Feeling stronger than she had a moment earlier, Dorothy straightened her shoulders and arranged her face in the cheerful countenance she required herself to present to her children, and stepped into the room.
She walked quietly to the corner she shared with her two children and then stopped, a small gasp escaping her lips. She reached one hand to the wall to steady herself, and the other flew to her mouth of its own accord.
Carol was sitting up on the bed, licking her fingers and smiling more broadly than Dorothy had seen in weeks. Bobby sat beside her bed on his little stool, a bit of cloth in his hands that he now raised for Carol to make another selection.
Dear God in heaven.
Bobby had found food.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
DEANNA DURBIN IS DEAD
Dearest Mother,
They told us today that Deanna Durbin is dead.
Dorothy lay under the bed with the children, listening to the bombs that sounded so much closer than before. Both children were asleep, unfazed by the noise.
In the first weeks of bombing, the explosions had been so far away that one barely registered what they were. Then, over time, they’d come further into the city and now there was no mistaking the hell they were unleashing.
Manila was sustaining horrible damage as the Japanese sought to maintain their hold against the U.S. forces. Anti-aircraft guns could be heard every day now as planes dropped bombs on the harbor, seeking to decimate the Imperial Army of Japan.
Bobby had become an avid shrapnel collector. Dorothy had warned him over and over about waiting an hour so the metal would cool enough not to burn his fingers. But it seemed there was no way he could leave a fascinating piece of steaming shrapnel to someone else, and she was constantly medicating his sore fingers. The very idea of shrapnel was fascinating to him, and he would talk to any who would listen about how the Japanese anti-aircraft guns shot little bomb babies up into the air that would explode near the American planes, hoping to damage them enough that they couldn’t drop their big mama bombs. Where he’d heard that was anyone’s guess.
The Japanese shouldn’t waste so much time trying to damage American morale, Dorothy thought. Each bit of shrapnel that plummeted through a roof and set a shanty on fire did a very nice hatchet job all by itself.
She pictured Fred in his air raid shelter on the first floor of the gym, a book in his hand or the cold pipe in his mouth. He hadn’t had pipe tobacco in two years, but puffing on it was not only a comfort to him, but to her as well.
He was never without that pipe. It was something normal. Something from before.
Like Deanna Durbin.
They’d only seen a few of her movies while on furlough from India before the war, but the pretty brunette with the silver voice was everybody’s icon, the girl next door. When conversation turned to movies, Deanna Durbin was the name that brought unanimous smiles. She was loved by all.
And she was dead?
Dorothy refused to mourn. Not yet. After all, the news had come from the Japanese radio broadcast. They got names mixed up all the time. Or worse, they distributed news that was patently not true.
It was no stretch at all to imagine that they chose a name all the American troops would recognize, a name that often came to a GI’s lips in conversation. It was just like them to choose a name that was part of the hopes of the enemy, something they longed to return to, a symbol of the life they’d left behind. Every soldier pined for the day he would get back to the people he treasured, to the voices of home, to the movies he loved.
Deanna Durbin was part of that. Part of what was normal. Part of what was home.
So they just want us to think she’s dead.
Dorothy had said as much, night before last, as her whole table had sat in stunned silence when the announcement came from the loudspeaker. But nobody nodded. As one they seemed to take the news to heart, crestfallen, dazed. A piece of what they longed to go back to was no longer there.
If it was indeed a Japanese trick, it had worked. Morale in camp had never been lower.
Dorothy had sat down beside Fred for the evening meal, weary from an especially troublesome case she’d been monitoring day and night in the children’s clinic.
He looked tired, she thought. Maybe it was just the wrinkled clothing. It was his nature to be a fastidious dresser, so even after all this time, wrinkles still looked completely foreign on Fred.
There had been no water for laundry since the Japanese had bombed the nearby reservoir. If it had not been for the rainy season, Santo Tomás would have been in dire trouble.
As it was, they had to forego doing laundry. But a week didn’t go by that you couldn’t at least rinse things out, even if just by standing out in the rain and letting your clothes get good and soaked.
Besides, there was no longer any soap in camp, and the native bark that had been a good substitute had by now been depleted as well.
Dorothy no longer cared about the rumpled look of her clothing. As long as things managed to dry out before she needed to wear them, she was satisfied.
“I had to move,” Fred said with a heavy sigh.
“What? Again?” Dorothy wondered if she’d blanked out for part of the conversation. A few weeks earlier Fred had been told to move his bed to the gym floor. The balcony was being taken over as a sort of isolation ward. Was he moving again?
“My office, I mean.”
His office that had been merely one desk was now a simple circle of stones, ever since his desk had been confiscated by the kitchen for firewood. Just a simple circle now. But it was his.
Fred reached over to rub her shoulder. It hurt, his bones against her bones, but she’d never let on.
“The new commandant took over the whole first floor of the Ed Building,” he said, and Dorothy’s eyes flew wide.
“Why!”
“Does he need a reason?” Fred asked.
Nobody spoke. In the silence, Dorothy’s mind raced to find a reason for this turn of events, and didn’t at all like the conclusion to which she easily leapt. Of course they were moving into the Ed Building. The internees who lived on the upper floors would be their shield now.
