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The Train to Crystal City
- FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America's Only Family Internment Camp During World War II
- Narrated by: Andrea Gallo
- Length: 14 hrs and 38 mins
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Publisher's summary
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.
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Edda Mussolini was the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s oldest and favorite child. At 19, she was married to Count Galleazzo Ciano, Il Duce’s Minister for Foreign Affairs during the 1930s, the most turbulent decade in Italy’s fascist history. In the years preceding World War II, Edda ruled over Italy’s aristocratic families and the cultured and middle classes while selling Fascism on the international stage. How a young woman wielded such control is the heart of Moorehead’s fascinating history.
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Mind Blowing
- By Greg on 01-27-23
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Forty Autumns
- A Family's Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall
- By: Nina Willner
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In this illuminating and deeply moving memoir, a former American military intelligence officer goes beyond traditional Cold War espionage tales to tell the true story of her family - of five women separated by the Iron Curtain for more than 40 years and their miraculous reunion after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A personal look at a tenuous era that divided a city and a nation and continues to haunt us, Forty Autumns is an intimate and beautifully written story of courage, resilience, and love.
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Excellent look into the divided Germanys
- By Mary Aalgaard on 01-18-18
By: Nina Willner
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The Lemon Tree
- By: Sandy Tolan
- Narrated by: Sandy Tolan
- Length: 11 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1967, not long after the Six-Day War, three young Arab men ventured into the town of Ramle, in what is now Jewish Israel. They were cousins, on a pilgrimage to see their childhood homes; their families had been driven out of Palestine nearly 20 years earlier. One cousin had a door slammed in his face, and another found his old house had been converted into a school. But the third, Bashir Al-Khairi, was met at the door by a young woman called Dalia, who invited them in.
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Steeping The Lemon Tree
- By Faithfull Fan on 04-11-18
By: Sandy Tolan
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50 Children
- One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany
- By: Steven Pressman
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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In early 1939, few Americans were thinking about the darkening storm clouds over Europe. Nor did they have much sympathy for the growing number of Jewish families that were increasingly threatened and brutalized by Adolf Hitler's policies in Germany and Austria. But one ordinary American couple decided that something had to be done. Despite overwhelming obstacles - both in Europe and in the United States - Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus made a bold and unprecedented decision to travel into Nazi Germany in an effort to save a group of Jewish children.
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I didn't want it to end
- By David Shear on 05-07-14
By: Steven Pressman
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A Lucky Child
- A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy
- By: Thomas Buergenthal
- Narrated by: Thomas Buergenthal, Don Hagen
- Length: 5 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Thomas Buergenthal, now a Judge in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, tells his astonishing experiences as a young boy in his memoir, A Lucky Child. He arrived at Auschwitz at age 10 after surviving two ghettos and a labor camp. Separated first from his mother and then his father, Buergenthal managed by his wits and some remarkable strokes of luck to survive on his own. Almost two years after his liberation, Buergenthal was miraculously reunited with his mother and in 1951 arrived in the U.S. to start a new life.
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Compelling Account
- By Simone on 04-23-15
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Nothing to Envy
- Ordinary Lives in North Korea
- By: Barbara Demick
- Narrated by: Karen White
- Length: 12 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy follows the lives of six North Koreans over fifteen years - a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung and the unchallenged rise to power of his son, Kim Jong-il, and the devastation of a far-ranging famine that killed one-fifth of the population. Taking us into a landscape never before seen, Demick brings to life what it means to be an average Korean citizen, living under the most repressive totalitarian regime today.
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The man who wants to be GOD
- By Gohar on 05-08-10
By: Barbara Demick
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You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
- A Personal History of Our Times
- By: Howard Zinn
- Narrated by: David Strathairn
- Length: 8 hrs
- Unabridged
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Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States, tells his personal stories about more than 30 years of fighting for social change, from teaching at Spelman College to recent protests against war. A former bombardier in World War II, Zinn emerged in the civil rights movement as a powerful voice for justice. Although he's a fierce critic, he gives us reason to hope that by learning from history and engaging politically, we can make a difference in the world.
