The Train to Crystal City: F.D.R.’s Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America’s Only Family Internment Camp During World War II

During WWII, thousands of people of German, Italian, and Japanese descent living in the United States and Latin America were imprisoned as potential enemy aliens and forced to live in internment camps. Sometimes entire families were gathered together and shipped to a camp outside of Crystal City, Tex., to be traded for Americans imprisoned overseas. Russell (They Lived to Tell the Tale) draws on historical records and extensive interviews to revisit a confusing, shameful episode in American history. Using two American-born teenagers as her focal points—one of Japanese descent, the other German—she examines the process that transformed law-abiding Americans, regardless of citizenship, into internees and repatriated many to countries they’d never known. Russell pulls no punches describing the cost of war and the conditions internees endured. “The fundamental questions of citizenship, the status of aliens—indeed the definition of who is and who is not an American—are perennial. The travesty in Crystal City,” Russell notes, “is that in the effort to win the war... the cost to civil liberties was high.” Though Russell sometimes loses focus while delivering the full story in all its detail, it’s nevertheless a powerful piece. [em]Agent: Amy Hughes, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (Feb.) [/em]