers had had grown crops in the shape of an arrow, then these were going to lead new planes into into California. That was pretty much nonsense. But there was I'm trying to evoke the fact for those of you who are not old enough to remember how terrified everyone was during World War Two. So he was taken because he was a photographer. The Icero family. This is Matthias Icero as a soldier during World War One in Germany. He so hated what happened to him in Germany as as that he and he left Germany and he was a very, very well-skilled engineer. He left Germany and came to the United States with his bride. And they were married in Cleveland, Ohio. There's Joanna and Matthias. There he is in showing off. This is the last picture that was taken at the Icero household. Joanna is in the middle of the mother and Ingrid, my main character, and often I often think of Ingrid as the heart of the book for me. She's on the on on the left and Lothar in NC there. Unlike the way it worked with the Japanese, when your father, if you were German, were taken, there was no place for you to go. You couldn't they didn't have an in internment camp for German women and children. And so what happened in the case of most of the families is that the moment that the father left, it wasn't like today when everyone works, you know, mothers and fathers and children, then Joanna tried to keep the farm together by selling eggs and other ways. But four months after he was arrested, they had lost everything. And this was the last photo taken. I asked Ingrid in this photograph, Ingrid has beautiful long red hair, like a penny, you know, copper penny. And I said, Why do you have that curly hair? And she said, My mom decided to perm my hair. And I always call this the unfortunate perm photo. And but they had this was the last one taken and they took they took it to send to their father, who was in a Stringtown, Oklahoma in an all male German camp. And they want in German, I wanted them to look happy. And that's why she's got them all smiling with those dresses and everything. So you heard about about about zoomie. Let's just talk about the camp itself. This is when I was working on this this project, that a lot of it is a National Archives, I kept thinking, nobody's going to believe me, I better get a lot of pictures. And this was one that came from the National Archives, and it's an aerial view view of the camp. When you see that circle there, it was a reservoir for for watering the things they were growing on the camp. But it was also very strategic for the kids. It was used as a swimming pool. It can be 195 degrees in in Crystal City. And summer was horrible. And so they they spent a lot of time there. The Earl Harrison was the was Roosevelt's commissioner of immigration and naturalization service. And he was charged with finding a camp in a location that would be secret. And and so he arrived from 10 Crystal City on November 6 1942, from his hometown in Philadelphia, and he walks around. What was a 29 acres site that had been used as a migrant worker camp for Mexican laborers, which, as you know, goes on all the time in South Texas. And he was charged with making it a secret camp. And he he said that from his point of view, the camp was so isolated, far from areas that were considered vital to the work effort. And he saw that as a part as a positive. In fact, he wrote that it was as close to Siberia as we have in America, which made it an unlikely target for sabotage by either the Germans or the Japanese. So in some ways, Harrison is with an unlikely architect for to me from from the internment camp, he was a Quaker. I don't think a Quakers is running internment camp, but I don't know that much about him. He was a Quaker, he was a Republican who had help with the help of his wife, shelter Jewish refugees in 1939. So you think of him as a pretty great guy. But again, imagining how the the the fear of war takes over people. And I just wanted to point out that before he became the head of the INS, Roosevelt had made had given him responsibility to to go out and find all of the aliens in the country that were here. It was a registration for all aliens. If you did not you were not a citizen of the country you had to register and in less than a year, Harrison and his staff had registered 4.7 million 7 million aliens. And he sold Earl Harrison with a good man. And he sold the program to these non citizens by arguing that their compliance demonstrated their loyalty to America and to the rule of law. So he didn't do this because he thought that these people would be taken to an internment camp. He did it because he he was giving them a chance to be pro American and they gave it. But it was a tough sell and especially in German in German areas in our country, because already the newspapers had made public that the of the Nazis attempt to register the Jews. And that led, of course, to the Holocaust. And so there was a lot of concern, especially among the German Americans in our country about this registration. So registration is a scary word for immigrants. It was a scary word for immigrants during World War two. And it's a scary word for immigrants today. Week after week, month after month, trains with the windows drawn carried thousands of civilian families from many parts of the world across the miles of flat empty planes to this small desert town at the southern tip of Texas. The FBI not only arrested access nationals on American