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clairealex 's review for:
This book narrates governmental actions that should never have happened. While there are some who opposed, people higher than them pursued. While there was an attempt to treat prisoners humanely, prison is still prison. Arresting on the basis of nationality alone was indefensible, not to mention the arrest of US citizens. I had been familiar with Japanese internment camps, but that Germans and Italians were also imprisoned, though in smaller numbers, was new. And that Japanese from Latin America were brought to the US to be imprisoned was also new and devastating information.
The history of Crystal City Internment is told through the experiences of the imprisoned. There is an extensive narration of Ingrid Eiserloh's family's experience and shorter interspersed vignettes of that of others. The events of World War II are background and referenced briefly where relevant, but the focus is on the people imprisoned. And deported.
It started with an overzealous FBI surveillance such that when the war began, people could be found and arrested and imprisoned without trial. At first it was just the men arrested; then wives and children could be reunited if the father agreed to be repatriated to their country of origin, reunited as a family at Crystal City, then "repatriated" together. (How does one repatriate children who never lived in the target country?)
The trauma of entry into Germany and Japan and the impact of encountering devastation unimaginable to those living in a country not directly attacked is devastating. Though the detail is hard to read, the style and organization makes for easy following of detail. There is one contrasting experience, that of Irene, a German Jew who was one of the reverse enchangees. She was Ingrid's counterpart on the exchange lists, traveling from a German concentration camp to the US (with some bureaucratic detours).
Reading this book is important memory activism
The history of Crystal City Internment is told through the experiences of the imprisoned. There is an extensive narration of Ingrid Eiserloh's family's experience and shorter interspersed vignettes of that of others. The events of World War II are background and referenced briefly where relevant, but the focus is on the people imprisoned. And deported.
It started with an overzealous FBI surveillance such that when the war began, people could be found and arrested and imprisoned without trial. At first it was just the men arrested; then wives and children could be reunited if the father agreed to be repatriated to their country of origin, reunited as a family at Crystal City, then "repatriated" together. (How does one repatriate children who never lived in the target country?)
The trauma of entry into Germany and Japan and the impact of encountering devastation unimaginable to those living in a country not directly attacked is devastating. Though the detail is hard to read, the style and organization makes for easy following of detail. There is one contrasting experience, that of Irene, a German Jew who was one of the reverse enchangees. She was Ingrid's counterpart on the exchange lists, traveling from a German concentration camp to the US (with some bureaucratic detours).
Reading this book is important memory activism