“Hunger had become a living thing, like cancer. It ate into our bodies and minds. We thought of nothing else but food and hate.”
—TRESSA ROKA,
DIARY ENTRY, JANUARY 26, 1945
ABRAM HARTENDORP WASN’T SURE HOW MUCH LONGER HE and other internees could survive at the University of Santo Tomas. Food stores were largely gone. So, too, were the pigeons, rats, and weeds that had sustained the nearly 3,700 men, women, and children during the long wait for MacArthur to return. Internees now starved at a rate of several a day; their skeletal bodies were wheeled from the camp in pushcarts for all to see, a grim reminder that anyone could be next. The fifty-one-year-old had witnessed a lot in a life that stretched across three continents, from his childhood in Holland, to his adolescence on a farm in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, to his adulthood in the Philippines. Along the way Hartendorp had marveled at the 1910 passing of Halley’s Comet, whose tail brushed so close to the earth as to spark panic. He nearly lost his hands to frostbite and had been fired once for teaching evolution to schoolchildren in Colorado.
But nothing in his half-century of world travel compared to what Hartendorp had seen on the roughly fifty-acre campus of Santo Tomas, where he had shed a third of his body weight as he watched humanity unravel. The once-stocky former journalist, poet, and magazine owner, whose bald head and freckled skin appeared out of place in the tropics, had parlayed his reporting skills into the role of camp historian, chronicling the more than eleven hundred days the civilians lived behind the iron gates of one of the largest Japanese-controlled internment camps in Asia. His chronology, which over the years dutifully covered committee meetings, camp personalities, and holidays, had devolved in recent weeks into a tabulation of calories and a scorecard of the starved:
“Three deaths.”
“Four deaths in one day.”
“There were again four deaths during the day, all of American men.”
Hartendorp’s tally promised to grow exponentially if MacArthur’s forces did not soon reach Manila. Conditions at Santo Tomas had come full circle in the three years since the Japanese seized the university, on Calle España just north of the Pasig River. Founded in 1611 and originally located in Intramuros, the Dominican school had welcomed its first students twenty-five years before Harvard, making it the oldest university under an American flag. Set amid a wide grassy lawn, the university boasted an Education Building, annex, and gymnasium, all of which flanked the four-story Main Building, capped with a clock tower, that stood dead center of campus. The three hundred internees who rolled through the gates on January 4, 1942, grew within days to several thousand, a number that would reach its wartime peak later that year of 4,200. “Santo Tomas was never a residence university. It had no dormitories at all,” recalled Eunice Young, a nurse. “The Japs segregated men and women, and jammed them into classrooms, halls, basements and offices.”
Santo Tomas proved not only crowded but a melting pot. Americans comprised about 70 percent of the internees; the rest were a mix of British, Dutch, Polish, and Spanish, among others. Age, sex, and internee health likewise ran the gamut. The only commonality was that most were civilians, imprisoned simply because of their nationality. “You had bankers and community leaders mixed in with prostitutes and thieves,” said Terry Myers, a nurse. “You learned to judge people not by their title as such but who they actually were.” Along those lines, there existed a huge disparity in wealth, which made a difference in how comfortable life could be behind bars. “The rich were rich and the poor were poor, just as in the outside world,” recalled Young. “Some internees had moved in with spring mattresses, plush chairs, and had arranged with Filipino houseboys to deliver more food regularly. Some of the women brought evening dresses. Another, with more sense, had brought a sewing machine. Some came with money, others without. Many arrived with only what they were wearing.”
The one constant for everyone: escape was not an option. The Japanese made that clear in early February 1942, when three internees went over the wall. Within hours troops recaptured the men—two Brits and one Australian—beating them so violently that one’s face resembled hamburger. Guards then hauled them out to La Loma Cemetery along with several additional internees to serve as witnesses. The Japanese prodded the escapees out to freshly dug graves and blindfolded them, though one of the internees refused to wear his. “I’ll die like a man,” he protested, “not a rat.” Moments later three shots rang out, and the men collapsed. “Then the Japs stood over them, firing down into the grave,” recalled witness Earl Carroll, who counted a total of thirteen shots. “Groans still were coming from that grave when the Japs began to shovel dirt into it.” The executions horrified the rest of the internees. “The lesson has had the desired effect,” Elizabeth Vaughan wrote in her diary. “No one speaks of escape.”