She swallowed the words, refusing to give voice to her fears that those men were now in some sense hostages. But truth be told, weren’t they all?
“Do your students know?” she asked, and he nodded.
“Did you find another place?”
He shrugged, then shook his head.
It was too much. Fred was a teacher, an administrator. An office was not just a place to work, it also had its own innate power. Young people came there seeking his counseling, usually of the academic variety, and sitting there in the circle with Fred puffing away on a cold pipe gave them all a sense of normalcy.
A few still came daily, even though classes had been suspended when the students became so nutritionally deprived that classes could no longer be held. And teachers no longer had the energy to prepare and present a lesson.
Every bit of energy was now focused on survival.
But a few were like Fred. If they could not find an outlet for their inquisitive, contemplative minds, they would go stark raving mad. So they would gather around Fred’s circle and debate. It didn’t matter what the issue was, they’d each fall onto one side or the other and discuss the issue of the day. It was not at all uncommon for several to switch sides midstream and begin debating the opposite view.
So it seemed practically criminal that his office, their gathering place, had been confiscated. The one small thing that represented some stability in their young lives was the fact that they could still meet around that circle. It gave them a place and a purpose that was uniquely theirs.
And it meant even more to Fred than it did to them. For him it was a symbol that he continued to do the work for which God had sent him into the Philippines in the first place. He was still on mission. He was still on task. His office had rooted him in this
place of constant upheaval.
And it had been taken away.
“You’ll find another place.”
He shrugged again. “I know.”
Dorothy touched his face, alarmed at the despondency she saw there. Yes, it was true that he could find another place to meet with his students. But did he have the energy to?
. . . .
“The death toll tripled today.”
If Dorothy had brought him along on her errands, hoping to cheer him up, this first stop was hardly going to do the trick. Fred watched Dorothy as she stood in the hall of the camp’s main hospital staring at the numbers chalked on the wall. It served as the place of record until things could be put down on paper.
After each name, a cause of death was listed. “Old age”, “Heart attack”. And here the word “malnutrition” had been struck through and replaced with “unknown”.
“They finally let him out of jail, you know.”
Fred nodded. Everyone knew that Dr. Stevenson, who served as the camp’s chief medical officer, had spent three days in the camp jail because he’d defied the commandant’s edict to remove malnutrition from every record of the deceased in which in which it had been recorded as the cause of death. He had steadfastly refused to write anything other than the truth.
The commandant insisted that malnutrition could not be the cause of death, since they were treating the internees too well to even think that one could die for lack of food. The other camp doctors had quickly altered the death certificates they’d signed, but Dr. Anderson had dared to defy the commandant by labeling three of his patients as having died of malnutrition. After several days in jail he made the decision to bend his thinking on the matter.
Dorothy lifted a weary arm to write in the latest casualty, the mother of the little girl she had saved in the night. As he watched her shape each letter of the woman’s name, Fred prayed for comfort for the grief-stricken child whose mother Dorothy said had given up.
He watched her start to write, then erase it. She started again, then flung the chalk into the tray.
“What’s the medical equivalent of ‘broken spirit’?” she muttered.
Fred stepped to her side and took her hand. He saw in her eyes that her great fear was that this woman was only the first of those who were giving up.
For three years they’d been sure of rescue. Now every attempt to take back Manila seemed doomed. And the transformation of the camp into a military compound had internees scurrying out of the way of squads of Japanese on the quick march through camp day and night, jeeps, trucks, and crates of ammunition stockpiled and heavily guarded, and anti-aircraft guns practicing sighting in on their targets and letting loose their horrendous volleys.
It was maddening. The Japanese had come to the brilliant conclusion that the Americans weren’t going to bomb their own, that the Americans knew there were U.S. citizens down here in Santo Tomás and they would keep their bombs clear of here.
So every bit of Japanese military equipment they could muster was brought into the camp for safekeeping. Great pyramids of crates now occupied every corner, not close enough to the walls to provide a nice stair step to freedom, but close.
And there were trucks everywhere. Parked in perfect military precision, row upon row, the trucks overtook the only open areas in the camp. It was menacing. It was claustrophobic. It was noisy. And it was a perfect opportunity for mischief.
Fred walked alongside Dorothy, defiantly holding her hand. She needed his touch right now and he could not have separated their hands if the commandant himself stood in front of them with his shiny bayonet.
He steered her toward a lot filled with military vehicles. Jeeps, trucks, tank wagons, all lined up in precise rows waiting to be deployed. He smiled. She had failed to cheer him up, but he could cheer her. This very lot was the perfect place to do that.
Without looking toward the vehicles, Fred whispered to Dorothy to casually glance toward any vehicle and inspect its tires. He knew the moment she spotted the problem.
“Fred, it simply can’t be a coincidence,” Dorothy snorted. “I mean, look at them. Half their tires are flat! Again!”
They stood quietly for a moment, watching the crew of Japanese going from truck to truck with an air bubble. They’d suspected vandalism right away, and railed at the internees. But after closely inspecting a number of tires, they found not a single puncture in tire or valve stem.
