Everything we did at Crystal City for the first time had an aura of surprise and mystique about it, even going to the marketplace, which was located just two streets away from our triplex. There was a bakery stall, a butcher shop, a greengrocer, dry goods, a beauty salon and barbershop, and a little place like a five-and-dime for buying cellophane tape and birthday candles and dish soap. Shopping at the marketplace was somewhat like I’d imagined shopping on a safari in Africa would be like, austere and minimal, but you were on safari, so you wouldn’t care because you’d be seeing giraffes and elephants in the morning. But there was no exotic wildlife to take the edge off the odd deprivation of this marketplace, just the threat of snakes and spiders and scorpions and fire ants on the walk back to our quarters.
Papa didn’t pay for our groceries with dollar bills; no American currency was allowed at the camp. He exchanged what we put into our shopping basket with coupons he’d been handed in our admissions packet. And we couldn’t purchase as much as we wanted; the food coupons were rationed. He had been given enough for a family of four to subsist on for two weeks, but we were expected to shop daily for what we needed for just that day. He wouldn’t get more coupons until the fourteen days were up.
I would later learn that from time to time, camp officials would arrange for shopping trips to San Antonio, so that we could buy necessities that the camp couldn’t provide, and we’d be able to tap into Papa’s frozen bank assets to do so. But those trips would be exactly like our travel to the camp had been: under guard and under scrutiny. We’d be stared at, feared, and pitied. We would not go very often.
We walked back to our triplex in the 108-degree heat and put the groceries away. Mommi had not been able to find any fresh mushrooms or sherry. There would be no J?gerschnitzel for dinner that night, not according to her. Papa had tried to convince her she could make the dish without the mushrooms and just use the German beer he had been able to get instead. She had just shaken her head like he’d no idea what he was talking about.
We’d just finished a lunch of toasted cheese sandwiches when there was a knock at the door. Our triplex neighbors on the right side had come to welcome us. Stefan Meier and his wife, Geneva, were a little younger than my parents, I thought. Both were short and slightly plump, with sincere smiles and honey brown hair. Their two children, Minnie and Betsy, were nine and seven. The girls, miniature versions of their mother, regarded Max and me with disappointed interest; clearly, they’d hoped the new neighbors would have daughters their ages. Stefan and Geneva were both originally from a suburb of Munich but had come to Crystal City by way of New York. He was a banker whose much older brother back in Germany was an official in Hitler’s administration. That was all it took to deem Stefan a threat. That, and the fact that he routinely sent money to his parents in Bavaria because his father was unable to work. Stefan and Geneva spoke English but kept lapsing into German as they visited with us. Papa answered all their German questions with English answers.
“You and your family speak only English?” Stefan asked, his tone one of curiosity.
“We do,” Papa said, smiling.
“You don’t have to here, you know. You don’t have to be anyone other than who you are,” Stefan said kindly. “Not here.”
Papa’s smile did not waver. “This is who we are. My wife and I are legal residents of the United States. We’ve lived here nearly twenty years and have made our declarations to become citizens.”
Stefan nodded, taking in my father’s words like someone might sample a strange new food. “Of course,” he finally said. “So your children will be going to the Federal School, then?”
“They will.”
Our neighbor said nothing else about schooling, but it was obvious there were unspoken words he wished to say. So much that happened at Crystal City—or didn’t happen—I wouldn’t fully understand until the war was over and we were thousands of miles away. Stefan and Geneva Meier had enrolled their children in the German school at the camp even though the girls had gone to an English-speaking school in New York. The Meiers had accepted the rumored fate that hundreds of German American internees at Crystal City were to be repatriated back to Germany, and if the Meiers were chosen for that, they wanted their girls to have a better command of the language they only spoke in bits and pieces at home. It did not occur to me then to ask about this concept of repatriation that Mr. Meier was talking about. I assumed the families that wanted to go back to Germany instead of staying locked up in the camp would have to volunteer to go, petition for the chance to be repatriated, like Papa had petitioned to come here to Texas. I did wonder why Mr. Meier would consider such a move, seeing as Germany was at war, but I didn’t think it was polite to ask him, and I was certain Papa would never seek to regain our freedom in such an unwise way.
The Meiers stayed for a little while longer, and it was good to see Mommi making a new friend in Geneva. Mommi had never been quick to make friends, forever preferring Papa’s companionship over anyone else’s. She was, as I would come to understand many years later, an introvert, and Geneva was the exact opposite. Geneva took no offense at Mommi’s short, one-word answers but kept barreling on, asking Mommi a thousand questions and freely volunteering information about her own family and life. Mommi visibly began to relax because Geneva was happy to do all the talking, which was just how Mommi liked it. Before the Meiers left, Stefan told my father that he taught economics at the German high school and that he was sure they’d want Papa on the faculty to teach chemistry and other science classes. He said he could take him over to meet the appointed principal in the coming days if that interested Papa, which I knew it would.
Over the next few hours, the rest of the neighbors on our block came to the triplex to welcome us. Most of the other families on our street were German, but there were two Japanese families, one on the left side of our triplex. The Takahashis had been living in Peru the last ten years and spoke no English. We learned sometime later that they had wanted to be on the south side of the campground where the majority of the other Japanese families lived but there had been no available houses when they had come. They had two teenage daughters; one was named Kasumi, who was born the same year and month as me. But the two girls spoke only Spanish with each other and Japanese with their parents. It was several months before I understood how it was that Japanese immigrants to Latin America had been surrendered by their governments to the United States as a way of keeping faith with the Allies, and supposedly to stop the spread of Nazism. I would learn years later that as early as 1938, the U.S. government had been worried that Axis nationals living in Latin America could too easily engage in espionage and pro-Nazi activities, and then quietly make their way to the States through Mexico and bring the war to our very doorstep. In 1940, the State Department had arranged with the governments of Peru and Guatemala and other Latin American countries for the deportation of German, Japanese, and Italian immigrants who might be a threat to the security and mission of the Allies. The day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, when America entered the war, the arrests in Latin America began and troop ships started bringing the targeted nationals to internment camps on U.S. soil.