Shut off from the outside world, internees mobilized to build what resembled a small city. Many had been business and industry leaders in Manila, while others had worked as carpenters, engineers, and schoolteachers. “Two things we did have in abundance: time and know-how,” recalled Life magazine’s Carl Mydans, who was interned for nine months at the start of the war, before the Japanese repatriated him. “There was never anything that had to be done for which there could not be found an expert.” A nine-person executive committee oversaw sixteen department heads, who managed everything from the camp’s medical and sanitation needs to work assignments, recreation, and education. The internees went so far as to appoint floor and room monitors and even designated Hartendorp as the camp historian. “We had offices and were keeping minutes,” Carroll wrote, “just like a city council.”
Food was the main priority. The Japanese did not provide meals but contributed seventy centavos per diem into a fund that the internees’ Finance and Supply Committee could use to buy food for the camp. A central kitchen inside the Main Building fed three thousand adults two meals a day, including cracked-wheat porridge for breakfast and stew and a banana for dinner. In addition, Filipinos on the outside lined up every day to pass food and laundry through the gates in what became known simply as the “package line.” This allowed internees with money to buy extra food. William Hoffman spent $13,000 during his time in Santo Tomas on food to keep himself, his wife, and two children alive, while others queued up for the camp’s chow line. “Leading members of Manila society and some of the city’s best known gourmets stood in those lines, week after week, month after month, tin plate in hand,” Hartendorp noted. “Everybody ate what was offered, there being no alternative but hunger.”
Medical care proved another necessity, particularly since the camp’s internees ranged from infants to the elderly. Internees converted the Santa Catalina Convent, across the street from the university, into a 115-bed hospital, complete with specialized annexes dedicated to convalescent and children’s care as well as an isolation unit for communicable diseases. Staffed by internee doctors and nurses, the hospital had an operating room, dental clinic, outpatient department, and physiotherapy room as well as a minor surgery and dressing station. The Japanese allowed the camp’s doctors to send critical patients to Manila hospitals, while local hospitals, pharmacies, and the Red Cross supplied much of the food and medicine. The medical staff vaccinated internees against typhoid, cholera, and dysentery and even screened for venereal diseases, uncovering three cases of syphilis and nineteen of gonorrhea.
An army of six hundred internees built additional toilets and more than fifty showers. Workers likewise drained open sewers into the underground system, sank oil drums in the dirt to make outdoor latrines, and tapped new inlets into the city’s water lines. Afraid that Manila’s utilities might one day fail, internees filled the Main Building’s six roof tanks with 72,785 gallons of water as well as the university’s 680,000-gallon swimming pool. Carpenters built beds, benches, and a butcher shop, while seamstresses mended torn work clothes and stitched everything from mosquito nets and aprons to sheets and pillowcases for the hospital. “The cluttered rooms were swept twice a day, and once a week everything was moved out and the floors were scrubbed,” recalled Hartendorp. “The toilets were scrubbed and disinfected twice a day. The University premises had never before been so clean despite the crowded, day-and-night occupation.”
Much of the work required ingenuity. Internees planted thirty acres of gardens to grow yams, tomatoes, and pechay beans, while others made disinfectants and soap, using the oil from coconut milk. A camp laboratory churned out other necessities, from alcohol and caustic soda to Epsom salt and hydrochloric acid. On a more personal level, internees devised a system to provide sanitary napkins for menstruating women, each made from small flannel cloth and embroidered with the internee’s name and room number. “A bucket of disinfectant was kept in the bathroom,” said Margaret Sams. “Each and every cloth went into this bucket and was carted away every day, and a certain detail laundered the napkins and returned them to their respective owners.” Internee leaders required every man to work three hours a day and every woman two. Outside that time, many performed individual services for a small fee, from cutting hair to laundry to shoe repair. A few even told fortunes. “One could have his teeth pulled, his hair cut, his shirt mended, his fever soothed,” Mydans wrote. “We even had a police force.”
To relieve crowding, internees constructed some six hundred shanties on the university’s grounds, many from old lumber and bamboo and roofed with nipa palm leaves. Residents nicknamed these areas Glamourville, Jungletown, and Froggy Bottom, among others. The footpaths that wound between them were likewise colorfully called Fifth Avenue, Hollywood Boulevard, and MacArthur Drive. A mayor presided over each area, and shanty owners paid a one-peso monthly tax, which went into a fund for camp welfare purposes. “Though such a shanty to all appearance presented the utmost in squalor,” recalled Hartendorp, “to the people crouching within, it was home.” The primitive dwellings offered an escape from the otherwise crowded camp. “The shanties were private places where we could take our ease with a book,” wrote nurse Denny Williams. “They were places for quiet conversations with friends, pretending we weren’t at war, we weren’t hungry or bored or uncertain of our future.”