soil, Italians, Germans and Japanese, but orchestrated the removal of 4,058 Germans, 2,264 Japanese and 288 Italians from 13 different Latin American countries. And they were then brought to Crystal City. The reason that this is important is that is that Roosevelt had what he called, which I always thought when I was a history student, the good neighbor policy with Latin America. But the way the good neighbor policy worked for these people is if they had a lot of rich people living in in Latin America, Germans that had companies there, big sake owners. And what the what the Roosevelt did is he told those governments, if you, if you will, you can take their money and you can take their businesses. If we are allowed to take some of them out of your country, move them by army ship to the to New Orleans to the port of New Orleans, and take them to a secret camp in Crystal City so that we can then trade them for more important Americans behind enemy lines in Japan, Italy and Germany. And the whole real reason that the camp existed was as a prisoner exchange was the center of President Roosevelt's prisoner exchange policy. And he was incredibly shrewd about the way he dealt with prisoner exchange. We have had prisoner exchange in every war except for except Vietnam, from the very beginning from to the very end. And the only reason we didn't have it in Vietnam is that LBJ wanted prisoner exchange, but the Vietnamese would not do it. So he but Roosevelt said, I want to take low value people and trade them for high value Americans. So his first goal was to get the diplomatic core out of out of Japan and Germany. And then after that, he went for the school teachers, the mill, the missionaries, the businessmen, and of course, the any injured people, any injured soldiers that we have there, who was low value people? Low value people were people that were not from here. They were from Latin America. And also, I'm sorry to say, low value people were children. As opposed, you weren't you were not trading people that were all men and workers, you were we were they were deluding it with trading people in for their children. I want to keep going the way the camp work is that the camp really was it for for for a place like this a reasonably fair place. But it was I all all internment camps look the same. They have six he had six guard towers. Each of the towers had guards in them. They the the perimeter of the of the barbed wire fence were always patrolled by men on horseback. And some of these were and most of these were from INS people. And so everyone knew that the penalty for escape for Crystal City, even if you could do it, was death. And in the entire history of the camp 42 to 48, no one ever tried to escape because they didn't know where they would go. And they were under constant gun threat of being killed. Having said that, many most of the children I interviewed are now in their 70s or 80s. And their memories of Crystal City are pretty good. Because their families were together. They the Japanese that were there had not been allowed to have their own homes and eat with their families. They had been in these relocation camps where they had had to eat in giant mess hall. Here you these were the barracks they were in. Each barrack had two different families, 500 feet. Now that was really good. 500 feet was good. If you only had two children, if you were like the fecudus and you had seven children, then you had to build on a port outside so that the people could sleep in that. Ingrid and and Sumi all had different things to say. When Sumi said she arrived at the camp, you know, she was kind of a she is kind of a tough cookie. And she was from LA and she saw that the the the streets of Crystal City were dusty. And they had that Popeye thing there. And they had tumbleweeds rolling down the first street. And she she asked her mother, Nobu, she said, Mom, is this a is this like a studio? Are we like are we making a movie? What are we doing here? And so her view of everything was slightly wisecracky like that. Ingrid on the other hand was an introvert and absolutely terrified the entire time that she was here. There we are. There we have it. Sumi is Sumi's over here. And some of you who know your Japanese history will recognize Edison Umo was was in there. And he became one of the Japanese Americans most vivid spokesman after the war. And he wrote actually while he was in Crystal City, a petition to the government, a petition to FDR to explain how illegal it was for him to have he an American born person to have to be living in this internment camp. So there's a lot of history there beyond the history. Everybody worked in the camp. This is not this is not the medical staff. These are the German beauticians and the German hairdressers. The camp was divided in the middle. And you've had Germans on one side and Japanese on the other. There were often a lot of problems between the two things. And on the end of the camp camp, the Germans that were taken from Latin America were on one side, who they generally spoke only German. And then the Japanese on the other side. You can. This is the Boy Scouts. I showed you the Girl Scouts. These are Boy Scouts. Everybody worked when they were in Crystal City. They made their own mattresses. They made everything they did their own clothes. These are the Japanese women working. You'll see the dolls there. If those of you are familiar with Japanese life, know that the doll ceremony in the