Courage in a White Coat

by Mary Schwaner

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  CANNAS AND CASKETS

  This wasn’t the way Christmas was supposed to happen.

  Dorothy struggled to resurrect a mental image of reds and greens and Christmas holly on the windowsills, but amid the drab grays and dusty clutter of the camp it simply would not materialize in her brain.

  She longed to see a door decked out with a wreath. For that matter, she longed to see a door. There had never been any doors in camp. They’d been removed by the Japanese long before she and Fred took up residence. There would be no hiding from their guards was the message, nothing in camp they could not see.

  In recent days she’d heard much reminiscing over the first Christmas in Santo Tomás. The internees recalled sharing a lovely celebration, with extra food, toys made for the kiddies, and a camp choir singing the Hallelujah Chorus.

  Over and over again people recited the clever dishes they’d organized for that first Christmas meal. They dwelt on the ingredients, describing the flavors in ebullient detail that spun mental images they swore they could literally smell.

  Perhaps it was as they said. She’d never know, since the Chambers family had not entered camp until mid-summer of 1943 and shared their second Christmas in captivity with Santo Tomás. Even though shadows lived behind every smile, that Christmas had not been as bad as one might have expected.

  Now they were about to share their third.

  Just thinking of the mystical beauty of a real Christmas with soaring organ music and hot chocolate at midnight made her heart ache for her children who had no such memories.

  For Dorothy, thinking of that first Christmas behind a barbed wire fence in Iloilo conjured poignant visions of purple shoes and Christmas carols. It had seemed such a meager Christmas, but even now—remembering the bounty of that Christmas meal with actual meat on the table and real milk in the children’s cups—it almost seemed obscene.

  Everything seemed obscene: the memory of portions of rice scraped into the garbage that first year, four whole, incredibly extravagant sheets of toilet paper doled out per use. Sugar to bake with. How could they have been so wasteful? How could they have been so naive as to think after one Christmas as a ‘confined community’ they’d have been going home?

  Now they were facing the third Christmas in captivity, and the bleak promise that it held was this very moment disappearing before her eyes.

  Fools. They were all fools to have been so trusting.

  Dorothy watched the shocking scene as it played out at the main gates, grateful that she’d not let Bobby come along. She almost had, knowing he’d love watching the trucks come in. But something had told her not to mention it to him.

  Now she was glad she hadn’t. Everyone expected some sort of food offering to come into the camp at Christmas. Somehow, some way, someone was going to get some food in here.

  And there it was.

  On the YMCA trucks. The ones that were being forced to turn around and leave without delivering their bounty. The Japanese armed guard would not relent.

  “Prisoners have plenty.”

  And when they had leveled their guns at the trucks, the drivers had no choice. They had to leave. Taking the bounty with them. Taking the life-saving food away.

  Dorothy fought her simmering anger. She would not—could not—allow herself to lose her temper. Slowly, she forced her fisted hands to loosen and set her fingers fluttering shakily against her thigh to press imaginary keys. Anger would be her undoing. She knew that with every fibre of her being.

  Dearest Mother,

  These Japanese will do anything to save face. Today they turned away life-saving food, because it came in YMCA trucks. Trucks made in America. The drivers would surely report seeing emaciated prisoners desperate to get their hands on the food. They would tell the world that the Japanese were letting women and children starve. Japan would lose face, and that would never do. I watched the trucks disappear, taking the children’s Christmas with them and I thought, I thought for a minute that, that I would...

  Without the expected food to rally the most desperate among them, she knew the death toll would mount. Rations had been cut yet again, to portions too minuscule to count on anyone’s scale of survivability. She could no longer tell if the children’s tin soup mugs had even been used, they’d become so adept at gleaning every drop and dreg.

  As the last truck disappeared in puffs of dust the soldiers turned to the small crowd. They were angry, too. They would have had first choice at anything that came off the trucks. It was their feast, too.

  Dorothy turned her back, not daring to let them see her burning eyes, and began to shuffle back to the Annex. She would roll through her day as she did most days now. The light-headedness had become her normal state of being. For the first time she felt oddly grateful for her swollen ankles, grateful for the weight of them that anchored her—even as they tethered her to the place she desperately wanted to leave.

  Her medical bag banged brutally against her thigh as she swung around. It was too heavy today, and nearly toppled her once or twice as she headed to her room. Nothing would part her from her bag now until she hid its contents beneath her bunk. It was too precious, even more so now that the trucks had been turned away from the gate.

  She could almost feel them rolling about in the bottom of her satchel, singing to her. Six sad little canna bulbs.

  Christmas dinner.

  . . . .

  In the days leading up to Christmas, Dorothy quizzed anyone she thought might help her know how best to use the cannas. Boil them whole or shred them first? Get them wet and roll them in rock salt and let them sit for awhile? The suggestions were as varied as the people who made them. But at last she’d set upon a recipe utilizing the best suggestions and the only ingredients she had with which to improvise.

  In Her Own Words

  Dorothy’s Postwar Essay

  Only 2 ½ oz. of water per child per day was allowed. But, we had so little to eat...and the kids stayed hungry...

