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The train to Crystal City [large type] : FDR's secret prisoner exchange program and America's only family internment camp during World War II / Jan Jarboe Russell.

by Russell, Jan Jarboe, 1951-

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Waterville, Maine : Thorndike Press, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning, 2015.

Iserloh, Ingrid, 1930-

Utsushigawa, Sumi, 1929-

Crystal City Internment Camp (Crystal City, Tex.) -- Biography.

World War, 1939-1945 -- Concentration camps -- Texas -- Crystal City.

World War, 1939-1945 -- Evacuation of civilians -- United States.

World War, 1939-1945 -- Forced repatriation.

World War, 1939-1945 -- Children -- United States -- Biography.

Japanese Americans -- History -- 20th century.

German Americans -- United States -- History -- 20th century.

9781410477613 (large print : hardcover)

1410477614 (large print : hardcover)

Thorndike Press large print nonfiction series.

657 pages (large print), 8 unnumbered pages : illustrations, portraits ; 23 cm.

Large print edition.

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.

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