spring is a big huge thing. And so they actually would make the dolls there in Crystal City. One of the problems that a Rourke who was the commentant that the camp had is that the Japanese hated the food because it wasn't Japanese food. And so the ladies that were in this mattress factory asked a Rourke if they could make, if they could build a tofu factory in Crystal City. And Rourke first said no because he didn't know what tofu was. And they essentially kind of went on a strike about, you know, we want our tofu or else. And so he converted, they did figure out how to make tofu and with soybeans tape brought in from some place sells. And you know how we use the molikos to grind our Wakamale. They do use the molikos to grind their soybeans. And so we have the very first Texas tofu factory in Crystal City. So the Germans got very the Japanese were very happy. The Germans got very upset and said the Japanese have their tofu. We want our beer. And this is a photograph of the beer hall that was built. And look at how they're dressed. And again, they're dressed as though they were working. And the reason that they are dressed is that is that they were working on the camp. That everybody worked, even the children worked and they were paid in these little fake coins. They weren't real money, but you could redeem your coins in the camp store by a certain number of hours of work. And so everybody worked. Now, they brewed their own beer and Rock had a bit of a drinking problem. I would have a drinking problem if I were living in Crystal City too. And so he said that they should only have the beer on Friday and Saturday night. But I'm told this was an often violated rule of the camp. This was the Germans who built the pool. And so I'm very proud to have this photograph of the Germans because there are very few photographs of Germans at all in the National Archives. And the Japanese often say they built the pool. And so this is proof that they didn't. And in fact, Matthias Iserl helped design the pool. I just wanted to show how the people at our at the camp, the government officials, tried very hard to keep life as family like they did try to keep it to keep things going. And these are a group of Japanese bringing a tree for Christmas time. You know, when I was 10 years old and my parents had an argument. I remember the argument. You probably did too if you had repair. But I don't remember what it was about. One of the things that was strange to me in interviewing over 70 children in the camp is that none of them knew why they were there, why their parents were there, what their fathers and mothers were arguing about, and why they, you know, they essentially regarded this as sort of a very strange summer camp that lasted year after year. And so I had to really go into the files of the National Archive to even discover for them, the people that I was writing about, why they were there, what unfortunately the government kept the dossier on every person in the camp including the children. So I could tell Sumi and Ingrid, oh, you're Ingrid's little sister, NC, got caught under a truck at one point and went to the thing that there was there. And so a huge thing for me, as much as I'm really grateful that the book is out and it's done fine, I'm grateful that these people knew what happened to them. And the thing that confused them the most in them is that they would be taken by trained to this place, Crystal City, and then they were taken back to the Port of New York and sent to either Germany or to Japan. They did not know why they were sent away. And that is by far the most jaw-dropping aspect of life in Crystal City, the fact that it was the exchange program. It was called the Quiet Passage Prisoner Exchange Program. And it was run by something called the Special War Problems Division within the State Department. They had it, that was the name of it, and it took me forever to figure it out and then be able to read the stuff. Because I looked under Prisoner Exchange, I couldn't find it, and then finally, somebody from the Holocaust Museum in Washington said, I bet it was a special war problem division, and then I got it after that. Over the course of the war, thousands of these internees from Crystal City, including their American-born children, served as human barter in negotiated exchanges with Europe and Asia. The mechanics were as follows. Each nation submitted the names of the individuals that wanted to trade it. Terms were negotiated between diplomats, and the diplomats injured POWs, businessmen, and missionaries were at the top of the list. Once the participating nations reached an agreement, individuals boarded ships of neutral nations and were transported to the agreed-upon exchange. For me, the tragedy of Crystal City is that many of those traded should have been of the highest value to Americans, because many were American-born children. The first of the exchanges was in, it was June of 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor. In that exchange, that was the 268 American government officials and 2,500 civilians were returned to the U.S. for an equal number of Japanese officials and exchanges. And it goes on like that. 44. And I just wanted to talk, because I'm trying to freeze this up so I can get to your questions, about the last trade of the war as it involved Ingrid. On January the 2nd, let me see what's happening over here. Okay, we're not going to talk about them. Yeah. I like