The Practice to Crystal Metropolis: FDR’s Secret Prisoner Trade Program and America’s Solely Household Internment Camp Throughout World Warfare II

Throughout World Warfare II, trains delivered hundreds of civilians from the USA and Latin America to Crystal Metropolis, Texas. The trains carried Japanese, German, and Italian immigrants and their American-born kids. The one household internment camp in the course of the conflict, Crystal Metropolis was the middle of a authorities prisoner change program known as “quiet passage.” Tons of of prisoners in Crystal Metropolis have been exchanged for different extra ostensibly necessary People—diplomats, businessmen, troopers, and missionaries—behind enemy traces in Japan and Germany.

“On this quietly shifting e book” (
The Boston Globe), Jan Jarboe Russell focuses on two American-born teenage ladies, uncovering the main points of their years spent within the camp; the struggles of their fathers; their households’ subsequent journeys to war-devastated Germany and Japan; and their years-long try and survive and return to the USA, reworked from incarcerated enemies to American loyalists. Their tales of day-to-day life on the camp, from the ten-foot excessive safety fence to the armed guards, each day roll name, and censored mail, have by no means been informed.

Combining big-picture World Warfare II historical past with a little-known occasion in American historical past,
The Practice to Crystal Metropolis reveals the war-time hysteria in opposition to the Japanese and Germans in America, the secrets and techniques of FDR’s ways to rescue high-profile POWs in Germany and Japan, and above all, “is about identification, allegiance, and residential, and the issue of figuring out the loyalties that lie in particular person human hearts” (
Texas Observer).