The adults set out to guarantee that internment did not rob the camp’s children of an education. Using partitions, internees converted two large former laboratories on the fourth floor into fifteen classrooms. Other spaces allowed for six additional rooms. Twenty-three former teachers from the Bordner School and American schools taught classes from kindergarten through college, in subjects as diverse as Latin, chemistry, and free-hand sketching. In addition to providing pencils, crayons, chalk, and blackboards, the education department cobbled together enough books to build a study hall, a reference library, and a children’s library, which offered a total of some 2,500 volumes, including twenty-two dictionaries and seven sets of encyclopedias. Students even received typed report cards, including fifth-grader Caroline Bailey, who earned A’s in both English and arithmetic and B’s in science and history for the 1942–43 school year. “While every pupil has not had an individual text to use,” one education department memo stated, “through a well-directed study hall, conducted in the morning, afternoon and evening, texts have been put to extensive use and in most cases one text was used through the study hall by 2–5 students.”
The fall of Corregidor in May 1942 ended any hope that internment might be brief. “Previous to that,” Hartendorp wrote, “the dullness of camp life had at times been relieved by distant bombing and cannon fire, by smoke clouds on the horizon and by flashes in the sky at night which proved to the internees that fighting was going on not far from Manila and that the invaders still did not have everything their own way. The cessation of such evidence of warlike activities had a depressing effect on the camp.” Most found it vital to remain busy, but internees still struggled as weeks turned to months and then years. One of the biggest challenges was the lack of any space. “If you want privacy,” a sign in the bathroom read, “close your eyes.” American Red Cross nurse Marie Adams, who shared a room with forty women, found the constant chaos rattling. “There seemed to be no moment of the entire day that was free from noise,” she recalled. “I was sure that I would crack up in a week.”
To distract internees, the recreation department organized volleyball, basketball, and softball teams. The captives went so far as to recreate the National and American baseball leagues, with teams ranging from the Giants and Braves to the Yankees and Red Sox. The printed schedule even listed individual players’ batting averages—captive Joe Yette had the highest at .522. Internee Archie Taylor likewise organized a boxing league, teaching more than seventy young men aged four to twenty. Army nurse Helen Cassiani learned to play golf from one of two interned pros. To prevent losing precious balls as she worked on her swing, Cassiani crocheted a small sack filled with cotton that functioned like a whiffle ball. “Once in a while he would let us take a swing at a real golf ball,” she recalled of her instructor. “But if we had a bad hook and the ball went over the wall, then we had a terrible time trying to get the Japs to go out into the streets there and look for the ball because balls were at a premium.”
Teachers hosted an evening story hour for children and dances for teenagers. The youths even put on a Christmas pageant. “Santa Claus came through the front gate,” remembered Madeline Ullom. “The Christmas tree was a Baguio pine on the front lawn.” Adults enjoyed vaudeville shows that featured comic songs and dances and even accordion and trumpet solos on an outdoor stage dubbed “The Little Theater Under the Stars.” Internees interested in more quiet pursuits could check out any one of some seven thousand titles in the camp’s makeshift libraries or catch up on the headlines in the twice-weekly newspaper, Internews, later replaced by the STIC Gazette* with the slogan “Independent, Curt, Concise.” Life magazine’s Mydans, before he was repatriated, gave photography lessons. Many others played games of chess, poker, and bridge. A few crafty internees brewed bootleg liquor from cornmeal, cracked wheat mush, and fruit juices. Others gambled. One successful card player ended up owning four shanties, including a restaurant, while even prostitutes offered up their services.
Despite the wealth of activities, internment exacted a toll on everyone. “We lived in the past. Completely in the past. We told things that we did as a child,” Inez Moore recalled. “You couldn’t look forward to anything.” The poor diet likewise proved problematic. “Beer-bellies had disappeared long before, but now thighs and shanks and shoulders and arms showed their leanness,” Hartendorp observed. “Many of the men—not at all that way inclined—were beginning to look like intellectuals, poets, divines!” Much to the heartache of parents, the children were not immune. Many had no concept of what life was like outside the walls. Others had never worn anything other than wooden shoes or even tasted fresh milk. Unlike American children, the youths inside Santo Tomas didn’t dream of one day serving as policemen, firemen, or doctors but instead talked of becoming room monitors and mush cooks. “To many of these young children, the Japanese soldier was the hero, the top man,” wrote Tressa Roka, a forty-one-year-old nurse who was interned with her fiancé on the day the couple had planned to marry. “I saw eight American kids fall in line with twelve marching Nips. They imitated their swinging arms and exaggerated goose steps with considerable enthusiasm and hilarity.”
