by Joe Meno
HOOVER
December 13, 1941
From a Department of Justice Press Release:
Attorney General Francis Biddle today announced that, under proclamation issued by the President, the Department of Justice and the War Department have apprehended a total of 2541 Axis nationals in continental United States and Hawaii who were regarded as dangerous to the peace and safety of the nation.
Mr. Biddle said that a report from Director J. Edgar Hoover of the Federal Bureau of Investigation showed that, from December 7 through December 11, FBI agents have taken into custody 1002 German aliens, 169 Italian aliens, 1370 Japanese aliens…
In addition to the enemy aliens, Director Hoover reported that FBI agents in Hawaii…have taken into custody 19 American citizens of German extraction, 2 American citizens of Italian descent, and 22 American citizens, most of whom are of Japanese extraction…
December 15, 1941
MEMORANDUM FOR THE FILE
Yesterday Dr. Prendergast furnished the undersigned the following data of the number of alien enemies for whom warrants of arrest had been issued in the United States, the number of warrants executed by the FBI, and the number of aliens arrested without warrant by the FBI:
GERMANS:
Warrants Issued
1757
Warrants Executed
374
Arrested Without Warrant
500
ITALIANS:
Warrants Issued
223
Warrants Executed
41
Arrested Without Warrant
85
JAPANESE:
Warrants Issued
700
Warrants Executed
437
Arrested Without Warrant
628
W. F. Kelly, Chief Supervisor of Border Patrol
HENRY’S FATHER and uncle were now both gone, his mother almost a phantom. Henry would stand beside her bedroom door and listen to her strange, brutal prayers. Closing his eyes, he would do his best to mutter along. Henry’s little brother, Timothy, was as small and as frightened as ever. He refused to leave their apartment to go to school, preferring to stay at home with their mother. Henry, thirteen years old, continued to hope that his father would be released soon. Without Len and the little tailor shop, the family had no income, no way to buy food, clothes, to pay the rent for the residence where they all sat huddled in disbelief.
By the spring of 1942, with the United States now at war, Henry did odd jobs in the little shops around the tiny German neighborhood—sweeping up at the porcelain shop, repainting the viewing rooms at Mr. Kratz’s funeral home, restocking the shelves at the small grocery store where his older brother Harold—now in the United States infantry—had worked. But a cloud of suspicion hung above the young boy, and many sympathetic store owners, fond of Henry but fearing for their livelihoods, felt they had no choice but to refuse his services. When he could not find work, Henry would crouch in the back row of St. Benedict’s Church on Irving Park Road, staring up at the broken body of his mother’s Lord and Savior, muttering his prayers in English, asking for help and guidance. More often than not, he spent the evening watching the flickering candles near the altar, imagining that their movements held a secret message. Outside, walking home, in the rain or snow, each raindrop became a note, each snowflake a code, a missive telling him not to be afraid. Be brave, the snowflakes would read: Be brave.
BY THE WINTER of 1942, after a year, with no news of his father’s case, the family was living on credit and the rent hadn’t been paid for many months. One night, Henry’s mother finally crept from her room and, having brushed her hair and dressed in her best gown, crossed the hall to ask their neighbor Mr. Holz for help. On behalf of the family, Mr. Holz—the only one in the tenement building who owned a typewriter—wrote to the FBI, demanding to know the status of Len Casper’s imprisonment.
After another two months without a response, Henry’s mother once again crossed the hall to Mr. Holz’s, then again, then once more, petitioning the FBI to please reunite the family. Finally, one night late in February 1943, as Henry climbed the front stairs of the tenement, the odd odors of embalming fluid and Mr. Kratz’s cigarettes rising from his dirty clothes, he could hear loud voices coming from the apartment. Henry bounded up the stairs on frightened legs, and found two men in black suits and gray felt hats. They were FBI agents. As soon as Henry entered the parlor, they turned to him with serious frowns and Henry’s hands began to shake with panic.
“Who are you? What’s going on here?” Henry asked, glancing at his mother, who was sobbing on the worn-looking sofa, looking stricken. Timothy, in his blue pajamas, was beside her, looking back at him, terrified and wondering.
“They said we’re leaving tonight,” Timothy, whispered.
“Who’s leaving?” Henry asked, staring at the blank-faced men.
“Your father’s been interned. You’ve got ten minutes to pack what you need,” one of the agents announced grimly.
“Where are we going?”
“We’re going to send you to be with your father, kid. Now grab your things and hurry.”
Henry, helping his mother to her feet, turned and ran into the tiny room he shared with his brother. Finding the large yellow suitcase beneath his bed, he began piling all the clothes he could fit, lifting armfuls from his and Timothy’s dresser drawers, as his mother, still standing confused in the parlor, kept on sobbing.
“Mother,” he said, holding her hand. “Go get your things. We’re going to see Father.”
His mother’s face did not brighten. She only shook her head and asked:
“What did he do? What did he do to us?”
Henry left her standing there and ran to her room, finding as large a traveling bag as he could and taking whatever looked necessary—shoes, dresses, a coat, underwear, he packed them up, hurrying to place the brown bag by the front door.
