Brutal guards. Executions. Starvation rations. And finally, the joy of liberation.
They were elements of an AP story from Manila we ran on March 1, in what’s become a series of 70th anniversaries of World War II turning points.
It echoed the experiences of a Vancouver woman who shared similar memories of a Manila prison camp with us in a 2004 story.
Marian Russell and her family spent three years in an internment camp for Allied civilians.
Russell lived with her late husband, Bob, and their son, Jack, on the campus of Santo Tomas University. Their address was No. 3 Banana Ave., Shantytown.
Bob had overseen a structural shop that made industrial equipment; he got his hands on some framing timbers and built their 10-by-10 hut 3 feet off the ground.
“It was a skyscraper. Most of the huts had dirt floors, and they flooded during the rainy season,” said Russell, who died in 2005 at age 87.
For food, they lined up twice a day with ration cards in their hands. Breakfast was cereal. Dinner was billed as soup or stew and a vegetable.
“It was nothing but slime,” she said.
“Some people died of starvation with cans of food hidden away,” she said. There was a reluctance to dig into the supply cache: “You never knew if it was going to get worse.”
Behavior was regulated.
“We had lessons in how to bow according to Japanese standards. We had to bow to any Japanese we came across. We would walk out of our way, which was difficult,” to avoid meeting a Japanese soldier, Russell recalled.
In December 1944, a couple of months before the camp was liberated, four men accused of violating camp rules were beheaded.
When the headless bodies were recovered after the war, a friend of theirs was asked to identify a victim named Cliff.
“Cliff’s wife had knitted him socks,” Russell said, so their friend “had to take a sock off the body, wash it, and show it to Cliff’s wife.”
The ordeal ended in 1945 when four American tanks crashed through Shantytown’s gates.
Russell said she didn’t have any major adjustments settling here after the war, although some habits remained.
“I drove my sister-in-law nuts,” Russell recalled. “She’d be cleaning the lettuce, and I’d say, ‘Don’t throw that away! We can eat that.’ It affected friends of mine the same way.”
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