The grounds of the University of Santo Tomas, showing the various buildings, gardens, and shanty areas. Replica of a hand-drawn map by an internee; scale is not exact.
The barriers at Santo Tomas consisted of far more than just the concrete walls and iron gates. The inequality that had existed before the war grew more extreme as the months passed and conditions inside the camp began to deteriorate. Wealthier captives went so far as to pay poorer ones to perform daily jobs, like the neurotic internee with manicured nails who hired the wife of an American soldier to do her duties. “She worked to earn money for extra food for herself, an ailing mother, and two teen-age sisters,” Roka wrote. “My prescription to cure the pampered darling’s neurotic aches and pains was simple and practical. Dig in and do her own work, and donate the money she was paying now to the overworked soldier’s wife. She could well afford it.” Food was another source of inequity as rich internees feasted on fine meals delivered through the gates. “It used to aggravate a lot of us,” recalled mining engineer Robert Wygle, interned with his wife and son, “to smell their pork chops frying while our tin can ”dishes’ held nothing but musty, moldy, and bug-peppered ”line chow.’ ”
Others internees suffered the agony of separation from their families. That was the case for Hartendorp, a father of three sons and two daughters. Though he was an American citizen, his children were Filipino, leaving them safe from internment, free to go about their young lives while he sat locked up in Santo Tomas. His only interaction with them was through the periodic visits at the camp gates or smuggled letters, where he tried his best to offer advice. It was through such a letter that his oldest son Eddy confessed that he had fallen in love with the neighbor’s daughter. “I am in very bad need for some one I can turn to for advice,” he wrote. “You seem so far away.” Such words pained Hartendorp, who felt powerless. “I want only the happiness of my children, but the one thing now,” he replied, “is to stay alive. Put up with everything necessary, but stay alive. As long as you remain alive, you can be happy again, some time. But there is nothing left for the dead or for those whose loved ones are dead.”
Hartendorp’s torment reached a crescendo when he was forced to miss the young couple’s seven p.m. wedding at San Miguel Church on July 27, 1942. In his diary that evening, he imagined the wedding, almost minute by minute. “I have been picturing to myself Eddy dressing and getting ready,” he wrote. “I suppose he is wearing his black dress trousers and his white mess jacket. I wonder what Lourdes looks like.” On his bed in his crowded room at Santo Tomas, Hartendorp kept his eye on the clock and fought back tears. “It is 7:20 now,” he wrote. “If the service was on time, perhaps it will be over now. I wonder who is there, whether they sent out announcements and invitations.” Ten minutes later Hartendorp concluded the wedding must finally be over. “I have never hated this place as much as now,” he wrote. “I want to be home with my children, where I belong, where I ought to be. I should have been there all along. But, of course, this is war. I ought to be glad we are all still alive.”
Hartendorp was, in fact, one of the lucky ones—his family was still alive. Georgia native Elizabeth Vaughan was interned with her two young children, Beth and Clay. Her husband, Jim, was an American soldier. Captured on Bataan, he was on the Death March and imprisoned at Cabanatuan. On July 10, 1943, while Vaughan mopped the floor of her room at Santo Tomas, a friend and fellow internee slipped her a sheet of notebook paper, folded into a two-inch square and sealed with adhesive tape. Vaughan read her name written on the outside. “The typed note wrapped tightly, almost wadded,” she wrote that day in her diary, “gave the definite and heartbreaking news.” Her husband had died in prison of dysentery. She was crushed. “Oh, Jim, Jim, why did this have to happen?” she begged in her diary. “You to die alone and suffering two days before our fourth wedding anniversary. Why couldn’t I have come to you, to give you medicine, to answer your feverish calls for water?”