“Where are we going?” Timothy asked, sitting on the sofa, afraid to look the strange men in the eyes.
“You’re going somewhere safe. It’ll be okay,” one of the agents said. “Now go help your brother out.”
Timothy nodded, helping Henry close the enormous yellow suitcase, which they dragged to the front door together. Henry looked around the dreary apartment in a panic, searching for anything else his family might need, but the taller of the agents, glancing down at his watch, said:
“Okay, it’s time. You got a train to catch.” He reached down and grabbed both suitcases, the tiny family following, marching out into the quiet, unfamiliar whispers of the city street.
MORE THAN THREE DAYS later, Henry climbed out the wide door of a troop transport train and stepped into the dry heat of a nearly empty Texas town. Holding hands, the two boys shuffled quietly behind their father, whose wide, strong arm braced their mother as they marched slowly along, following the line of internees before them. It had turned out that their father and uncle had been held in Chicago all that time, in a converted warehouse with other German-and Italian-born suspects. Henry’s uncle Felix was a bachelor, and because of this he was sent to another internment facility somewhere within the snowy borders of Wisconsin. Henry, still deeply shamed by his father’s cowardly betrayal, refused to look him in the eye, and so he stared outward at the blank plains of silent brown earth, the horizon a single line bisecting the blue sky.
“Where are we?” Timothy asked.
“Somewhere in Texas,” Henry whispered.
“Why did they bring us here?”
“Because we’re German.”
Henry glanced around and saw family after family, all disheveled and heartbroken, their small bundles and suitcases packed tightly with their possessions, some wearing the only set of clothes they owned, climbing out the open door of the train, blinking at the wide blue sky. Their faces were all the same as his father’s and mother’s, long and gray, their eyes sadly sunken into the flesh. Their lives had been torn from them, like a beat
ing organ, and they did not know how to carry on, other than to be silent and to obey the orders shouted at them.
A guard with a rifle directed the families onto several transport trucks. Henry sat beside his brother in the truck bed, turning to watch his father as the vehicle slowly pulled away.
“How long will we be here, Dad?” Timothy asked in a whisper.
“I don’t know. They can do what they like to us.”
Henry turned and saw his mother was crying once again.
“Will we be put in jail?” Timothy asked.
“I don’t know,” their father said. “We can only wait and hope they treat us better than they have.”
Henry turned away from his father and looked at the other families, who, like his, sat huddled together and whispering. Perhaps a half hour later, maybe more, maybe less, the truck began to slow, and the flat, nearly invisible horizon of gray earth began to brighten, turning green. Henry stared from the back of the truck at the fields of verdant leaves, unsure what he was seeing, until a young girl across from him shouted it out: spinach. There were irrigation ditches cut back and forth and troughs of fresh water and workers walking along the wide fields and then the farms were gone and the earth became gray again. Finally, after almost an hour, the truck slowed to a halt. Henry turned in his seat and saw the shadow of an enormous fence, guarded by dozens of soldiers. The transport trucks slowly drew past the gate, stopping a few moments later, one beside the other, nearly five trucks full of interned families. The families stepped from the trucks no longer tethered to the world around them. What would happen to them? What sort of life would they be allowed to lead? And everywhere, only silence, and the shadows of young men in uniforms, wielding guns.
Henry could see there were houses, gloomy, rectangular-framed wooden bungalows, much like the shape of the homes back in Chicago. He smiled when he saw them, then stopped because he saw there were no trees. There were no trees anywhere and no birds either and the sun had become very hot suddenly. He noticed he had sweated through his one clean shirt. A man in a military uniform climbed down from one of the transport trucks, lifted his helmet off, wiped at his sweaty forehead with a white linen handkerchief, and then donned his helmet again. He looked around at the sad faces and said to the dirt:
“Welcome to Crystal City, Texas. This is a detainment facility for interned families of foreign nationals. You will be staying here for some time but please remember, this is not your home. This will never be your home.”
HENRY, NOW FOURTEEN, terrified by his unfamiliar surroundings, had stopped talking. Crystal City was divided into two large sections, one set of facilities for Germans, one for the Japanese, with both groups of detainees under heavy guard at all times. The young man did not like the feeling of being constantly watched, the long shadows of the soldiers crossing and recrossing the narrow streets. In Crystal City, there was no place to be alone, no place to hide. The sun hung close to the earth, its terrible heat piercing everything. It left no secrets untouched, no quiet places to sit and stare and dream. Though the German children had their own elementary school and high school, with its very own school newspaper, marching band, and sports facilities, Henry found no books to his liking in the school’s library, no drugstore where he could go buy the latest issue of Justice Society of America or The Airship Brigade, no empty alleys to pretend he was somewhere else. In the stark landscape of the internment camp, everything was plain and lifeless. There was nothing to be excited about, no adventures to be had, no reason to talk. And if it was his father who had cost them their home, whose easy laughter and convincing lies had forced them to be sent to this awful place, then Henry would prefer not to speak at all. Having decided his father really was a coward, a crook, a spy, he gave up saying anything to anybody.
