NEWSLETTER
Society for the History of Children and Youth
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No. 9 |
Winter 2007 |
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Captive Innocence: Jennifer Aerts Terry The mid-morning tropical sun shines down outside, but in the relative coolness of the Weinzheimer’s dwelling, three children sit at a roughly hewn bamboo table. Twelve-year-old Sascha Jean passes a cup of “tea” (lukewarm water) to her six-year-old sister Doris and then one to her three-year-old brother Buddy. “Oh, be careful Buddy,” admonishes Sascha Jean, “you don’t want to spill it.” Wide-eyed Buddy nods his head and accepts the cup with two grubby little hands. The three children blow on their cups and sip gingerly as if afraid to burn their lips. Sascha Jean engages Doris in “grown-up” conversation on topics such as the weather, food prices, and whether the Americans will soon route the Japanese from the Pacific. Buddy listens intently as he reaches for a “cupcake” from the chipped plate in the middle of the table. He delicately takes a bite, savoring the flavor, and smiling contentedly. Pensively, Sascha looks at him, saddened that he derives so much enjoyment from a dried up old garlic bulb. “But,” she thinks to herself, “he doesn’t know what cupcakes taste like, so he doesn’t know the difference.” It is December 1944 and the Weinzheimer children are nearing the end of their third year as prisoners of the * * * The World War II era lends itself well to the study of prison camps; both military personnel and civilians were imprisoned worldwide during this global conflict. The time period yields a wealth of wartime internment experiences that transcend nationality, socio-economic status, and geographic borders with the long term consequences of confinement ranging from humiliation and financial loss to the loss of loved ones and even life. My own research focuses on the experience of prisoners-of-war held by the Japanese in the Pacific theater of action. I have found accounts of military prisoners plentiful both in scholarly work and published memoirs, while knowledge of the events surrounding their captivity is present even in the collective understanding through popular movies such as The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), and recently, The Great Raid (2005). Yet, accounts on the Japanese internment of Allied civilians are rare. Therefore, few people realize that as the Japanese military extended its sphere of control over the Pacific, it imprisoned “enemy aliens” (non-natives of Allied nations) in every country it invaded.By early 1942, the Japanese occupied a wide swath of territory extending from Manchuria in the north to Indonesia in the south. Throughout this area the Japanese government established hundreds of prison camps, both military and civilian, to deal with the enemy alien threat. Monographs such as Frances B. Cogan’s Captured: The Japanese Internment of American Civilians in the Philippines 1941-1945 (2000) and Teresa Kaminski’s Prisoners in Paradise: American Women in the Wartime South Pacific (2000) tell the story of civilian captivity from the adults’ point of view; they do little to reveal the children’s experiences, and, in Cogan’s case, to reveal the existence of children in the camps at all. Much of my work has focused specifically on the children held at the Santo Tomás Internment Camp (STIC) in the Philippines. STIC, located on the Santo Tomás University campus in Manila, was the largest civilian internment facility in the Philippines with as many as 4,000 internees in camp at any one time (upwards of 7,000 or more passed through between January 1942 and February 1945). Approximately 1300 internees were children and their presence in camp created dynamics different than would be found in a camp without children as the adults struggled to provide adequate food, shelter, and a semblance of normalcy through education and organized activities. The effect internment had on the children’s physical and emotional development, as well as the altered foundation of their understanding of social norms, is also worthy of investigation as the experience irrevocably altered the circumstances of their physical and emotional development. Over the course of internment in the Pacific, children endured malnutrition, disease, physical injuries, starvation, separation from loved ones, and the ever-present stress of captivity. Even children too young to understand the nature of their circumstances felt the gravity of the situation through the disruption of routine and the mood of their parents. Studies reveal that a child’s distress level positively correlates with the distress level of his or her parents.[2] Teenagers found themselves thrown into early adulthood by war. At a time when they naturally wanted to exercise increased control over their lives, they became prisoners with adult responsibilities and with none of the advantages of being a minor. These conditions manifested long term effects in the children’s post-captivity lives as most dealt with the consequences of ill-health, loss of loved ones, and were reintegrated into a society that held little understanding for their wartime ordeals. There are a variety of sources that shed light on the children’s experiences at STIC. General accounts by adult internees provide a framework for understanding the timeline and structure of the camp. Fredric H. Stevens’s Santo Tomas Internment Camp, 1942-1945 (1946) and A.V.H. Hartendorp’s The Santo Tomas Story (1964) are two of the best in this regard. The Japanese forbid internees from keeping journals and routinely conducted searches for written records. Yet, the need to record captivity experiences was strong and a surprising number of prohibited journals surfaced after liberation. Both Stevens and Hartendorp, prominent in the camp’s civilian leadership, recorded information almost daily, seemingly conscious they were preserving history as it happened. Both were thorough in detail, noting key committees and policies, leadership within the camp, food provisions and distribution, living arrangements, and details on the various Japanese administrations. Generally, children did not keep diaries of their experiences. However, many wrote or spoke of it after liberation. Their hindsight accounts reveal an honesty about circumstances that is uncompromising in its frankness; memories preserved from a child’s perspective. In Surviving a Japanese P.O.W. Camp: Father and son endure internment in Manila during World War II (1991), Peter R. Wygle, a teenage boy at the time of internment, reveals his hatred of the camp-established school, declaring it ridiculous in the face of their circumstances. In Rose M. Aiello’s 50th Anniversary Commemorative Album of the Flying Column 1945-1995 (1994), Sascha Jean Weinzheimer (Jansen), a twelve-year-old polio survivor wise beyond her years, remembers the confusion and fear exhibited by her younger brother and sister and the tender care her father provided her increasingly incapacitated mother. Karen Kerns Lewis reveals in Lily Nova and Iven Lourie’s work Interrupted Lives: Four Women’s Stories of Internment During World War II in the Philippines (1995) the thrill of a previously lonely, only-child at the constant presence of other children. She also discusses her dismay in her short stint at the Holy Ghost Convent, a live-in school for children. Though conditions were better at the convent, she wanted more than anything to be reunited with her parents and the other children in the camp. Some events and circumstance are too confusing or painful for children to comprehend and so many memories become lost to them. Parents’ accounts help to shed light on their children’s experiences, providing an understanding of events or conditions that children themselves often lack the ability to fully fathom or have blocked from their memory. Carole M. Petillo’s The Ordeal of Elizabeth Vaughan: A Wartime Diary of the Philippines (1985) provides details on the care of the young children in camp. In this published diary, Elizabeth Vaughan, the mother of two-year-old Clay and four-year-old Beth, records important details on the administration of the Holy Ghost Convent and the process in which children were selected for the program; information that children may not have been aware of. In addition, her observations of her own children reveal the innocence and naiveté with which the youngest internees tried to cope with their situation. For example, after many months of internment, Vaughan still had not told her children of their father’s death in a military prison camp. When her daughter Beth asked why daddy did not come to visit them, Clay explained in his two-year-old logic, “Your daddy is riding in an airplane, Beth. When that airplane comes down my daddy will come out. There are many airplanes to come down and many daddies to come out. Yes sir!”[3] In Celia Lucas’s Prisoners of Santo Tomas: Civilian Prisoners of the Japanese (1975) Isla Corfield reveals her observations of teenagers in the camp as she remembers her own teenage daughter’s struggle to form her burgeoning identity and assert her autonomy within the confines of captivity. Perhaps the most revealing is Margaret Sams’s Forbidden Family: A Wartime Memoir of the Philippines, 1941-1945 (1989). In her frank discussion of societal pressures within the camp Sams observes the difficulties children had adjusting to new surroundings, the daily issues associated with raising a toddler in unsanitary conditions, and the social conflicts that arose between adults as a result of their children’s quarrels. Sams’s account also provides valuable information on maternity and infant care in the camp. Memoirs like the ones aforementioned all speak to the deprivation of prison camp life. Many relate that February 1944 marked the beginning of the era referred to as the “starving time.” Additionally, unsanitary conditions and a scarcity of medicines enabled disease to spread rapidly and repeatedly throughout the camp with little to do but to allow it to run its course. Alan Butler’s “Nutritional Status of Civilians Rescued from Japanese Prison Camps” in the November 1945 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine speaks to the topic of the starvation conditions; Emmet Pearson’s “Morbidity and Mortality in Santo Tomas Internment Camp” in the June 1946 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine discusses the life threatening ailments encountered by internees and their consequences. Many visual sources provide insight to prison camp life as well. Behind the Sawali: Santo Tomás in Cartoons, 1942-1945 (2000) is a compilation of drawings by teenager Teedie Cowie (Woodcock). In order to deal with her sense of helplessness, frustration, and hunger, Cowie drew humorous cartoons based on her observations of camp life. As a gesture of cheer, she gave the collection of cartoons to her mother for Christmas in 1944. Years later, she had them published in book-format. James McCall’s Santo Tomas Internment Camp: STIC in Verse and Reverse, STIC-Toons and STIC-tistics (1945) is a wonderful collection of drawings and poetry that provide humorous and candid insight into human nature and the trials of internment. The photos of the children with their emaciated parents that accompany the article “Santo Tomas is Delivered” in the March 5, 1945 issue of Life magazine are stirring. Finally, Lou Gopal’s recently released documentary, Victims of Circumstance: Santo Tomas Internment Camp (2006) tells the captivity story through newly discovered archived film footage and interviews with survivors of the Japanese occupation. Many of the interviewees were children or teenagers during internment. Although my research focuses primarily on children interned at the Santo Tomas Internment Camp in the Philippines, a number of works describe experiences in other camps throughout the Pacific. Although she lived in the Philippines when the Japanese invaded, eight-year-old Mary McKay (Maynard) and her family were not interned because they hid from the Japanese for two years in the jungles of Mindanao, finally escaping by submarine. My Faraway Home: An American Family’s WWII Tale of Adventure and Survival in the Jungles of the Philippines (2001) tells their amazing story. Disguised (2001) by Rita la Fontaine de Clercq Zubli reveals how teenaged Rita, disguised as a boy, lived in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Indonesia for three years. Agnes Newton Keith’s Three Came Home (1946) is the account of a woman interned with her toddler son in a Borneo prison camp. In addition to the South Pacific, the Japanese held numerous prison camps throughout China. A Boy’s War (1988) by David Michell speaks to the experience of missionaries’ children interned at their boarding school during the war. The wartime internment of children provides a new angle on the captivity experience. The presence of children in the camps necessitated additional considerations in the way of provisions and housing. Survivors experienced recurrent health problems and children specifically had problems stemming from injuries and malnutrition while in camp. However, more research is needed to determine the extent of the long term physical and psychological effects. Further, a focus on these children calls to mind questions about native children’s experiences under Japanese domination. What was it like for Filipino, Indonesian, and Chinese children in occupied regions? Preliminary accounts suggest worse treatment than that of prisoners, regardless of the child’s age. Notes |