that one. That's Goonser. That's Goonser. Anyway, on January the 2nd, 1945, Ingrid's family left Crystal City. They took the train to New York with 429 other civilian internees from Crystal City. They boarded a steam ship, sailed to Europe to be traded into war. In the confusion of the war, things began to go awry. Many of the American-born children in Crystal City who were listed as repatriates to Japan and Germany in the train. But that, that implies that they were returning to countries of their origin. Their, their appearance were repatriates, but but they had a sign on them that was repatriate and that wasn't the case because they were born in America. Ingrid's family was, had, after they got to Marseille in France, they took a train into Kresslingen, Switzerland, which is just on the Swiss side of the, from Germany coming in. And then they were, and they were at a train station in Kresslingen. And then at this moment a train from Germany carried in the people that they were being traded for. So these would be American soldiers. And although President Roosevelt had not done anything very much for Jews, we were at the end of the war and there weren't that many Americans left. And so he had, he said that he wanted to take what he said was 300 Jews from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and trade those Jews for those Americans. So it, so it came to be that without knowing it, Ingrid, and her, Ingrid was traded for a German Jew who was in Bergen-Belsen. And I'll see if I can find this picture. We did not find this out. This is Ingrid, you can see Ingrid after she arrived back from Germany in the United States. Most of the people that were Americans, that were traded, worked their way back on the mailboats and certainly Ingrid did that. And the first that they became obsessed with proving their Americanism. So almost all of them married Americans that had fought in the war against the company, against either Japan or against Germany. Ingrid married this guy who is still alive and he, he was a German-American who fought against Germany. And that offered her a great deal of protection. Sumi married a man who fought in the 442nd, which is our most decorated division in World War II, made up of all Japanese. This is all Ingrid, this is Ingrid here. I want to say something about, about the person she was traded for. The person she was, was traded for, was the, was born in Amsterdam and was a close friend of Anne Frey. She was also in Bergen-Belsen too. And her name is Irene and she's still alive. And Irene did not know that, that she had been traded for anyone. And before Ingrid died they were able to talk on the phone. And one of the things that, last thing for Ingrid told me, because she, when I went to Honolulu, because I couldn't just get this news over the phone, I, I went to Honolulu and I said, here's the list. You can see you were traded for Irene and she was traded for you. And he, and she said, are you, are you in flu to her face? And she said, are you telling me that Irene is alive because of what happened to our family during World War II? And I said yes, I'm telling you that. And she said, well then everything that would happen that was so terrible in World War II to our family was worth it. How many German Americans can say that they helped at least one family survive? There was any doubt about the loyalty of the children of Crystal City who were traded into Japan in Germany? That doubt was disproved by their endurance, resilience and patriotism against overwhelming odds when they were traded. Many, including Ingrid and Sumi, were taunted by straw, spies, as spies. Ingrid was considered a spy in Germany and, and as you know, Sumi was also considered a spy in Japan. Local populations could not understand what American teenagers were doing in Japan and Germany. And so, in fact, Ingrid's father, Matthias, was arrested. This guy couldn't do anything right. As a feared American spy upon his arrival in Etsy, Germany, and he was held by the Nazis as an American spy for nearly a year. But Ingrid and Sumi and Lothar all got these jobs from the American Army when they, when our, when our guys occupied those and were, were able to make it home. In military terms, the children of Crystal City could be viewed as collateral damage, just part of the sacrifice of World War II. I believe it is, I'm very glad we won the war in, in the World War II. My dad was fighting in Japan, so that's not the issue. The issue for me was that we should count the cost of all these wars and not just pretend that everything's a Disney movie and that nothing bad happens as a result of the war. In psychological terms, I consider the children a scapegoat. They were victims of the understandable fear and hysteria of war. Over the course of the five years of research, I was inspired by them because they paid a very heavy price. Some of the German-born children that ended up in these camps in Germany. But the terrible thing for me now is that while the Japanese have been recognized and what happened to them has been recognized with an apology by Reagan and a $20,000 gift for each child, or each person that we arrested, that we arrested who was Japanese. There's never been any official government, not even a recognition that this happened to Germans and German Americans. And they've never, they've, all of these people were arrested into the same way. As, without charges, without lawyers, without knowing why they