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mind blowing
- By WILLIAM on 11-27-19
By: Howard Zinn
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Avenue of Spies
- A True Story of Terror, Espionage, and One American Family's Heroic Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Paris
- By: Alex Kershaw
- Narrated by: Mark Deakins
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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The leafy Avenue de Foch, one of the most exclusive residential streets in Nazi-occupied France, was Paris' hotbed of daring spies, murderous secret police, amoral informers, and Vichy collaborators. So when American physician Sumner Jackson, who lived with his wife and young son, Phillip, at Number 11, found himself drawn into the Liberation network of the French resistance, he knew the stakes were impossibly high.
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Gripping, inspirational, and informative!!
- By Constance M. Specht on 09-26-15
By: Alex Kershaw
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Prague Winter
- A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948
- By: Madeleine Albright
- Narrated by: Madeleine Albright
- Length: 15 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Before Madeleine Albright turned twelve, her life was shaken by the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia—the country where she was born—the Battle of Britain, the near total destruction of European Jewry, the Allied victory in World War II, the rise of communism, and the onset of the Cold War. Albright's experiences, and those of her family, provide a lens through which to view the most tumultuous dozen years in modern history.
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History from a Personal Perspective
- By Jeanette Finan on 02-22-13
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A Kim Jong-Il Production
- The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator's Rise to Power
- By: Paul Fischer
- Narrated by: Stephen Park
- Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Before becoming the world's most notorious dictator, Kim Jong-Il ran North Korea's Ministry for Propaganda and its film studios. Conceiving every movie made, he acted as producer and screenwriter. Despite this control, he was underwhelmed by the available talent and took drastic steps, ordering the kidnapping of Choi Eun-Hee (Madam Choi) - South Korea's most famous actress - and her ex-husband Shin Sang-Ok, the country's most famous filmmaker.
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Absolutely terrifying
- By Anonymous on 02-19-15
By: Paul Fischer
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Operation Whisper
- The Capture of Soviet Spies Morris and Lona Cohen
- By: Barnes Carr
- Narrated by: John Pruden
- Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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In Operation Whisper, Barnes Carr tells the true story of the most effective Soviet spy couple in America, a pair who vanished under the FBI's nose only to turn up posing as rare book dealers in London, where they continued their atomic spying. The Cohens were talented, dedicated, worldly spies - an urbane, jet-set couple loyal to their service and their friends. Most people they met seemed to think they represented the best of America. The Soviets certainly thought so.
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Too many facts details
- By Rebecca C. Browne on 10-02-17
By: Barnes Carr
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The Invitation-Only Zone
- The True Story of North Korea's Abduction Project
- By: Robert S. Boynton
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Throughout the late 1970s and early '80s, dozens of Japanese citizens were abducted from coastal Japanese towns by North Korean commandos. In what proved to be part of a global project, North Korea attempted to reeducate the abductees and train them to spy on the state's behalf. When the project faltered, the abductees were hidden in a series of guarded communities known as "Invitation-Only Zones" - the fiction being that these were exclusive enclaves, not prisons.
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Over enthusiastic reader!
- By AJW on 02-14-16
What listeners say about The Train to Crystal City
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Laura Aydelott
- 06-05-21
Learned a lot about internment camps!
I learned a lot about the struggles so many Japanese, German and citizens had during World War Two dealt with!