“In two hours they’ll be flat again,” Fred whispered.
Dorothy giggled. Nothing had prompted a laugh for weeks, and from the look on her face Fred knew that the laughter bubbling up felt foreign to her.
“Those guards have been here all day, Fred. Our people could not possibly be doing this!”
Fred kept his face sober as he glanced sideways at her, beneath lowered conspiratorial lids. “So, you’re suggesting Divine intervention?”
Dorothy poked him in the ribs, then regretted it when her finger found no cushion there. “No, silly. But really, if it is...mischief...how in the world would they do it right under the noses of so many guards?”
Fred just smiled. One day he would tell her how they were doing it. One day he might even demonstrate how they made the ingenious device that converted a valve stem into a slow-leaking vessel.
But not today. Today a little mystery was good for her. It cheered him just to hear her chuckle again. And never, under any circumstances, would any word that could possibly be used against the mischief makers ever escape his mouth. He applauded them. He admired them. He prayed for them. He almost wished he were one of them.
. . . .
One week later the trucks were gone. And they had taken their leaky valve stems with them. It didn’t matter now where they took the trucks. Until every tire was replaced, they’d suffer the same rate of flats as they had during their tenure on campus.
Problems like that kept the camp commandant in a constant state of anger. During the worst of it, his mood filtered down through the ranks, and the children who usually scored handouts at the Japanese mess hall went home empty handed more days than not.
Things got so bleak that many of the kids just stopped coming. So when the vehicles were all removed and the guards began to return to their normal routines, Bobby was there with just a handful of others, the scrap of napkin cleaned and pressed, and with yet another small cartoon of thanks inked into its corners.
He was awfully proud that he’d thought of doing it. The first time he returned the napkin he’d drawn a figure of himself bowing low before the Rising Sun. An image of himself honoring these soldiers who called themselves Sons of Heaven would have been a lie, of course, had he not added the tongue sticking out between his cartoon lips. Unless their eyes were very, very good he doubted they could see it.
The same guard always watched for him, and took great delight in showing off each new drawing before tucking it into his pocket and offering yet another bit of cloth with an equally small bit of food in it for Bobby.
The first time Bobby had drawn on the napkin, the guard had tried to ask him who had made the drawing, but Bobby couldn’t make him understand that he had drawn it himself.
The next time, after Carol had washed the napkin and he’d pressed it beneath his mattress, his penciled drawing had faded so badly it could hardly be seen. The Japanese guard, disappointed that the drawings might disappear altogether, left the mess hall and returned moments later with a fountain pen.
He gestured to Bobby that he wanted him to take the pen to whoever it was that had drawn the pictures. It was clear that he wanted the pictures restored, using the pen’s indelible ink.
Bobby had just smiled, popped the cap off the pen, and proceeded to redraw the cartoon pictures. The soldiers had gathered round, watching the small boy with the curly platinum hair concentrating so hard on his artwork.
When he finished, the guard picked up the napkin and held it up to the amazed faces of his comrades. In an instant,
three other guards had grabbed their napkins and gestured for Bobby to draw a picture for them.
Bobby just made an exaggerated frown, popped the cap back on the pen and laid it down on the tent platform. He stepped back, raised his eyebrows, made a pitiful face and pressed his hands to his stomach.
If they wanted him to draw, they needed to bring on the food.
And they did. Mere, minuscule scraps. But in Bobby’s world, it was food.
Memory related by Santo Tomás internee
Dorothy Khoury Howie
100 Miles to Freedom by Robert B. Holland pg 134-135
The last Christmas in the camp, 1944, Jimmy had paid two hundred fifty dollars for a duck. He knew a man who could get things done and get things for a price. So Jimmy got this duck and killed and cleaned it. Then I cooked it for Christmas dinner.
...When I went to use the bathroom, two women were showering. One, a very beautiful redhead, was saying to the other, “Oh, yes, we cooked it and had it and it tasted like chicken. It really was good.” The other one said, “Yes, I have heard that is how it tastes.” I said, “What did you cook?” And she said, “A cat!”
I threw up all my dinner. When a cat disappeared in the camp we knew what had happened. Toward the end, nothing crawled or moved; anything that was alive was eaten.
A Free Frenchman Under the Japanese
The War Diary of Paul Esmerian, Manila, Philippines, 1941-1945
Translated by Robert Colquhoun
Page 164
16 Dec. 1944. The air raid continues. Forty-eight hours now. Sound of bombing and machine-gun fire several times last night. Few planes. They watch over Manila like vultures their prey, circling incessantly. Naturally there’s talk of a landing in the south. Something must be brewing for the Americans to be trying to neutralize Manila in this way. In the meantime, for us, new practical difficulties. Yesterday we didn’t get any mush and today it will only be ready at 8:30 a.m. Impossible to hear the loudspeaker, broken down. The children are touchy, especially Nicholas who bursts into tears at the slightest thing that annoys him. No lights in the evening, of course, and we go to bed at eight o’clock. Wonderful weather but strictly forbidden to leave the shanty, even to hang out the washing or saw wood. Christmas is approaching.
Courage in a White Coat Page 39