were held. It's, as I said to somebody here, there were 285 children born in the, in the Crystal City Camp in the small hospital. About half of those were Germans and half were Japanese. So the Japanese kids have an apology from their government and a $20,000 payment. The Germans have nothing. And I believe that is something that can be done, that we need to change. And I have been working with other people to do it. The Japanese are very, very good at making their case and the Germans not so good. In the, in my course of my life as a human being on this earth, a single theme has always informed my work. And it has to do with suffering. Why is it, as it says in the book of Job, that the good, along with the evil, bear the suffering? How then can, if that's true, and the older you get, the more you know it's true. Things happen that we don't deserve. Good things happen to us that we don't deserve. Bad things happen. Everything changes. All of those we love eventually fade away. But I was very inspired by these elderly people that were children in Crystal City. Incredibly inspired about how suffering can be managed. I was inspired by the Japanese idea of what they call gamon, G-A-M-O-N. It means finding some practice in your life, whether it's Buddhist meditation, which I now do, calligraphy, judo, poetry, writing, or anything, the tea ceremony that the mothers do every day. It is to help them persevere in the face of unendurable suffering. Every time that Sumi would want to give up, her mother would say gamon, gamon, gamon. You can do it. You can do it. And they did. I was very inspired as well by the Isreal children who were good German American kids who obeyed their parents, even though they didn't agree with them about going back to Germany, but never lost faith in the country of their birth that had in effect betrayed them. I have to tell you, if President Trump, let's just say President Obama for the record, if the President Obama had treated me into Syria for somebody more important than me, I don't think I would have been very forgiving. I don't think I would have ever forgiven him if that had been the case. And yet all of these people know that citizenship is not just being born here. It's bearing the burden of being a citizen of the United States and never giving up and doing something for the country, not just paying your taxes, but some kind of some kind of a real something. And these people have really shown me that in an unexpected way. The American officials at Crystal City, Harrison, the Roark, the school teachers, the staff members saved our national honor by treating these interneeds as humanely as possible in a treacherous time. This was not Bergen-Belsen. It was that nobody got killed in Crystal City for being there. In the end, though, it was Irene Hassenberg, the German Jewish girl, who was freed in the 45 trade that involved Ingrid, that provided for me the seminal lesson about how to deal with human beings in times of bitter conflict. We are in a time of bitter conflict. And so Irene said that she survived the Holocaust because her father, who died of malnutrition in her arms from the train from Bergen-Belsen to the Kruslingen station, admonished her to fight for her life at all costs so that the Nazis would not prevail in their plan to murder all Jews. She not only survived the war but has used her life in the most admirable way. She has a PhD in social medicine. She teaches even today at the University in Ann Arbor, and in the free time she works full time for peace in the Middle East. She has the Dalai Lama on her speed dial. This is what Irene told me, and it's in the front of my book, and I hope we will all remember it every time somebody tells us that we need to get into another war. Always remember, Irene told me during an interview at her home, enemies are people whose stories you haven't yet heard, and whose face you haven't yet seen. Thank you very much. Thank you for the questions, and I'm sorry it went on and on, but this is my hometown, and I wanted to have my little say. Yes, and I have a microphone, so if you could. Jan, that was fabulous. Thanks, and I want to, I heard a great story interview on NPR just this week about F. About baseball. Yeah, about F and baseball. And it was a fabulous story about the baseball between Japanese and Germans taking place in Crystal City, and you were used as a reference, so tell us a little bit about life. Yeah, life, you know, the F was really great, you know, he didn't was not traded, which is, but he's definitely in my book, all over my book, because he met and married the love of his life in Crystal City, as did most of these people. He had been, he lived in Cincinnati, and he was a star, he was, he and his brother, were star football players, and, and when his father was taken as a dangerous enemy alien, they didn't know what to do, and they attempted to keep, to stay in school for as long as they could, but eventually they were both, even though he had, he had given his girlfriend his football jacket, and he turned around, and the FBI was there, and he and his brother were arrested as enemy aliens, and taken to Crystal City, where they joined up with their families. And he, he ran, everybody as I said, worked, and Ebb worked as an ice delivery, you know, they didn't have, you can't just turn on water in the, in the, in the, in the house, and so they brought ice every day to, to each house, and then, you know, sports