  Fred was very thin; both kids weighed less than they had 3 years earlier; I myself was down to 100 pounds, some of which was edema.

  I recall our last Christmas before the war ended; Fred and I dug, scraped and boiled some canna roots, seasoned them with rock salt, and invited friends for our “feast” to celebrate the coming of Christ!

  The Santo Tomás Story

  A.V.H. Hartendorp

  Page 358

  Late in the month, the health committee informed the Internee Committee that, along with the increase of dysentery, there were occurring a number of cases of food poisoning in which the cause could be traced to the use of strange plants for food. On the thirtieth the internees were warned in a broadcast against the use of hibiscus leaves, canna-lily bulbs and roots, and hemp.

  Instructions were given for the proper preparation of the core and heart of the root of the banana tree, a taro and cassava root, both of which had outer skins of a poisonous nature.

  . . . .

  The strange taste of the canna shreds that bolstered their usual meager lugao seemed appropriate. A strange taste for a strange setting. The only familiar aspect of Christmas 1944 was the holy message that still burned clear and strong in hearts that could not countenance diminishing it.

  Christ is come.

  For several weeks leading up to Christmas that joy had lingered in small ways about the camp, until true to form, the Japanese army found a way to squelch it. Earlier, on Christmas Eve day, the camp’s leader—Carroll Grinnell—had been thrown into jail. Most suspected it was a reprimand and he would soon be released. But on January 5th, he and three others were taken to some unknown location, and that news rocked the entire camp. Carroll Grinnell and Alfred Duggleby led the camp committee and between the two of them were responsible for nearly every decision that had kept the camp functioning and fed these past three years. Ernest Johnson and Clifford Larsen were arrested with them, all on suspicion of having had con
tact with guerrillas. It was an accusation that the Japanese generally greeted with the most dire of punishments.

  The arrests seemed to signal a rampant paranoia among the Japanese, which sent internees into paroxysms of both fear and elation. Fear that if the men who had worked most closely with the Japanese in running the camp were not spared the wrath of their jailers, no one would be. Elation because they knew paranoia to be the best possible sign that the Japanese feared they were about to be overrun.

  And they were right.

  On the third day of February, a local casket maker delivered his order to the gates of Santo Tomás. It happened every week now. Because internees were dying of starvation each week.

  The camp undertaker accepted the order, and surreptitiously acknowledged the Filipino casket-maker’s signal that the third casket from the bottom was for some reason special.

  The stack of caskets rattled and creaked as he rolled his cart to the area set aside for burying the camp’s dead. As soon as his helpers lifted the casket third from the bottom off the cart, he followed, waiting for them to return to the cart.

  When he saw their backs, he turned to the casket, lifted the lid slightly, and felt along the underside of the lid until his fingers touched the corner of a slip of paper sticking out from beneath a strut.

  He hurriedly worked the paper free, deathly afraid that he would be seen before he was able to retrieve the message.

  But it slipped free. He clutched it in his hand, stood, reseated the lid, nodding as if it had passed his inspection, and walked a few feet away. He made a show of pulling his notebook from his pocket and flipped it open, ostensibly to study the names of the departed. But inside the notebook he opened the small note and read its brief message:

  Be careful. Something happens tonight.

  His outside contact was rarely wrong, and within an hour, the message seemed to be validated.

  For weeks squadrons of American planes had passed high overhead, dropping their explosive payloads on strategic Japanese installations.

  But on that February afternoon, a small squadron of American planes approached Santo Tomás, banking in from the south, their noses pointed toward the barrage of bombs that were decimating the enemy. As they neared the camp, they dropped altitude, skimming low across stripped palm trees and crumbling houses. Just moments out from the camp one plane dipped side to side, waggling its wings.

  Every ear in camp was fixed on the planes that seemed to be barreling through their space, though most dared not look. In the instant before they crossed the camp boundary, furtive glances revealed that the pilot who had waggled his wings had his canopy open. And in the next instant something fluttered past the wing, dropped by the pilot’s own hand onto the camp’s grounds.

  It was a message.

  Wrapped in the straps of his own flight goggles.

  Roll out the barrel! Christmas comes tomorrow!

  The carpenter couldn’t know which message was more accurate—tonight or tomorrow. But he set his own hopes on tonight. And he was not disappointed.

  Memoir of Peter Robert Wygle

  The Rescue of Santo Tomás by Robert B. Holland pg 184

  By this time our main preoccupation was food. We had survived without much of it for about a year, and that tends to color one’s thought processes. We were pretty far down on the scale of physiological well being, though I don’t remember being particularly concerned about it. Mom and Dad were slowing down considerably, and we made jokes about the beriberi. We’d stick our fingertips into our water-filled ankles and watch the holes stay there for several minutes. Any infections we got would last forever, and we’d have to force ourselves to get up several times a night to go to the bathroom because we were so weak. Nobody ran anywhere. They didn’t move very much at all if they didn’t have to. But this came on so slowly that I don’t think we realized what was going on—at least the kids didn’t. I guess that’s how starvation works. One morning, instead of waking up, you’re just dead.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  THE HARBINGER

  Dorothy was halfway between the Annex and the clinic when the low-flying squadron came bursting through above her head, barely skimming the top of the Main Building. Their thrumming engines were the same as the hundreds they’d heard overhead for weeks now, yet they seemed to vibrate like a child scarcely able to hold a secret. They pulsed and sang, and as the lowest plane waggled its wings and skated off into the clouds it seemed to take with it the tremor that had sat in her stomach for countless days.

