PROLOGUE
I was seven years old when the Imperial Japanese Army captured me, my parents, and almost 4000 other enemy aliens, and imprisoned us behind the walls of Santo Tomas University in Central Manila. It was Saturday, February 3, 1945, the 1126th day of my captivity.
Prisoner morale was at it’s lowest ebb in three years. Despite the strict Japanese ban on all news, everyone, even us children, knew that MacArthur had landed at Lingayen Gulf on January 9. The clandestine radio, for which the Japanese had spent the past three years searching, had confirmed it, and we had pinned our hopes on MacArthur’s capturing Manila as a birthday present for Franklin Delano Roosevelt on January 30. But January 30 came and went with no MacArthur. Morale plummeted. Grown-ups began to discuss their greatest fear–being caught between Japanese and American lines in the fight for Manila.
There were other fears–starvation chief among them. Food, which had been trickling into camp in ever lessening quality, was now unobtainable. The executive Committee, whose job it was to procure food for all the internees, had exhausted the emergency supplies painstakingly built up by Earl Carroll, chief of Finance and Supplies, who for three years had fought with the Japanese authorities to get food brought into camp and had risked smuggling to get more. Now the daily ration of 700 calories per prisoner would depend entirely on whatever supplies the Japanese chose to provide. Every day several prisoners died of starvation.
The Japanese commadant, Colonel Hayashi, had jailed Dr. Stevenson, one of the internee doctors, in the camp jail for refusing to change “starvation” as the cause of death on several death cerificates. He languished in the camp jail while the camp leaders struggled to fill the void left when Carroll Grinnell, Prisoner/Chairman of Santo Tomas, and he three aides were arrested and taken out of camp by the ruthless military police. All efforts to extract news of them from Hayashi had ben rebuffed.
Earl Carroll, Grinnell’s chief rival now acting Chairman, was doing his best for his fellow prisoners. He cut all but essential labor. Those assigned heavy work were given double rations, but even that was proving insufficient. Japanese tempers, particularly that of Lieutenant Abiko, the camp enforcer, were rising over the lack of laborers turning out for work details in the camp truck gardens, and the Lieutenant was threatening to cut off all food unless the prisoners worked. With the Japanese helping themselves to whatever they wanted from these gardens, Carroll was hard pressed to convince the garden crew that their labor was helping the camp.
School was closed for the children as we hadn’t the energy to learn, nor the teachers to teach. Lacking the strength to lose ourselves in games, as we had done in other years, we haunted the Japanese barracks kitchen, were the Japanese cooks were roasting the carabaos and pigs being slaughtered en masse, preparatory to the troops’ withdrawing. The cooks gave us nothing and complained when we raided the garbage cans. Soon children were officially banned from the kitchen area. Only Ernest Stanley, our hated interpreter, shared the Japanese food, as he had been doing for three years.
February 3 began early for the 3768 prisoners in Santo Tomas. At 4 a.m. we were jolted awake by a shattering explosion. Daddy said it must have been an ammunition dump to make such a noise. We never knew. In any case, there was nothing we could do, so we crawled back under our mosquito nets and sought to drown the pangs of hunger in sleep.
At 7 a.m., our musical reveille rasped over the loud speaker. As we dragged ourselves to roll call, few people showed any interest in discussing the early morning blast. Even the dawn sighting of two U.S. reconnaissance planes over the northern suburbs roused no speculation, as we stood at stiff attention and bowed from the waist to our captors, who had brought us to the brink of starvation.
Internee opinion was divided as to our fate–a shrinking number of optimists argued that the Japanese would evacuate Manila after demolishing their military stores. The pessimists held that abandoning Manilla would be too great a loss of face, and that the Japanese would contest the city. The STIC people, predicted the pessimists, would die in the crossfire, if the didn’t starve to death first.
On this morning, pessimism infected everyone in the roll call lines, and I decided to cheer everyone up.
After a breakfast of one ladle of watery mush and a cup of hot water, I headed for the barbed wire fence which enclosed the Fathers’ garden, where the Dominicans, who owned Santo Tomas University, still maintained their hibiscus hedge. I reached between the strands of barbed wire, picked the reddest flower I could find, and pinched out its yellow stamen so that it would be all red. Then I searched the ground until I found some sailors hornpipe. Now I had red and blue. White was always a problem, so I went home to our shack at #5 Duck Egg Drive, where we had lived for almost a year to free up space in the university buildings for the ever growing number of prisoners. Once home, I tied my flowers with my frayed white hair ribbon, stuck them in a bottle of water, and set them in the middle of our all-purpose bridge table. Surely today my lucky red-white-and-blue bouquet would insure a morale-boosting air raid.