actually saved their life. They did the, they did play football, and the, and the, and the Japanese were shorter than all the Germans, and, and so they, the Germans always won, period, and the Japanese boys today, well, you can say Ebb, your name, and they just start trembling, because he was so, he was so good, and they did win that game, they did win that game. So the, the, the life there was a life of Peter Pan, and for the boys, they would, both the Japanese and the Germans would, would serenade the guys that were, had the guns trained on them in the, in the bar towers, they would go up and sing Oh, give me land, lots of land, under the starry skies above. They were just astonishing, and they, you know how kids can do, but it, that later, one of the things that always broke my heart is that they, they, they said, they said that the camp didn't bother them, it destroyed their fathers. The fathers were, were, were just essentially emasculated by the government, because that the, the head of the camp told, told the children what to do and when to do it, and that was the big fight over the dance, because the Japanese boys that, I mean, Japanese fathers, who, they're considered the emperor in the house, and the German fathers are considered the furor in the house, which is one reason that the emperor and the furor didn't get along so good at, at Crystal City. And anyway, and so in that, in the dance party thing, the Japanese were really angry that the government were turning their daughters into prostitutes because, according to their thinking, because of the way they dance. Now all of us know that dancing is fantastic, and so, but at the time, they, and their, and their daughters still feel badly about the loss of face of their fathers during that particular time, and that's an example of what Ben was asking about. Something small, like a dance. When I first heard this story, I thought, how silly is that? When I dug down deep into what was really going on, it carried, it carried the humiliation of the family. It carried that and in every way. Question? Yes, sir. You mentioned that the camp with an operation from 1942 to 1948, what necessitated keeping the camp in operation for three years after the war? That's a very good question. You see, one of the reasons that they were, they were arrested is that the fathers were citizens of the countries that we were at war with. Once we had won the war, then they were no longer, that, that didn't work because we'd won the war. And Truman was now president, but the people that were in the camp didn't want to be sent back. They never even wanted to go to those places, and so Foucouda and Ebpere and those people petitioned the government to let them stay here. The government didn't want to do it, but they hadn't, at this point, they had a legal right, and they started filing lawsuits from the camp in Crystal City into these little South Texas thing, and it went on and on and on until Truman finally said, open the gate and let them out, and that was in 48. And so they just walked out. There weren't that many of them left in the camp in 48, but they closed the camp and it reopened as, again, as a migrant, a migrant farm laborer. And so they, they did not, the last thing that Ebpere wanted to do or Foucouda was to go back to, to the countries that they had been born in, but which had lost the war. They wanted to make their, their lives here. So, again, that says a lot about their own commitment to our country, as opposed to the country of their parents birth. All right, and it says a lot of things about how important it is to know the law. This said, anybody that we're at war with, but you have to have a declared war. You can't have one of these fake wars with it without getting everybody, you know, like without getting congresses and, and the, and the stuff like that. So, so that's something to get through. Thank you. Yes ma'am. Talk about numbers in terms of the numbers of how many Japanese were in turn given their, their, their numbers of populations compared to Germans. I can imagine that there's far more Germans in U.S. and so, you know, and, and what that plays in terms of why we don't hear that in Germans being in turn. Okay, this is a little bit of a complicated question because every, the numbers are in dispute among people, but we do know this for a fact. 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans, two-thirds of the people, 120,000 or American citizens, they were evacuated into the war relocations camp or this one, 120,000 and so that we know for sure. The number, the number of Germans lived in our country was huge. I think the number was seven million or something like that and Roosevelt didn't know that and so he turns to his Secretary of State and says, I want you to take all of the Germans. I, I want you to take all of the people that are citizens of the Germans and their children and the guy with Secretary of State says, well, who's going to build a railroad? Who's going to, the whole country would have collapsed because you could just imagine what it would be like in the hill country of, of, of Texas because we had so many Germans here and so he said, okay, just get take, get as many of them as you can. Now F-Fürt says it's 300,000 Germans. I don't know if that's true or not because that is, seems like an awful lot of Germans to me but I do know that, that what I, that that's the number he had, 300,000 that were taken. So that's more