Most of us are aware of the internment of Japanese-Americans after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1940. We don’t talk about it much because we largely would like to forget about this blight on the human rights record of the Roosevelt administration in particular and the United States in general.  But as Jan Jarboe Russell makes clear in The Train to Crystal City, Executive Order 9066, which paved the way for internment of Japanese Americans, was just one of the questionable human rights decisions the wartime administration made.  According to this account, which is made more personal by Russell’s’s focusing on two of the children interned, a camp in Crystal City, Texas housed American-born children of German and Italian descent as well as Japanese, and many of those children were traded for “more ostensibly important Americans—diplomates, businessmen, soldiers, and missionaries” who were stuck behind enemy lines. The program was dubbed “the quiet passage.”

How did such a thing happen? To find out, Russell looked into government files and interviewed now-adult survivors who had been in the camp as children, most notably a Japanese-American girl named Sumi and a German-American one named Ingrid. Though the two never met, their stories, taken together, celebrate the pluck and resilience on the part of many survivors. They also paint a vivivd picture, all too applicable today, of a country beset by wartime fear, bigotry and governmental misguidance.

Jane (our discussion leader) asked that these videos be made available for us to look at before the discussion.  The first one is located at the Jan Jarbo Russell website. The second is at the Simon and Schuster website.