It also examines the transnational repercussions of eviction from Latin American countries and the practice of forced repatriation. This essay investigates stories of former internees at the Crystal City Family Internment Camp in Texas with a particular focus on German Americans. residents and their American-born children and exchanged many of them for American prisoners of war in Europe and the Pacific. government interned Japanese, German, and Italian legal U.S. 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.Ĭombining big-picture World War II history with a little-known event in American history, 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 above all, “is about identity, allegiance, and home, and the difficulty of determining the loyalties that lie in individual human hearts” ( Texas Observer).During World War II the U.S. “In this quietly moving book” ( The Boston Globe), Jan Jarboe Russell focuses on two American-born teenage girls, uncovering 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. The only family internment camp during the war, Crystal City was the center of a government prisoner exchange program called “quiet passage.” Hundreds of prisoners in Crystal City were exchanged for other more ostensibly important Americans-diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, and missionaries-behind enemy lines in Japan and Germany. The trains carried Japanese, German, and Italian immigrants and their American-born children.

The Train to Crystal City is compelling, thought-provoking, and impossible to put down” ( Star-Tribune, Minneapolis).ĭuring World War II, trains delivered thousands of civilians from the United States and Latin America to Crystal City, Texas.

The New York Times bestselling dramatic and never-before-told story of a secret FDR-approved American internment camp in Texas during World War II: “A must-read….

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