  She stood frozen, searching for the lump of fear that appeared to have vanished, expecting its return at any moment. But it did not. Instead, her breathing steadied, as did her pulse. She’d prayed for more than three years for an end to the war, and now skies dominated by friendly aircraft seemed to signal that it was finally happening.

  Dearest Mother,

  I know that you will catch my meaning when I tell you I have been afraid. I used to think fear was an unreasonable response made by people of weak faith, just as stage fright was only experienced by those who are unprepared. But my friend Grace has revised my thinking. She’s the most marvelous violinist, Mother. Such a Divine energy flows through her, such surety that her fingers will find the sweet, pure center of each fleeting note.

  I commented to her once that her gift was so remarkable that surely she never experienced anything so amateurish as stage fright. Well, she looked at me with her beautiful hazel eyes and told me that while she didn’t call it stage fright, she did call it performance anxiety. She laughed, saying that one day I should ask her husband about it. And then she became serious and said, “If any performer ever tells you they are not nervous, then I guarantee that you will not hear their best performance. One needs a bit of nerves, anxiety, apprehension, whatever you want to call it, to be on the fevered pitch of your very best performance.”

  So I think fear or apprehension has perhaps done that for me—kept me on the fevered pitch of my best performance so that my flagging energy and wasting body didn’t affect my skill as a doctor. As a parent.

  As a wife.

  Grace Nash has her “four strings to survival”, as she calls them, the strings of her violin that have kept her sane in a world gone mad. I’ve had my practice, the knowledge that though my hands are tied, they are not powerless, unproductive, fruitless.

  Fear doesn’t have to incapacitate or weaken a person. Fear doesn’t make one less courageous. Fear merely exists to remind one of one’s vulnerability.

  I began to understand that concept early on when I stupidly challenged a Japanese guard. For some reason I expected him to address my situation logically, to see the sense of what I was insisting upon. Well, he either didn’t see it or couldn’t see it, and it made him angry. I know now that he couldn’t help but be angry. Probably because he DID see the sense of what I was asking and was bound by unreasonable restrictions put upon him to deny my reasonable request. I embarrassed him. I made him lose face. And I felt the point of his bayonet hover inches from my waist.

  My vulnerability had never been made more clear. My children might or might not have a mother, depending upon that soldier’s ability to leash his anger. That was the day I first felt the leaden weight of fear in

  my belly.

  Today an American plane swept through the camp, barely missing the trees. It took with it my fearfulness. My apprehension. My sense of vulnerability. It stripped away the sledge of trepidation and I felt my faith shining through more fully than I have ever felt it in my life.

  I shall see you soon, Mother. The skies have told me so.

  Grace Chapman Nash

  by Judith W. Cole

  http://aosa.org/documents/100 Yrs of Graceful

  Living and Teaching.pdf

  Grace, Ralph and their two young sons endured more than three years of internment in various prison camps including the dreaded Los Banos. They survived dysentery, hepatitis, lice, bedbugs, separation, acute starvat
ion, and the birth of their third son. It was her violin, her four strings to survival, to which she turned for comfort and to comfort others. She received a small bag of mongo beans from one Japanese soldier for performing with her violin. This occurred just prior to the family’s rescue on February 23, 1945, just hours prior to scheduled execution. Their lives had been spared and for that gift, Grace dedicated herself to living each day to the fullest.

  . . . .

  They were coming. American troops were coming.

  At last.

  To say that the rumor mill was in a frenzy would be an understatement. The Americans were coming. The Americans were here. The Americans had been turned back outside the city. The Japanese have scheduled us for execution in three days. The Americans have surrendered.

  Dorothy shut her ears to the camp’s whispered joys and fears. Too many times they had seen their hopes soar, only to have them hammered back, beaten down by a vile oppressor. She would not watch for the Americans like others did. She didn’t need to. It was a cruelty which she would no longer inflict upon herself. She knew they were coming. That was enough.

  Bobby, however, soaked up all the rumors like a little sponge.

  “What will they look like, Mom?”

  Dorothy heard his question but had lost the thread of his conversation. “Who, dear?”

  “The Americans. The Marines. The ones who’re going to let us out of here.”

  “Ah. Well, they might be Marines. And they might be Army. They’ll look just like your dad and his friends, except not so skinny. Some will be younger, some will be older. But they’ll all be dressed alike in uniforms.”

  “Like the Japs?”

  “The Japanese. Yes, dear. That’s how soldiers dress. All the same.”