than the, than the Japanese and they were taken, many of you probably even know like when you go to Marfa and you see that great art exhibit, that was a German POW camp. In Kennedy we had a POW camp where Matthias came from, near Houston there was and at Fort Sam we had many Germans there that didn't go to Crystal City, both civilians and POWs, I mean and POWs and there have been wonderful books written about the German POWs in Texas and the truth of the matter is that they, the German POWs were grateful they could be in Texas, they weren't locked in an internment camp, they had to work on ranches and stuff like that but it was a heck of a lot better job than it would be to have to have gone back to Germany. The situation is different but I'm very interested in the fact that the Japanese, the German American coalition for internment did file a lawsuit to ask that they get an apology for the ones that had been interned. The court ruled that they could not have it because it was a matter of ethnicity as opposed to blood. I don't know the difference between and that's the blood thing about being Japanese. Every person who had one sixteenth of blood from Japan was taken off the West Coast and they they claimed that because it wasn't just the West Coast it was it was the it was all over the country or something like that. It's a complicated situation but the court ruled against the Germans and so the Germans now say and I am with them on this they don't want any money but they would like for their for us for it to be acknowledged that this happened and and I hope that the telling of the train to Crystal City story will at one point make that happen. There are lots of people now trying to work for it and I'm very happy with just the idea of a of an apology and that's it. We apologize to people all the time in this country. We don't we're not and they're not seeking any money at all. It's complicated and I can't be sure about the 300,000 so that's why I said that. Yes ma'am you never know but yeah there's somebody working on that. I guess I you know maybe my great grandchildren would be around these things happen. But there are there is interest in it. You know there's a lot of interest in as we all know in World War two. We are all interested in World War two and this is a slightly different version of it. So I hope so so if you don't mind you could say you're Hail Mary for that. Yes ma'am well some people think I didn't organize it too well. One of the good things I get is you have so many characters and I just wanted to say I left so many people out and well I just started in you know many of you know the way the history of the story. The history of this that this came to me when I was in college at UT. So I was like I think 18 years old and I met Alan Taniguchi was the head of the Department of Architecture in Austin and I struck up but I was working as a young reporter for the Daylight Texan and I had to go to a Senate faculty meeting and Alan was the chair of the Senate faculty committee. Those of you went to UT he was against what's his name Frank Irwin who was like the devil himself to people like me. Anyway so I was happy I was very happy to meet him anyway but I'd never seen an Asian person in my life as it was reported I was from a very small small town in East Texas and my dad was a preacher I was I didn't know anything about anything and the and I went up to him and I said you know how did you get here and he said I said where are you from and he said I'm from Brentwood California and I didn't know where that was and then I said well how did you get to Texas and he said my family was in camp here I only knew one kind of camp so I looked at him and said church camp and he said not exactly and I got to know as a result of that that was the beginning of a friendship with him and his wife Sadiah who was a fabulous poet and his his father was in me who built the Taniguchi peace garden in Austin and I was out there helping Mr. Taniguchi who we call Bodovista Taniguchi built that thing because he built it pretty much with his own hands and he was by this time 80 years old anyway so I knew about the camp at a time and I tell this to university people when I speak at universities they say keep notes on what you're learning because you know I knew a secret at 18 that I didn't follow up on till I was you know 50 and when Alan Taniguchi died I got he had sent his some stuff to me about the friends he had known in Crystal City his friends and so I started calling those friends and some were Germans some were Japanese and including a sure and art Jacobs and others and I then got it started getting on airplanes and I started just interviewing them as fast as I could because I felt that I that you know sometimes you can feel providence on your shoulder saying this is something you have to do I did it for Alan Taniguchi and and who was a remarkable man anyway and so I started with these long lines of interviews for like a year and a half and to make sure that I could find the story and then I became I fell in love with these people and that's something you don't do in journalism I have never fallen in love with the subject before but Sumi and Ingrid and these people I was determined to get the files from their fathers and the FBI files to give to them even if I never finished the book and I because they didn't know what happened to them Alan didn't know what had happened to his father and mother and so