Internees followed the progress of the war via the information that trickled into the camp. Popular Manila radio commentator Don Bell, who as an internee went by his real name Clarence Beliel to avoid detection by the camp’s commandant over his prewar anti-Japanese broadcasts, ran the camp’s internal broadcast system, playing phonograph records each morning at reveille and again at night just before camp announcements and taps. Bell used the system—specifically his choice in music—to disseminate important news. “When the Americans entered Paris, he played ”Midnight in Paris’ several times,” remembered nurse Young, who was captured after the fall of Corregidor. “When MacArthur landed on Mindoro, he featured ”Better Get Out of Town Before It’s Too Late.’ For the Luzon landing, it was ”Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here.’ About the time of the Leyte landing, he described the arrival in camp of a delivery of rice, concluding with the cryptic, ”Better Leyte than never.’ ”
The Japanese Army took over Santo Tomas in February 1944, eliminating the package line that had been the single contributing factor to the camp’s survival. In 1944 the community garden produced 124 tons of produce—most of it talinum, a leafy green similar to spinach—but that proved to be only a fraction of the food needed to sustain nearly 3,700 internees. After more than two years in lockup, most internees had already lost all excess body fat. Weight loss now increased dramatically. “Our ration decreased at first month by month, then week by week, and finally day by day,” recalled Marie Adams. “We could see each other lose weight almost before our eyes.” Nowhere was that more obvious than in the bathrooms. “Paunches, of course, had long since disappeared, but now men were losing their buttocks, strange as it may seem,” Hartendorp observed. “In eight out of ten, these finely rounded features had flattened out in a most unsightly way, and in some of the older men the skin sagged down in flaps.”
One hundred eighty five internees had died in the period between the camp’s opening and January 31, 1944. That number soon escalated—and at a much faster pace. From February to September, another fifty-four perished, many so weakened that their bodies struggled to fight off infection. Starvation sapped energy, even among the children who enjoyed a better diet than the adults. Robin Prising, the eleven-year-old son of a wealthy Manila tobacco merchant, later described his exhaustion in a memoir about Santo Tomas. “Each day as I climbed the stairs I could feel my strength draining from me; I was growing weaker,” he recalled. “I had not learnt much in the past weeks. It was easier to sit and let my mind drift from my arithmetic, to gaze over the trees in the front grounds, beyond the matted barrier of iron bars and out over the city. The view of church towers, the jumble of streets beneath the corrugated iron roofs of houses and the red-tiled roofs of buildings lent me an illusion of freedom as I sat hungry and constrained, muffling some vague feeling of anger. On a fair day I could see as far as the piers and stare at the grey Japanese warships in the bay.”
Men and women grew testy with one another. “There was a tension among the internees that is almost indescribable,” Adams wrote. “Irritability is one of the first symptoms of starvation, and certainly that symptom was marked among us. We were all cross, irritable, and edgy; we argued about things that were utterly insignificant. We were ready to claw each other’s eyes out—over nothing at all. We were hungry; we were starved.” Many developed beriberi, a disease caused by malnourishment that dimpled muscles in some and caused elbows, knees, and joints to swell in others. “Each day, we examined our faces, hands and legs for the telltale signs,” Roka wrote in her diary on August 2, 1944. “Most of us had some symptoms, but what we feared most were the edematous legs that resembled useless and dead stumps of wood. Worse still were the distorted and large faces that resembled grinning Halloween pumpkins.”
“If MacArthur doesn’t soon come,” went a common refrain around camp, “he’ll get here in time to bury the last internee.”
There was little doubt that the Japanese used food as a weapon—a form of punishment. “It seemed every time that our forces took over another island, they would cut our food,” recalled American Frank Long, who worked in the camp’s kitchen until beriberi left him unable to walk. “They were methodically and systematically starving us to death.” The physical effects horrified Prising, who queued up hours before each meal, watching as internees fought over places in line. “As I waited in the queues from day to day I could watch the other prisoners shrink,” he wrote. “From one day to the next their eyes sank further into their sockets, cheek bones jutted out of paper-thin flesh, knees became gigantic swollen joints attached to the sticks of their legs. The elderly wasted rapidly and, as their slack skin shriveled and began to crack, they grew into walking corpses. Their staring eyes, once troubled, took on a haunted look; then a milky film crept over the cornea and iris—the signal of approaching death.”
Internees received a welcome distraction on the morning of September 21, 1944. Two days earlier the Japanese had announced in the press their plans to conduct antiaircraft gun practice. The weapons began firing at five a.m. Around nine-thirty internees spotted a plane in the skies overhead towing a target, while south of the city others spied as many as a half-dozen fighters that appeared to dogfight. “That’s a rather dangerous practice,” one internee remarked.
