The train to Crystal City
Subtitle: FDR's secret prisoner exchange program and America's only family internment camp during World War II
By: Jan Jarboe Russell
Edition: Large print edition.
Series: Thorndike Press large print nonfiction; Thorndike Press large print nonfiction series
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 657
ISBN-13: 9781410477613
Copyright date: 2015
Subjects: World War, 1939-1945; Prisoners and prisons; Concentration camps; German Americans; Evacuation and relocation, 1941-1948; Evacuation and relocation, 1942-1945; Evacuation and relocation, 1942; Crystal City Internment Camp (Crystal City, Tex.); Evacuation of civilians; Forced repatriation; Italian Americans; Japanese Americans; Children; Biography
Other titles: FDR's secret prisoner exchange program and America's only family internment camp during World War II; Franklin Delano Roosevelt's secret prisoner exchange program and America's only family internment camp during World War Two
Description: From 1942 to 1948, trains delivered more than 10,000 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.
Notes: Originally published: New York : Scribner, 2015.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 639-651).