I am also indebted to the German American Internee Coalition, whose online resources at www.gaic.org were invaluable to me; archivist Norbert Becker of the University of Stuttgart; filmmakers Joe Crump and Kristina Wagner; Jonathan Turner of the Rock Island Dispatch-Argus; the Texas Historical Commission; and author Jan Jarboe Russell, whose nonfiction work The Train to Crystal City opened my eyes to a World War II story I didn’t know and then couldn’t forget.
I endeavored to make this novel as historically accurate as possible, weaving actual events into my fictional characters’ lives whenever possible. Any liberties I might have knowingly or unknowingly taken were made for the good of the story or because I felt I had margin to speculate.
More than eleven thousand legal residents of German descent living in both the United States and Latin America, along with Latin American residents of Japanese and Italian descent, were interned at the camp in Crystal City, Texas, and in other similar detention facilities. These internees were encouraged, sometimes pressured, to repatriate to war-torn Germany or Japan as part of an “Exchange Process” that began with diplomats and embassy staffs and their families stuck behind enemy lines, and later included civilians and severely wounded prisoners of war. From mid-1942, when it opened, until it was closed in 1948, Crystal City Internment Camp interned 4,751 people, a tally that includes the 153 babies born there. Seventy years later, most of the camp buildings are gone, although the building that housed the German elementary school still stands. Today, eight interpretive panels that were dedicated in 2011 by the Texas Historical Commission and the city of Crystal City are on display at the former site of the camp, which now exists on open fields on Crystal City public schools property, with a few cottage foundations scattered here and there as well as the partially filled-in swimming pool.
While the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 granted reparations to Japanese Americans interned during World War II, as of this writing there has been no governmental review or acknowledgment of the same violation of civil liberties regarding interned German Americans.
None of the internees at Crystal City were ever convicted of a war-related crime.