AND SOON HE found he could no longer daydream. The world of Crystal City was all flatness, as if the real world, the world of the little tailor shop and his delivery job, were only memories now. The family’s “home” was very nice, a small, square-shaped bungalow with a small kitchen and a room for his parents and another for him and Timothy to share. But there were no skyscrapers on the horizon. The spectacular clouds had vanished from the reaches of the sky. All was dull and sun-bright now, an empty world without shadow or fog or dimension. There were no gray moments of twilight, no dark gangways, no snow-filled alleys to explore, nothing silver or striking or imposing along the skyline to help the boy imagine what might be possible instead. Each night, as Henry lay in his cot, the soldiers marched back and forth along the perimeter of the fence, their footsteps echoing colorlessly. The footsteps of the soldiers then became the footsteps of the G-men in Mr. Miner’s stairwell, then the sound of his friend Mr. Miner, leaping from the open window. Henry, terrified in bed, found he could not sleep. He could not fly up and over the wire fence using make-believe; he could not dream an escape for himself because he could not dream.
ONE DAY, stalking along the outside circumference of the camp, counting his footsteps as he went, Henry looked up and watched three transport trucks pull into the administration area. He saw several Japanese families being escorted from the trucks, their bags set down in the gray dirt as they took in the hopeless angles of Crystal City. As he stared, he caught sight of two tiny girls, twins, their dark eyes and dark hair luminous in the Texas sunlight, each holding one of their mother’s hands. One of the girls was in a blue dress, the other’s was purple, and as they looked around at the plain rectangular buildings, the tall wire fence, the young men in uniforms hustling back and forth with their rifles, they did not cry or flatten or sink with dismay. The two twin girls, together, leaning over in the dirt, began to write something, using the tips of their fingers, drawing a picture, scribbling something before their mother tugged gently at them and they followed the rest of their family toward the Japanese section of camp. As soon as the families cleared out, Henry, still counting his steps, searched among the footprints and marks made by the heavy suitcases, until he found what the two twin girls had drawn in the dirt.
It was a picture of two birds, their pointed beaks touching, as if to kiss. Inside of each bird was a single Japanese word, a letter perhaps. Henry stared down at the strange little drawing in the dust and wondered if maybe it was a secret message left for someone to decipher. He soon decided it was the two girls’ names, written in the dust to mark their new home. He looked down at the two tiny birds until he had memorized their shape, then continued on, counting his steps until a guard near the gate told him to move out of the way.
LATER THAT WEEK, Henry quietly sought a place to be alone, in hopes that by being alone—out from under the watchful eyes of the bored soldiers and the difficult glare of the midday sun—he might once again be able to daydream. The young man searched the dusty circumference of the camp, until he finally discovered a small, unlocked utility shed—twenty or so yards behind the administration building—which was filled with tools, shovels, brooms, and gardening equipment. It wasn’t very dark but it was incredibly hot. Climbing over a pair of sawhorses, Henry could feel his entire body shivering with sweat. Slowly, he closed the door and sat in the corner, the shed lit by the bright sun streaming through the gaps between the metal sheets overhead. Henry closed his eyes and immediately he was in a submarine, moving undetected, several leagues beneath the surface of the murky ocean. Just outside the submarine’s hull was a squid, perhaps, or a school of vibrant, translucent fish, their strange skeletons visible through their shimmering skin. Perhaps he was all alone, searching out the lost city of Atlantis, or transporting secret weapon plans to the British, while in the clouded waters above, a Nazi gunship searched for him, depth charges at the ready: “All engines stop. We are surrounded by a Wolf pack but fear not.” Or better still, he was miles and miles above the surface of the earth, in the airship X-1, speeding off toward several thousand uncharted galaxies: “Prepare yourself, Airship Brigade, for intergalactic flight! Five-four-three-two-one! All systems go!”
Henry hardly r
ealized he was speaking aloud to himself, his voice high and unsure and scratchy. Just as he imagined a breech unexpectedly erupting in the airship’s hull, poisonous space vapor leaking into his lungs, the storage shed exploded with light, and Henry, startled from his daydream, let out a high, strange-sounding cry.
“Who’s in here?” a low voice mumbled. “Hinkley? Is that you? I can hear you whispering, you wing nut. It’s me, Doug.”
Henry, hiding behind the rack of shovels, could see a young man in uniform, his handsome, broad face broken in a smile.
“Hinkley? You better hop to. The lieutenant is looking for you. We got a truckload of rations to unload.”
Henry held in his breath, closing his eyes, his heart beating hard in his chest.
“Hinkley?”
The young soldier stepped into the shadows, reaching out a hand. When the soldier saw Henry huddled there—a pale young man with a narrow face, mouth mumbling in frightened whispers—he went for his rifle, dropping the gun awkwardly at his feet. Henry saw the gun fall and cried out as the rifle discharged, the round ricocheting inside the empty shed, the sound muffled by the noise of transport trucks passing by. The soldier, just as frightened, grabbed the gun, and stared down at it with surprise, seeing his mistake.