The captives watched as dark puffs of smoke peppered the sky. “That’s a real fight!” someone cried. “That plane is on fire!”
To the amazement of the internees, dozens of carrier-based fighters and bombers from Adm. William “Bull” Halsey’s Third Fleet swarmed out of the clouds and broke off for attacks on Nichols, Nielson, and Zablan airfields. The internees realized that this was no drill—it was an American air raid on Manila, the first since the fall of the Philippines two and a half years earlier. “Men, women, and children ran out of buildings and shacks shouting like maniacs,” Roka wrote. “Others, with eyes cast heavenward, stood rooted to the ground. They could not believe their eyes! A few of the bombers flew low enough to give us the thrill of a lifetime! We saw, not the familiar and hated orange circle, but a flash of blue and a white star. It was like a beautiful dream!”
“This is a raid!” barked the camp’s loudspeaker. “Take cover!”
Air raid sirens finally sounded, and antiaircraft fire thundered. Many of the internees ran for shelter, crowding the lobby of the Main Building. Smiles spread across faces. Some people cried; others embraced one another. A few even sang. “They’re here!” internees shouted. “They’ve come back!”
A few narrated the progress of the battle overhead. “Look at that one dive!” someone yelled. “See that bomb dropping! Now listen! Just like clockwork! Isn’t it beautiful?”
A Japanese machine-gun bullet tore into the asphalt near the lobby door, while shrapnel rained down around the camp, injuring several internees, including one hiding under a bed in a shanty. Those minor wounds did little to dampen the euphoria. “We pounded each other until we were black and blue,” Roka wrote, “and we shouted until we were hoarse.” Elizabeth Vaughan celebrated by giving her children the two lollipops she had saved for just such an occasion. “For an hour or more,” Roka wrote, “we saw a show that could not be duplicated on Broadway.”
American bombers reappeared in the skies in the days and weeks ahead, buoying the spirits of the internees. “Blood plasma and vitamin shots couldn’t have done as much for the morale of the camp as the spectacular bombings we had witnessed in the last two days,” Roka wrote in her diary. “We talked of nothing else.” New Jersey native Albert Holland, a sugar executive before the war, observed the apparent medicinal power of America’s air campaign. “We have no deaths on air-raid days,” he wrote in his diary. “Perhaps they help in the struggle for survival.”
The Japanese guards fumed, forcing anyone caught watching the aerial fights to stand for six hours and stare into the sun. It was a risk worth taking. “We reached a point where we weren’t scared anymore,” recalled American internee Margaret Gillooly, “because the only alternative was death, and what was that after what we’d been through?” Internees woke the next morning to the song “Pennies from Heaven,” while a few days later the loudspeakers played “Lover, Come Back to Me.”
The American bombings proved a potent tonic for the spirits of the internees, but it did nothing to stall the progressive march of starvation. “The body, as long as it is living and breathing, consumes itself,” Gillooly recalled. “As you were walking around and breathing, you were dying.” Bodies often shrank in bizarre and disfiguring ways. Starvation carved deep pits on the inside of the internees’ thighs near the groin. Hair and fillings in teeth dropped out, and fingernails turned brittle. “Many people complained of a growing hardness of hearing. Others suffered from blind spots on the retina,” Hartendorp wrote. “It was a grisly thing to note such symptoms develop in one’s own body.”
To survive, desperate internees ate anything and everything, from tins of Pard brand dog food to the pigeons that once perched along the roof of the university. Caroline Bailey’s parents even harvested the beans out of her prized stuffed animals. Children picked through the trash left behind by the Japanese guards for rotten potato peelings and stole the slop dumped in the troughs for the pigs. Internees not only ate such waste but were grateful for it. British internee Elsa Colquhoun feasted on a special birthday dinner comprised exclusively of rubbish. “Such a wonderful meal,” she wrote in a thank you card, “all gathered from the Japanese garbage dump!”
Medical officer Maj. Samuel Bloom roasted his pet guinea pigs, while many others choked down everything from stray dogs and cats to snails. Even rats could fetch as much as eight pesos apiece on the camp’s black market. “One man,” Eva Anna Nixon wrote in her diary, “pioneered in rat cooking and others followed.”
Roka recounted how a friend announced he had feasted on feline. “How was it?” she asked.
