The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (26 page)

For months before this day of departure, O’Rourke had worked with the State Department and the Immigration Service to prepare to transport the 429 internees from Crystal City to the port of New York, where they would board the Swedish liner MS
Gripsholm
, sail to Europe, and be traded for American prisoners of war and civilians. Potential lists of internees who would be repatriated to Germany flew back and forth between Washington and Berlin.

Meanwhile, the Germans waged a two-front strategy for
survival. Allied forces had advanced quickly from Paris to the Rhine. As Ingrid and the others prepared to leave Crystal City, the Battle of the Bulge was under way. Hitler was within weeks of firmly ensconcing himself in his bunker in Berlin with Eva Braun.

The January 1945 exchange was the sixth and last of the transatlantic exchanges. By then, 2,361 Americans, caught behind enemy lines in Europe, had been returned from Germany and Italy in exchange for 4,500 German nationals and 124 Italians who had previously been interned in US camps. During the negotiations between Berlin and Washington about this final exchange, Berlin insisted that the United States deliver many German citizens seized in Latin America and interned in camps in the United States, including Crystal City. The Germans pressed for a one-for-one exchange: for every American prisoner of war or civilian freed by Germany, they wanted one German. In the tedious process every name on the two lists was scrutinized by multiple government agencies. Negotiations dragged.

Even on the morning that the group of repatriates from Crystal City prepared to leave camp, the final exchange list was incomplete. Nonetheless, William Mangels, a special FBI agent from New York, arrived in Crystal City on the evening of December 28 to clear those who had been identified for departure.

Ingrid and her family and most of the others had been on lockdown inside the camp for about two weeks. The repatriates were separated from other internees and not allowed to have contact with anyone other than their families, for fear some might attempt to smuggle money, maps, or codes into Germany. “All repatriates were kept incommunicado after final customs examination and body frisk,” wrote Mangels in his report to Washington. “At no time were they able to pass or receive any verbal or written communications.” All who were leaving the camp were searched for concealed contraband items, and repatriates designated as high security risks were strip-searched.

The State Department issued a list of what the repatriates could
take with them from Crystal City. The list included German clothes, passports, American birth certificates, baby carriages, and personal items such as family photos. The list of what could not be taken was much longer and included electrical appliances, radios, binoculars, garden tools, and sketches. Apparently, the State Department viewed these items as potentially helpful to the war effort in Germany.

Customs agents methodically examined everyone’s baggage. The Eiserloh family had five handmade wooden sea trunks, each four by four feet wide and three feet tall. Like many other repatriates, the Eiserlohs had spent all the family’s accumulated quarter-shaped tokens at the camp store on items that would be scarce in Germany. Johanna purchased heavy coats and sturdy shoes for every member of the family and many cartons of cigarettes for Mathias.
On December 29, their luggage, with that of all the others bound for Germany, was loaded onto six baggage cars attached to two Pullman trains at the small station in nearby Uvalde.

Johanna was nine months pregnant with her fourth child and torn about their repatriation. If Johanna gave birth before the day of departure, she planned to stay in Crystal City with all of the children. Yet Mathias was adamant: he would return to Germany, even if he had to go alone. Ingrid would lose her father for a second time. She didn’t think she could stand that. Night after night, she listened to her parents argue.

Johanna had married Mathias because he wanted to make a new life for them in America, and now that life was finished. With three children and one on the way, she needed her husband’s support and protection, which now depended on whether she carried through with her previous decision to repatriate. All of this was complicated by her pregnancy. She had not even wanted another child, but after their reunion in Crystal City, Mathias had insisted.

Finally, the day of reckoning—January 2—arrived. On that morning, Dr. Robert Martin, a physician at the camp, signed a medical release certifying that Johanna was fit to travel by train to New York and by boat to Germany. Johanna never announced her
decision, but boarded the bus for Uvalde with her family and the large contingent from the camp.

Before exiting the gates of the camp, Mathias and Johanna, like the other adult internees, signed an oath promising never to disclose details of their internment or the upcoming exchange. Mathias, like all adult German repatriates, signed a second oath not to perform military service in Germany. For the rest of their lives, Mathias and Johanna kept silent partly because they feared US government reprisals and partly out of shame for their internment. “Goddamn war,” Mathias said as he left Crystal City. Over the years, that phrase became his standard explanation for what had happened to his family.