then I found out enough and I could hear the same story about about them being trade and they didn't say traded we had to we had to leave the country and go to Japan and so I began to that's when I went to Washington and started in with the files so I probably did not really I wrote the preface of the book and the first in the Eleanor and Franklin D Roosevelt chapter which my it went on a hundred more pages than in the book in my editor called me and said are you writing about Eleanor Roosevelt are you writing about crystal city so those pages aren't in the book anyway and so but I really wrote it full time from the third year so two years of writing and at the same time research it was awful it was it was my husband would bring sandwiches into my office knock on the door put the sandwich on the floor and leave and yeah because it was many it was it was it was thousands of hours and so yeah no it wasn't it was in marathon not a sprint yeah yes did you have yes yes let me bring the microphone over so those at home can hear the question since the book has come out have you had have any government or elected officials come to you and want to discuss the book with you no I did go to I went I was invited for Cinco de Mayo celebration at the White House and I went and took my book and gave it to President Obama and ask him to please offer an apology but so that was one person that I have and in Crystal City things are really weird because you know Crystal City is odd you had it's still like I don't know what you know you have the Anglos on one side of the street and the Latinos on the other side of the street and they didn't hire so many people from Crystal City because it was a secret camp they brought people in from elsewhere there were some people used as gardeners and stuff like that but the school teachers were primarily from here in San Antonio and they you know lived in in Crystal City in special housing and they too were under secrecy and so there's really not very much known about about this in Crystal City I was so stupid I thought well this will be easy I'm 120 miles from here from my house I'll just go down to Crystal City I'll interview people I'll write the book in a year it'll be over but they have nothing there they had there are two now signs that one was put up by Alan Taniguchi for the Japanese and it says it calls it a concentration camp which is the political word that the Japanese use because they were they they were a group of people concentrated in that area but the Germans have called it what the government called it which was the Crystal City family internment camp because they know what concentration camps really were and they don't want to get involved in that politics there's a lot of politics involved in everything and but but no nobody's asked me you know it's ridiculous I wish that somebody would take this on like you know and yet they all write about the Japanese every year you know Joaquin Castro wrote about the Japanese and I sent him a note and said do you want me to read this book to you or what I like him I like it and but I'm hoping that at some point when I'm dead and the movies out that they that the Crystal City will acknowledge that they have an incredible history and it could be like Manzanar or any of those other places where people go for on vacations a lot of people that have come here here to see this camp have come to Crystal City and they there's nothing much to see and that's fine but is there what was there there's now we have six different panels from the State Historical Society that does explain you know that it was a prisoner exchange thing but the there's no none of the little barracks are there the of course the crew the swimming pool is gone the reservoir is gone the funny thing is that I didn't put this in here but after the camp closed the camp they used it for a country club and that and only in Crystal City could you use an termic camp for a country club but it does sort of say everything you need to say we are talking about very very poor people and the guards the children of guards that were in Crystal City that I was able to interview are very ashamed of the because they don't know anything about it and because and they don't want to know their you know their south Texas people and they and they they're very proud people and they're doing you know that is a he's right it's close to Siberia as we have in America I can't thank you enough I want I did want to say that Barnes & Noble has been kind enough to come and bring books I am gravely appreciate them coming so if you need a book I will sign it if you don't need a book thank you very much and do you want to say something before you thank you to the library thank you to my hometown so I had one announcement that I forgot at the beginning I do want to let you know that our Texana genealogy department on the sixth floor of the Central Library currently has a display about the train to Crystal City so please take the time to look at that and Jan will you come back up here please so I just wanted to present Jan with a small gift thank you so much for revealing this story and for coming to share it with the library patrons we really appreciate you all that we can do as citizens to help our library that's one thing we can do when you think about how much we pay in taxes yes we pay our taxes but it doesn't pay for things like this and so we can always give to our librarians thank you very much