THE TRAIN TO CRYSTAL CITY

The dramatic and never-before-told story of a secret FDR-approved prisoner exchange program run from Crystal City, Texas, an American internment camp during World War II, where thousands of families were incarcerated.

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, only thirty-five miles from the Mexican border. The trains carried Japanese, German, Italian immigrants and their American-born children. In addition more than 3,000 Germans and Japanese, who were deported from thirteen Latin American countries during World War II, were also transported to Crystal City. Crystal City – the only family internment camp during World War II – 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.

Told from the primary point of view of two American-born teenage girls, Ingrid Eiserloh, from Strongsville, Ohio and and Sumi Utsusjogawa, from Los Angeles, California, Jan Jarboe Russell uncovers the narrative of their years spent in the internment camp; the struggles of fathers, Mathias, a civil engineer arrested in January 1942, and Tom, one of the first successful Japanese photographers in Los Angeles, arrested in March 1943; their families' subsequent journeys to war-devastated Germany and Japan; and their years-long struggle to survive and return to the United States. Their stories have never been told.

Jan Jarboe Russell is a Neiman Fellow, a writer at large for Texas Monthly, and has written for the San Antonio Express-News, the New York Times, Slate, and other magazines. She is the author of Lady Bird: A Biography of Mrs. Johnson, (Scribner, 1999) and has also compiled and edited They Lived to Tell the Tale (Lyons Press, 2008). She livesin San Antonio, Texas, with her husband, Dr. Lewis F. Russell, Jr.