All day and well into the night, FBI agents supervised the departure of the contingent from Crystal City.
The passengers were loaded onto two separate trains at the station in Uvalde. The first train left Uvalde at 11:00 p.m., accompanied by three FBI agents, one doctor, and twenty-two border patrolmen. The second, with the same number of personnel, left at 11:15 p.m. Ingrid and Lothar remembered that the weather was cold—unusual for Texas—and both were sleepy and tired when they finally boarded the train.
“It was literally the dead of night,” Lothar said. “We stumbled on board. I wasn’t sure what was happening.”

Their family was assigned to a Pullman car, a compartment designed for two persons to sleep on the lower level and one on the upper berth. Lothar and Mathias crowded into the upper berth; Johanna and the two girls took the lower level.

Security was tight. Armed Border Patrol agents, stationed at the ends of each car for the duration of the trip, explained that the passengers were to remain in their separate cars. No communication between passengers in separate cars was allowed, and as a general rule, the shades were kept pulled down. The internees were not allowed newspapers.

The train barreled down the tracks. Beside Ingrid in the cramped car, Johanna moaned and groaned, her cries in painful harmony with the movement of the train. The space felt closed, and the air
was stagnant. Ingrid gripped her mother’s hand as if to say,
Get a hold of yourself.

By morning, Johanna was in hard labor, and Mathias asked one of the guards to bring the doctor. After Dr. Martin and a nurse arrived, Mathias and the three children walked to the dining car and ate breakfast. As the train traveled toward New Orleans, Johanna’s family paced the hallway. Mathias’s fingers, stained by tobacco, reached for one cigarette after another, and the hallway filled with smoke.

A half hour or so before the train crossed over the Mississippi River, the guards allowed the dark shades to be raised. Morning light flooded the passenger car. From the hallway, Ensi, Ingrid, and Lothar pressed their faces against the glass and watched the immense river pass by while their mother labored on.

Finally, Dr. Martin and the nurse emerged from the car and announced that Johanna had given birth to a boy. Mathias named his second son Guenther. According to Ingrid, Dr. Martin tried to convince Mathias to have Guenther placed for adoption.
“Don’t take this infant into a war zone,” Martin said. “He might not survive.” He offered to arrange the adoption himself.

“I understand the risk,” Mathias said, “but I have to keep my family together.”

In fact, Mathias did not understand the risk. None of the repatriates on board the train understood their desperate part in the context of the war. In Crystal City, war news was censored, and rumors among the internees were rampant. Most German fathers who left camp did not realize that Germany was losing the war. Indeed, most believed, without evidence, that Germany would prevail. While Mathias did not know what he would find in Germany, he followed the fantasy that he would find work there and live as a free man with his family. It would be better, he was sure, than life behind the barbed-wire fence. Mathias did not understand that Guenther, only hours old, would become one more name on Washington’s side of the exchange list, an infant pawn.

In his written report, Dr. Martin described details of the birth but made no mention of his offer to place Guenther for adoption. “The birth of the child en route was anticipated, and sterile obstetrical packs and instruments were taken along by the doctor and the nurse accompanying the train for use in this case,” the doctor wrote. After the delivery, the doctor signed Guenther’s birth certificate and listed New Orleans as his place of birth.

Two days later, the Eiserlohs’ train arrived at Pier F, Jersey City. From the pier, Ingrid got her first look at the
Gripsholm
, a large Swedish ocean liner, 573 feet long with a 74-foot beam. The white ship was brightly lit and garlanded with Swedish flags. In addition to the 429 internees from Crystal City, the pier was crowded with 47 repatriates from Fort Stanton Internment Camp in New Mexico, 208 from Fort Lincoln in North Dakota, and 114 from Seagoville in Texas.

The trains arrived in Jersey City every thirty to sixty minutes. For the American authorities, logistics were a nightmare. Each person’s baggage and documentation was carefully processed for embarkation, taking more than a day.

