This story is part of a year-long exhibit on German American internment at the Texas State History Museum, in partnership with St. Mary's University. 

Jo Anna Wartemann was born unfree in America. These tickets took her to freedom—in a war zone. When Jo Anna was born, her mother was being held as a “dangerous enemy alien” in a former prison in Seagoville, Texas, near Dallas. The U.S. was relocating, interning and expatriating legal residents and citizens it deemed potentially dangerous to America during WWII. This most famously included Japanese-Americans, but less famously, many German Americans who suffered the same injustices during this time. This included newborn Jo Anna and her four older siblings who were being held in an orphanage. Finally, in October 1943, when Jo Anna was 9 months old, the Wartemann family was reunited. But they were still held captive behind barbed wire in the Crystal City Internment Camp in South Texas. After her first birthday, baby Jo Anna and her parents were free! They had chosen to be sent to Germany rather than remain condemned and captive in the US. They boarded the M.S. Gripsholm in the midst of the war and ended up in Bremen where they suffered bombardment. These are the tickets. They bear silent witness to a history few people know. 

– Oscar Ortega

Relationship:  Im/migrant who arrived as a child Im/migrant who arrived as a child