Author: Jan Jarboe Russell

Jan Jarboe Russell worked as a journalist and nonfiction author who examined political power through the lives of people affected by public policy. The Train to Crystal City reconstructs the wartime family internment camp at Crystal City, Texas, and the federal prisoner-exchange program connected to it. The 2015 Scribner edition carries a fuller subtitle naming Franklin D. Roosevelt, the exchange system, and America's only family internment camp during World War II. Russell follows Japanese, German, and Italian families, showing how citizenship, ancestry, and government decisions shaped confinement and possible repatriation. Her narrative draws institutional history together with individual accounts, allowing children and parents to remain visible within a complicated national program. The book also traces what happened after the camp, when release did not erase displacement or divided loyalties. Andrea Gallo reads the audiobook. The Train to Crystal City thus belongs to narrative history and investigative journalism, using a specific Texas site to illuminate a wider, less familiar part of American wartime incarceration.