The Detainees of Crystal City

Hi, this is Joe and before we begin today's episode, I have a special message. As you may know, just over a month ago, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts canceled existing grants for organizations around the country, including us here at Radio Diaries.

For the past decade, NEH and NEA have been our primary funders. The administration's order, which is titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, includes a clause to remove content that, quote, inappropriately disparages Americans past or living and instead focuses on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.

At Radio Diaries, we believe that progress doesn't come from denying, erasing, or whitewashing the past, but from deeply understanding our history, even when it's painful. We try to create stories that don't just tell you what happened, but help you feel it. And we believe in stories that look at hidden, buried, rarely told chapters of history from a personal lens. If you believe in what we believe, we hope you'll support us.

Your donation is more important than ever, and right now, we have a $50,000 match, so every dollar you send us will be doubled. We're a nonprofit organization, so your donation is tax-deductible. Go to radiodiaries.org to find out how you can support our work. A good example is our most recent episode about the last time the Alien Enemies Act was used in this country in World War II. So if you like it, please consider showing your support after you listen. That's radiodiaries.org. Thanks.

We want to recommend a fellow show in the Radiotopia family. It's called This Day, hosted by Jody Avergan, alongside historians Nicole Hemmer and Kelly Carter Jackson. Each episode is a short, fun glimpse. of that day in American history. You hear stories ranging from the time we accidentally dropped a bomb on North Carolina to the time women fought against the right to vote. We're living in a pretty rocky present, so it's a good time to look at the past.

the good, the bad, and the hard to explain. Subscribe to This Day wherever you get your podcasts.

From PRX's Radiotopia, this is Radio Diaries. I'm Joe Richman. President Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act today, which has been used only a few times in U.S. history, including during World Wars I and II. The Alien Enemies Act could allow the president to speed up deportations. To justify mass deportations President Trump has invoked an old wartime law from 1798 called the Alien Enemies Act. This is currently being challenged in multiple court cases around the country.

The Alien Enemies Act has been used only a handful of times in American history, always during war. The last time came on the heels of Pearl Harbor and America's entry into World War II with the internment of Japanese and German Americans. That history is familiar to many people. But there's another story that even today, most people don't know about.

During World War II, the Axis countries, Germany and Japan, began detaining Americans abroad. Journalists, businessmen, missionaries, anyone who could be a potential spy. In response, the Roosevelt administration came up with an elaborate plan. They wanted people they could potentially exchange for these American prisoners of war. So they turned to Latin America.

and began arresting Germans, Japanese, and Italians who were living there and brought them and their families to internment camps in the United States. Today, we bring you some of their stories.

My name is Karin Schramm. Both my parents were from Germany and my father went to Ecuador in 1928. They had their German friends and Ecuadorian friends, and they were very happy. My mother used to write diaries and after the war started, she wrote about my father, Wolfgang. This was one of those entries. December 23, 1943. I will never forget that day or that hour. Suddenly, a military vehicle stopped in front of our door. I held my breath.

Two American soldiers holding rifles had picked Wolfgang up. I felt an enormous emptiness and I stayed behind alone with my three small children. My name is Livia Yamamoto and my parents are Japanese. We lived in Chiclayo, which is northern Peru, and my father had a store there. I was seven and a half when my father was taken. It was January 3rd, and that was when the police came to the house, took my father to jail.

He couldn't understand why because he had not done anything wrong. After the truck disappeared in the distance, I asked my mother, where is he going? And she said, don't know. It was like he was being kidnapped. Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States. Today's threat to our national security is not a matter. of military weapons alone, spies, saboteurs. My name is Teresa Van Hoy. I am professor of history at St. Mary's University.

They must not be allowed to spread in the new world as they have in the old. This is a memorandum for the Attorney General, March 27, 1942. They... the State Department, have arranged for two vessels which will pick up the aliens from the west coast of South America. One vessel will have 700 males. The other vessel, there will be 250 men, women, and children. a total of 950 enemy aliens. We were taken and used as like hostages to be exchanged with American prisoners of war.

And there were FBI agents throughout the whole of Latin America looking for people who were convenient for this purpose. Latin American authorities did not want to do this, did not want to round up its citizens who had never broken any law, including the women and children. But we exercised a lot of clout. And the U.S. authorities threatened to boycott their goods in our markets. So we sent our transport ships to pick them up. We brought them here.

and then held them on grounds that they had entered the United States illegally. The filming of the Crystal City facility, which you are about to see. A family facility 110 miles southwest of San Antonio shows how men, women, and children, detainees of World War II, lived, worked, and played. My name is Chieko Kamisato. I was an internee in Crystal City, Texas in 1944. When we arrived to the United States, we had to strip.

you know, naked completely, and they sprayed us with EDT. My mom thought they were just going to kill us. In a way, she was relieved when we got to the camp because she saw Japanese faces. My name is Kazumu Julio Cesar Naganema. My friends call me Kaz. The U.S. took our passport. Everything was tripping from us, but my mother said we were going to be reunited with Dad.