Shortly before midnight on January 7, all of the repatriates—a total of 183 German prisoners of war and 856 civilians, including Ingrid and her family, were on board the ship. Once the repatriates crossed the gangplank, they were in the hands of Swedish authorities. On board, it was utter chaos as members of the crew scurried on deck like busy ants, baggage was stowed, and passengers, who wore tags on their coats, struggled to find quarters.

The whistle blew, and the ship left the pier. Twenty-two years before, Mathias and Johanna had arrived in New York to start their lives in America. From the deck of the ship, Mathias saw a silhouette of the Statue of Liberty, which was not brightly illuminated because of the World War II blackout. When he was a young immigrant years before, the statue had been a symbol of promise. That seemed a long time ago. Now he and his family were leaving the United States, sent by their adopted country across the Atlantic—into war.

Johanna and Guenther were taken below to sick bay, on the third level of the ship. Ensi went with her mother and was supervised by nurses. All the life seemed drained from Johanna’s face, and she was too frail to produce breast milk. When she attempted to feed Guenther, her breasts were dry and her nipples bloody. Nurses fed the newborn bottles of milk, and Johanna sipped black tea. Even at four years old, Ensi understood that her mother did not want to return to Germany. “All I remember is her fear and helplessness,” Ensi recalled. “She was in sick bay for the entire voyage. What I remember most about the trip was how lost I felt.” Ingrid was assigned to a bunk on the same level, but not in sick bay, and was grateful that she was separated from her mother and younger siblings. Mathias and Lothar had separate quarters in a dormitory-type facility on the first level.

During the first few days, the sea was rough, and most of the passengers were seasick, but Ingrid stayed well. On the train trip, she’d taken a half teaspoon of baking soda each day, and the remedy worked. She roamed the ship and shadowed her father as he kept a watchful eye on the family’s belongings. Some of the passengers were terrified that German U-boats might attack the crowded ocean liner. “Wouldn’t that beat all?” Mathias told his daughter.

He sought out and had conversations with German soldiers on board who were going back into the war. Many were young and had lost arms and legs in battle, and Ingrid stared at the absence of limbs and didn’t know how to react. After all, these were not her countrymen but German prisoners of war. She was an American, yet they were all on the same boat, bound for Germany. Nothing was simple.

Ingrid asked her father to resume the dancing lessons that he’d started when they lived in Strongsville, Ohio. Before his arrest, Mathias had taught young Ingrid the waltz. The dance lessons had stopped after Pearl Harbor, when the Eiserlohs, like other German nationals, surrendered their radios as contraband. Now, on board the
Gripsholm
, Mathias attempted to teach Ingrid the basics of the American swing dance, but his footwork was clumsy. One of the German POWs
cut in on father and daughter and offered to help Ingrid master the basic steps. The two of them, fourteen-year-old Ingrid and a young German POW, swirled in circles on deck to the sounds of Duke Ellington and the Andrews Sisters.

Meanwhile, Lothar had the run of the ship, which was a luxury liner, not a standard troop ship. The ship had a sports deck on top with a swimming pool, a cinema for movies, and a dining hall. Many of his friends from Crystal City were on board. The food was plentiful: beef, potatoes, vegetables, fruit, and simple desserts. Many of the crew and the Swedish guards on the
Gripsholm
knew that food was scarce in Germany. Knowing what faced these children, they encouraged them to eat their fill.

As the ship followed the currents toward Europe, a school of dolphins appeared on either side of it. Ensi came up top from sick bay to see them and cried, “Flying fish! Flying fish!” As if arranged by a Hollywood casting company, the dolphins continued with the ship, romping in its wake. Both sides of the ship were lined with children. The air was sweet and the ocean smooth. For Ingrid, Lothar, and Ensi, the few days of watching the dolphins as the
Gripsholm
plowed across the Atlantic and into the Mediterranean were the happiest since the outbreak of the war.

On January 18, sixteen days after the Eiserlohs left Crystal City, the ship sailed east past Gibraltar. To the left was Spain and to the right North Africa. Morning sun glistened on the water as the
Gripsholm
passed through the narrow strait. Ingrid stood on deck, on the other side of the Atlantic from her homeland, and stared at the steep face of the strongly fortified Rock of Gibraltar.