
The Train to Crystal City
FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America's Only Family Internment Camp During World War II
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Narrated by:
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Andrea Gallo
About this listen
The dramatic and never-before-told story of a secret FDR-approved American internment camp in Texas during World War II, where thousands of families - many US citizens - were incarcerated.
From 1942 to 1948, trains delivered thousands of civilians from the United States and Latin America to Crystal City, Texas, a small desert town at the southern tip of Texas. The trains carried Japanese, German, and Italian immigrants, and their American-born children. The only family internment camp during World War II, Crystal City was the center of a government prisoner exchange program called "quiet passage". During the course of the war, hundreds of prisoners in Crystal City, including their American-born children, were exchanged for other more important Americans - diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, physicians, and missionaries - behind enemy lines in Japan and Germany.
Focusing her story on two American-born teenage girls who were interned, author Jan Jarboe Russell uncovers the details of their years spent in the camp; the struggles of their fathers; their families' subsequent journeys to war-devastated Germany and Japan; and their years-long attempt to survive and return to the United States, transformed from incarcerated enemies to American loyalists. Their stories of day-to-day life at the camp, from the 10-foot high security fence to the armed guards, daily roll call, and censored mail, have never been told.
Combining big-picture World War II history with a little-known event in American history that has long been kept quiet, The Train to Crystal City reveals the war-time hysteria against the Japanese and Germans in America, the secrets of FDR's tactics to rescue high-profile POWs in Germany and Japan, and how the definition of American citizenship changed under the pressure of war.
©2015 Jan Jarboe Russell (P)2015 Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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Learned a lot about internment camps!
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history revealed
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U.S. kidnaps Peruvian Japanese to barter them to Imperial Japan?!
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(Although the reader was clear & unhurried, I would have preferred a reading with more inflection/emotion..)
I didn't know...
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best book I have listened to in years
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A More Comprehensive Record of Internment
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Eye opening
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Very interesting!
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abridge
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Compelling and appalling
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