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- John
- 04-25-18
history revealed
The narrator was merely adequate. The story compelling. It was a worthy of your time read.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Louise de Marillac
- 04-12-17
A More Comprehensive Record of Internment
This is a very rich treatment of the internment of Japanese-Americans and German-Americans as well as Japanese and German expatriates living in the U.S. during WWII. While the U.S. was fighting for "freedom" in Europe and the Pacific, the government was subjecting its own population to the same kind of racism, bigotry, and injustice that the Germans and the Japanese subjected their own people to. And in the same way that the German and Japanese populations, for the most part, blindly followed the racist impulses of their own leaders, so did American society as a whole. The historical record of internment, so far, shows that there were no Schindlers in America hiding and protecting the persecuted population. This is must-read in the age of Trump and Republican dominance over American politics. We would be sorely mistaken to think that such violations to human rights couldn't happen in America again.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Graham Emslie
- 02-27-17
I didn't know...
To say this recounting was Informative is a huge understatement! I've lived in Dallas, Texas for the past 35 years, raised my family here... my 2 daughters have lived in San Antonio, my 2 sons went to U of TX in Austin. None of us ever heard of Crystal City or its history. I do think this story should be put into the history curriculum of not only all schools in Texas, but indeed the whole country. The fact that it happened is bad enough.. To Not Know is a travesty. Thank you, Ms. Russell for researching this piece of American history so well and putting it down on paper. Now, I know.
(Although the reader was clear & unhurried, I would have preferred a reading with more inflection/emotion..)
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3 people found this helpful
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- Constance
- 08-19-19
best book I have listened to in years
Untold story of German Americans, Japanese Americans and other internees in Crystal City Texas prison camp during WWII. Well researched and comprehensive. A powerful and moving account.
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2 people found this helpful
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- VDH
- 08-15-18
Very interesting!
I didn't know about the US camps or the way some people were treated. I'm not surprised but it is heart breaking and difficult to understand. Whether all the information is completely true or not it has historical significance. I'm glad I read it.
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1 person found this helpful
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- James
- 06-24-18
abridge
interesting story that should have been abridged.To much of the story had nothing to do with the stated subject of the book.
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- John 'n Austin
- 07-11-20
Compelling and appalling
This was an exceptionally well researched, constructed, and written account of one of the many episodes of truly appalling behavior by the U.S. government and many of its white residents. The author did a beautiful job of marshaling her facts, constructing the tale, and demonstrating its tragedy primarily through the eyes of several of the affecting individuals and their families. The bright spots were found only in the triumph of a few of the wrongly imprisoned Americans with Japanese or German ancestry. Many of these poor people were indeed American citizens, many of them American-born children of parents who were first- or second-generation immigrants. The book should be required reading for everyone.
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- NeoAtreides
- 02-24-17
Neither scholarly or narrative
I couldn't finish this one. The reader has an irritating voice tone and constantly pauses before reading Japanese names and words, and still botches the pronunciation. The work is poorly structured. It has a roughly chronological construction, but jumps between multiple perspectives and retreads time periods over and over, often repeating the same information when it applies to multiple cases. Despite all of this filler, the book fails to adequately explain cultural differences and the resulting effects, which would be a bare minimum for a work of this type. There is little analysis here, but rather a heavy bias based on simplistic ideas. Eleanor Roosevelt was good, and her husband was bad is the theme of the first third of the book, Issei don't understand their Nissei children is the theme of the middle third of the book, a representation so simplistic as to completely misrepresent the philosophical and cultural conflicts faced by internees The last third of the book degenerates into recalling fragments from primary and secondary sources, without any real analysis.
The final straw is in the final 5 hours, when the author goes off on a wild tangent discussing the conditions in concentration camps in Germany near the close of the war. The author is apparently trying to show balance by telling the stories of two prisoners on opposite sides of a prisoner exchange (and internee family and concentration camp survivor), but the diversion is so off topic and so long that I just decided to stop and return this awful book.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Michael
- 01-01-16
Interesting subject, superficial treatment
Any additional comments?
I didn't know much about this before I listened to the book, and I did learn a bit, but overall I found it to be a glossed-over, cliche-laden, ``morning television`` presentation of a significant topic, read in the style of a children`s storyteller, and I was glad to reach the end.
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2 people found this helpful