“A bit gamey,” he replied. “I’ve been to several dog parties, too. It’s much more tasty than cat!”
The best meal of all, Robin Prising’s family discovered, were puppies. “Dogs or old tomcats could only be simmered for broth, but puppies were tender,” Prising wrote. “Poached toad was the one delicacy I could provide, but mother strictly insisted that toads caught in the latrines must be thoroughly washed.” Even among children the pain of hunger surpassed the love for prized pets. “I was fond of Whiskers, but when the time came, I simply picked him up and presented him for slaughter,” Robert Colquhoun, who was six at the time, recalled of his cat. “He tasted very good—rather like chicken.” To the sadness of many, some culprit even ate the camp’s mascot, a mauve-gray Persian raised since a kitten. “The poor splendid beast had gone into the pot,” Hartendorp wrote, “like many a more common member of his genus, of some one without either conscience or an appreciation of the rarest of feline beauty.”
Internees likewise ate wild plants, including pigweed, cassava root, and hibiscus leaves, though the latter was a purgative that often made people sick. So, too, did canna lily bulbs, which poisoned six internees in November. One of those was nurse Anne Louise Goldthorpe, who wrote in her diary that the sickness and nausea at least temporarily replaced the gnawing pain of her hunger. The rampant foraging prompted the camp’s medical staff to broadcast a list of edible and poisonous plants. “It must again be emphasized and repeated that the use of condemned vegetables and garbage must be discontinued,” the message cautioned. “While it is realized that everyone is hungry, we must not become panicky.” Such warnings did little to ease the suffering. “Our hunger at this time was a living thing, like a torturing pain,” Roka wrote in her diary on December 15, 1944. “It was with us day and night.”
The Japanese, in contrast, ate like kings. Portly guards with apple cheeks roamed around camp with filthy cummerbunds that struggled to restrain bulging bellies. The Japanese further inflamed tensions by slaughtering pigs and carabaos in front of hundreds of starving internees. “Just as soon as the Nips disappeared with their freshly quartered meat,” Roka wrote after the butchering of a carabao, “men, women and children rushed to the spot and, like voracious dogs, they clawed around the blood, entrails, dust and grit, searching for tail, ears, hooves, or anything that resembled food.”
Another forty-three internees died between October 1 and the end of December. Food theft skyrocketed along with the black market prices. A kilo of sugar went for as much as $105, a kilo of rice $60, and a twelve-ounce can of corned beef $40. Even a pack of thirty cigarettes went for $18—prices few could afford. San Francisco native Jean Crichton wrote that desperate wives hawked their diamond rings just for rice. “The money lenders, usurers, profiteers and bloodsuckers,” she wrote, “I have no illusions left about human nature.” A rash of food thefts provoked a similar response from Albert Holland. “There is as much community spirit in this camp as among a pack of jackals.”
“I weighed 92 lbs today,” nurse Goldthorpe wrote in her diary on December 23. “I am losing almost a pound a day.” Others experienced similar drastic losses. “I weigh 110 today—down 18 pounds in 17 days,” Holland wrote. “81 pounds below my pre-war weight.”
“I’m hungry,” children up and down the halls cried each night, much to the frustration of parents powerless to provide. More painful than the cries was the obvious physical toll starvation took on the children, all of whom were innocent victims in an unending war. “The tremendously active kids that used to tear around the campus like savages were now little old men and women,” Roka observed. “Hollow eyed, skinny and listless, they sat around and talked about food.”
Robin Prising discovered in late 1944 that he could no longer run, not from a lack of energy but because his youthful knees could no longer support even his tiny frame. “Starvation is taking its slow toll,” he wrote. “I can count my bones from the collarbone down—each joint, each jutting rib.” To trick his body, Prising vomited his meager rations back up in his mouth, allowing him the sensation of swallowing them again. “Even the vomit tastes good,” he wrote. “I go to the latrine as seldom as possible, trying to hold everything inside me, stingily preserving it for two or three days.”
By the end of 1944, camp officials canceled all school. Neither the students nor the teachers had the strength to climb the four flights of stairs to the classrooms. “It is hard for me to realize,” one woman said, “that I was a tennis champion just 3 years ago.” Adult lectures likewise ceased as internees struggled to concentrate and battled memory loss. Others abandoned the games of chess and bridge that had helped pass the years. “When I went to bed at night, I felt just on the verge of screaming. I ached to the ends of my fingers and toes, with the most horrible ache that I have ever experienced,” Adams wrote. “We were so thoroughly depleted that frequently I would sit on my bed and stare at the sink in the corner of the room, wondering whether it was worth while to make the effort to get up and go over to it to wash my hands, or whether it wouldn’t be better to wait until lunch-time to do it, because it would save that much energy.”