My girl friend, Jacqueline Honor, and I had devised this method of bringing about air raids four months ago, when American planes first attacked Manila. We had learned that air raids cancelled school and improved adult moods immeasurably. Unfortunately, the raids did not come daily. Prater proved unreliable in producing planes, so we turned to superstition, grasping the only talisman still available–flowers, red, white, and blue ones.
For a while our bouquets seemed to work, but then the raids tapered off again, and Jackie lost interest. This morning I felt impelled to try again.
It worked. At midmorning, the sirens shrieked. They were followed by American planes, which we were forbidden to watch. My parents and I listened to the bombs from the confines of our air raid shelter under our shack.
The raid was disappointingly short, ending soon after noon. Because lunch had been eliminated, siesta was next on the agenda. I lay on my cot, too tired to read, too hungry to sleep. At last 3:00 came, time to get in line for supper–no matter the hour’s wait. I’d find Jackie and tell her about the bouquet.
Jackie was among the hundred or so children already lined up. I persuaded her to come to the end of the line, where we sat in the shade of the kitchen shed, our skinny legs stretched out in front of us.
Jackie was uninterested in my flowers’ success, preferring to launch right into our usual speculations about what we would have for supper: hardtack, coconut milk, or our favorite, peanut loaf, non of which we had been served for months. The adults behind us in line were morosely silent, standing in obvious pain, on legs swollen by beri-beri. When the line began to move, we held out our plates to receive the usual mingy scoop of mongo beans, a local fodder formerly fed to caribao. Jackie carried hers off to her shack. I gobbled mine in the dining shed.
Just as I was finishing, I heard a deafening roar of aircraft engines. The noise receded as suddenly as it had come, and I decided it was safe to head back to my shack for a second supper.
My parents sent me through the regular camp meal line in case there was ever a treat for the children, but they opted to take their own rations raw on a monthly basis. This they cooked over hoarded charcoal, burned in the tiny clay pot which the Filipinos call a stove, adding a bit from hoarded canned goods. Thus I got two small meals each evening, and, although together they were insufficient for a child of ten, I was better fed than most of the other 500 children in camp. My parents were skeletons, but continued to give me a substantial portion of their rations.
On my way back to the shack, a girl friend, Betty Ingram, caught up with me and drew me under a mango tree where the sentry patrolling the path could not hear us.
“Did you see the planes, Isabel?” she whispered excitedly.
“No, but I heard them.” I whispered back.
“Did you hear about the goggles?”
“What goggles?”
“One of the pilots dropped his goggles, and there was a note inside. It said ‘Roll out the barrel, boys, we’ll be in tomorrow!’”
“Sounds like another crazy rumor to me,” I said. “I got to go home for supper.”
Unimpressed and hungry, I continued down the path to home. Food was more compelling than another wild story about our imminent liberation. I joined my parents in a scant meal of weavilly rice and a slice of spam. When we had finished eating, we sat outside our shack for a while, getting up the energy to do the dishes.
Mr. Percival, an Australian journalist, dropped by, as he did most evenings, to tell Daddy what the secret radio, to which he was privy, had to say.
“The Yanks are still seventy miles off,” Percival reported, “near Cabanatuan, to be exact. They just liberated the military camp there–only 500 of the 10,000 military prisoners were left. So it’s going to be a while before they get here.”
“Well, they’d better hurry or they’ll find us reduced to 500–or less if the Japs decide to shoot us all.”
“Do you really think they’d do that?” inquired Percival.
“Why do you think I’ve been avoiding all large meetings for the past year? Sure, they’d shoot us to deprive MacArthur of the pleasure of rescuing us.”
“‘I shall return’” mused Percival. “They could certainly make his trip useless as far as we’re concerned.”
“Yes,” replied my father. “Let’s hope they don’t think of it.”
Percival left and we set about the evening chores. Mother tended the fire. I gathered the plates. Daddy went off for a bucket of water at the public tap. The familiar rumbling of tanks approached the camp wall along Calle Dapita. I glanced up. Five tank turrets were visible, the lead one sporting a small American flag
Then the shooting started.
No comments:
Post a Comment