He came, and all three of us kind of jumped on him and hugged him. He still had his mustache, and he still wore glasses, but he had lost a lot of weight. His face was skinny, hollow. He just looked fragile. The Department of Justice produced a propaganda film. about life in the camp, touting its good care and happy families. Crystal City is an extremely isolated spot, and good food was good for morale.

in a climate which often reaches 120 degrees. The climate was terrible because it was even hotter than Ecuador and there were rattlesnakes and scorpions. This is the perimeter over which armed guards kept a 24-hour watch. At night the illumination from the lights along the top of this fence was visible almost to the Mexican border.

They built a whole community there. I mean, it became a real city. Of course, that was a prison. Germans were housed in one section. Japanese were housed in another section. There was a laundromat. a butcher shop, a hospital, schools. The guard tower was what was really intimidating because on the top of the tower They were soldiers and they had machine guns facing us. Not facing outside, but facing us, so we couldn't go near the fence. It was understood that we cannot leave at all.

There was one incident when they were playing baseball and the ball went out of the fence. And this little boy wanted to try and retrieve the ball. And that's when the gunshot went up. They were a warning, you know, not to ever, ever go near the fence. We are setting a standard for the rest of the world in the treatment of people who may have loyalties to an enemy nation.

We are protecting ourselves without violating the principles of Christian decency. The United States needed to reassure the Germans, hey, we're taking care of your people, make sure and take care of ours.

Diary entry January 1945. The list was published with names of hostages who had been chosen to be exchanged for American prisoners of war. Our names were not on the list. And from Paraguay, Bolivia, and other South American nations, more families kept coming. A lot of people from our camp, they were deported to Japan as exchange prisoners.

And thank God my father fought against going to Japan. A very close friend of my father sent a telegram. People are suffering so much. It's devastating over here. Germany was being bombed by Americans. There was war everywhere. So we found a ship manifest. From the February 15th, 1944 voyage, 76% of the people on that boat were from Latin America. They were sent on to Germany.

And in exchange, Americans won their freedom. Diary entry, May 1945. We are still in the camp in Texas, behind walls and barbed wire. We ask daily. what will become of us. President Truman announced the official surrender. This is a solemn but glorious hour. General Eisenhower informs me that the forces of Germany have surrendered to the United Nations.

The war is over, but we basically had no country. We never got a passport, no visa, no nothing. What we do have is papers from the government saying that we are illegal aliens. Yet they don't mention... that they brought us here. Nobody was in any kind of hurry to liberate the enemy alien camps. And they languished for months and years in some cases. I was interned from 1943 to 1947, four years. The government said, you either go to Japan or go back to Peru. We were Peruvians, but...

The Peru government wouldn't take us. They didn't want us back. And in Japan, it was war-devastated. In order to get out of camp, you have to have a sponsor family? and you're supposed to have a job. We had this lawyer that helped us. And he found this fruit processing company in Seabrook, New Jersey, and they needed labor over there, and they were able to sponsor us. That was the only way we were able to leave camp.

We have to start all over again. And that's where I get very angry for my parents to go through all of their hardship because they have to suffer. It was not easy. Upon release from Crystal City, people were required to sign a confidentiality document saying that they could not speak of the experience to anyone. And they did not, because they had already lived through years of imprisonment, so they weren't going to take any chances. For me, I always credit my mom that

for the family's sake to take us through that. We were kidnapped from another country, and yet they hardly complained. Part of this is the Japanese culture. You might have heard the term gamang. You just deal with it. You know, you live through it. Gamang is, you know, just suck it up.

More than 6,000 people, men, women, and children, were taken from Latin America and held in internment camps in the United States during World War II. A few of the survivors who you heard in this story will travel to Crystal City, Texas this fall to visit the camp where they spent part of their childhood. This story was produced by Joanne DeLuna and Nellie Gillis. It was edited by Deborah George, Ben Shapiro, and me. The Radio Diaries team also includes Micah Hazel and Lisa Escarce.

And this week, we are saying goodbye to the wonderful Lena Engelstein. She'll be spending more time on her dance career. You can follow her work at LenaEngelstein.com. We are proud members of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of the best independent podcasts around. You can find them all at radiotopia.fm. We have support from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, NISCA, and the Horace Goldsmith Foundation.

And in case you've been following the news, we no longer have support from the National Endowment for the Humanities or the National Endowment for the Arts. So if you're not a supporter already, now would be a great time to visit radiodiaries.org slash donate. I'm Joe Richman. Thanks for listening.