We internees were not without a voice at Crystal City. Mr. O’Rourke, the camp director, allowed us to choose leaders from among our two communities to represent us at meetings designed to improve camp life. To be truthful, I did not pay a great deal of attention to the politics of our existence at the internment camp. It was enough for me to navigate life at the American high school, even with Mariko at my side. Apparently it had been a bold move on my parents’ part to enroll me there—the German community wanted all its children to attend the German school as a sign of solidarity and national pride. I only cared about making good grades and being assured that none of the boys thought I was ugly or stupid. It made no difference to me what our community leaders expected of me.
But I would hear Papa and Stefan talking in the evenings about the German internees who were our spokesmen. Papa wasn’t happy with the chosen leadership of our side of the camp and he would say so to Stefan, who would then caution Papa about communicating that displeasure.
“Everything that gets said here gets heard here, Otto,” Stefan said one fall evening. It was clear he wasn’t talking about the guards, who did in fact listen to every conversation we had if they were within earshot. He was talking about the other internees, especially those in positions of control.
Stefan then told Papa that three months before my family arrived, the elected leadership of the German internees, all of whom at the time were loyal to Hitler, had taken down the American flag in the German recreation hall and had replaced it with the Nazi flag. The flag was promptly removed by furious guards who were on patrol that evening and who then shredded it to bits. Apparently a number of German internees complained about the treatment of the German flag to the International Red Cross, as well as the government of Switzerland, which, being neutral, had been designated as liaison for German internees in matters related to our internment. The commissioner of the INS soothed the infuriated internees by flying no flag at all in the German recreation hall. But there was still tension among the German camp leadership and camp administration, and between internees loyal to the United States and those loyal to the fatherland.
Back in July, when we’d arrived, the spokesman for the German internees had been a man named Karl Kolb. He was from New York and he had been working for a German camera company. He and his wife and their seventeen-year-old daughter had arrived at Crystal City a few weeks before we had. Kolb was apparently a man who liked being in charge and he was quickly elected to be spokesman for the German internees. He decided, much to Papa’s annoyance, that his fellow internees would not be allowed to talk to O’Rourke on their own. Instead, any complaint or comment or suggestion had to be filed with a German internee council, of which he was the head. Before Kolb, O’Rourke assigned day jobs to the internees who wanted them, and most did, but Kolb wanted to hand out job assignments himself. It was Kolb whom Stefan Meier took my father to see the day after we arrived about a post as a science teacher at the German school.
Papa asked Stefan one evening why O’Rourke had given Kolb that kind of power. Stefan thought it was because O’Rourke had been instructed to run a peaceful camp. The Allied camps weren’t to be compared in any way, shape, or form to the Axis camps, which we’d all heard via the newsreels and newspapers were deplorable. If that’s how the German internees wanted to be represented at the camp, O’Rourke wasn’t going to stand in their way.
Papa and Stefan would also talk about an internee named Fritz Kuhn, who had the ear and the confidence of many of the German internees, but Papa did not like or trust him. Kuhn and his wife and their fifteen-year-old son, Walter, had also arrived before us. Kuhn was not like Papa, even though he was also a chemist. He had been the Hitler-appointed leader of the American arm of the Nazi Party, the German American Bund. He was also a decorated World War I soldier, having won Germany’s Iron Cross for his military service. Kuhn was apparently well-known in Germany, and of all the Crystal City internees ripe for repatriation, Germany was most interested in a prisoner exchange that would include Kuhn, even though he’d served forty-three months in prison for embezzling prior to coming to Crystal City. Kuhn’s wife, Elsa, and their son had also been arrested as enemy aliens, and the thought that fifteen-year-old Walter had been treated that way still makes my soul tremble all these years later. It angered Papa that men like Kuhn had risen to the ranks of leadership for the German internees.
Stefan Meier said it was the same in the Japanese community. Their leaders were issei loyal to Japan. The Italians were so few in number, they did not have community leaders.
In early December, evergreen trees were trucked into the camp and anyone who wanted to could take one home to their quarters to decorate for the holidays. None of us had our Christmas decorations with us, of course, but Mommi, Max, and I made ornaments out of cardboard and hung candy canes that we’d bought at the marketplace with our camp money.
Mariko’s family didn’t celebrate Christmas, not like we did, although her parents had been giving them holiday gifts since Tomeo and Kaminari were in grade school. She had told me well before Christmas that her grandparents on both sides were Buddhists but that her parents weren’t practicing any faith at all, which freed her to enjoy the Western religious holidays as much as she wanted. She loved our Christmas tree and made some ornaments of her own to put on it.
About the time those Christmas trees were being delivered, a German internee named Heinrich Hasenburger became the new official spokesman for the German internees. Papa couldn’t understand how the man had pulled this off, because he got fewer than two hundred votes out of more than six hundred that were cast. It infuriated Papa that even within the tiny little cosmos that was Crystal City, where every action of ours was controlled, a man like Hasenburger could strong-arm his way into being the one in control. Papa did not approve of him and wasn’t afraid to say so.
One Friday morning, Mommi went to the marketplace to buy groceries. By this time, the single camp grocery canteen had become two; the one we shopped at was called the German General Store, and the other was known as the Japanese Union Store. Both canteens sold basic groceries but also ethnically distinct food items. I’d been inside the one that Mariko and her family shopped at several times, but never to buy anything. On this particular day, Hasenburger had posted sentries to police the front door to the German General Store. The sentries had been instructed not to allow anyone in who opposed Hasenburger. Our family was on his list of opposers and Mommi was turned away. Papa tried to go later and came back again, angry because he’d been turned away, too. The camp stores were staffed by internees and there was no one from administration physically at the marketplace to whom Papa could appeal. He would have had to break ranks with the community to report to camp officials what had happened to him, so Papa said nothing. Then on Sunday afternoon when we wanted to go to the Café Vaterland, we were told we wouldn’t be allowed inside.
The man at the front door said something in German, his arms crossed stiffly over his chest.
Papa said something back to him.
The man shook his head. “Nein, nein,” he snapped.
Papa turned to us. “Let’s go,” he said, in a tone that suggested he didn’t want to go in there anyway. And maybe he didn’t at that point.
“What did that man say to you?” I asked.
“That this place is for Germans who are proud to be German,” my father replied, as we turned for home.
Mommi wanted to go to O’Rourke and complain to him about what Hasenburger was doing, but Papa thought this was a bad idea. I told him we should buy groceries where Mariko and her family shopped.
“This will blow over,” he said. “If we go to the director or I try to buy rationed food meant for the Japanese community, it will just get worse for us.”
I knew what he meant about going to the director. It would have been like me tattling on Lucy Hobart.
“But I have nothing to make for us for supper,” Mommi told him.
“We will eat,” was all Papa said.
We ended up having our evening meal in the mess hall, where internees who didn’t have kitchens in their living quarters or who were new to the camp took their meals. On the menu that night was spaghetti, which I loved. But we didn’t know any of the other people eating in the hall that night. We walked home afterward to sit by our Christmas tree and play spades.