The average caloric intake for the internees in 1944 was 1,323 a day. By December that figured plummeted to 898, only to fall again the next month to just 567. A medical survey conducted by the camp doctors in January 1945 revealed that the average male had lost fifty-one pounds and the average female thirty-two. More than half of that weight was lost just since August 1944. “I was worried about a lump in my stomach,” Goldthorpe, the nurse, confided in her diary on January 5, 1945. “Then I found it was my backbone. I never expected to feel that from the front.”
As much as 90 percent of the camp’s population suffered from edema, accompanied by either constipation or loose stools. Others battled bleeding gums, vision loss, and frequent urination. Army nurse Gwendolyn Henshaw ultimately lost all her teeth. Many women, who had long since stopped menstruating, discovered their bladder muscles were too weak to hold in urine. “When I’d stand up, I’d start urinating,” recalled Sally Blaine, another army nurse. “It was terrible. It was absolutely embarrassing. Some of the girls really flooded themselves in front of other people.” The agony of starvation struck most internees as intentional. “Many of us believed that the Japanese planned to kill us by slow starvation. If their plan was to make us suffer, they had succeeded,” Roka wrote. “A bullet would have been more merciful.”
In the absence of food, many resorted to fantasy. A mass mania swept the camp as starving internees copied and traded recipes, from baked Indian pudding and Boston-style fish chowder to clam pie and French dressing. “People would be sitting with their legs all edematous from vitamin deficiencies, talking recipes,” recalled army nurse Anna Williams. “It was only a banquet of words.” Roka could not help but note the tragedy of the craze. “What made the mania so pathetic and futile was that they copied and concentrated on recipes that called for hard-to-obtain ingredients even in a normal world,” she wrote in her diary. “It stimulated their desire for food, and it used up energy that they could ill afford. It seemed like the cruelest form of torture.”
Several internees attempted suicide, while others suffered breakdowns. “Many prisoners are losing their minds and furtively devour imaginary meals, slurping and eating the air,” Prising wrote. “Men suck their thumbs, gnaw at their hands.”
Prising noted with alarm how hunger had hollowed out his parents. His fifty-seven-year-old mother Marie had once been a stage actress in London and on Broadway. Her dark hair and eyes had captivated his father, Frederick, who happened to take in a show of the opera Thaïs while in New York in 1911. “That’s the woman I shall marry,” he declared when he first saw her.
Her beauty likewise had captured the attention of famed illustrator Harrison Fisher, whose work regularly appeared on covers of The Saturday Evening Post and Cosmopolitan. Harrison’s drawing of Marie had graced the cover of the centennial edition of Ladies Home Journal. But the loss of so much tissue and muscle deformed her beauty. “Mother is so thin that her eyes and ears are enormous, the flesh of her arms hangs on her bones like a sleeve,” he wrote. “Her hands are knucklebone.”
Prising’s sixty-six-year-old father, who had once advised William Taft, was in far worse shape. His beard had stopped growing, and he showed the telltale signs of death’s approach. “When he undresses, I can see how his skin drips on his skeleton; the cavities are deep at his thigh and buttocks. Only his hands, his ankles and his feet are fattening—swollen from beriberi,” the youth observed. “Father’s eyes are growing a milky film; from day to day he becomes more quiet, more abstracted and gentler than ever. As he lies on his bed, unless his breathing is labored, I have to glance over at him to make certain he is still alive. If he notices me looking at him, he can scarcely smile.”
The once-thriving camp—a testament to the collective will of the internees—began to crumble. “Every waking hour,” nurse Bertha Dworsky recalled, “was a struggle just to exist.” Emaciated internees fainted and collapsed during roll call. “Food is getting much shorter,” nurse Goldthorpe noted with alarm in her diary. “The dogs and cats have all been eaten. Nor is there a pigeon on the place.” All nonessential work ceased. Some eighteen hundred women, many with dysentery and diarrhea, lined up to use only two serviceable toilets. “Some stayed on their beds and cots to stare at the ceiling all day,” Roka wrote. “They had lost all hope and faith that our forces would return.” Few had the strength to do much else. “This place is a living graveyard,” British internee Elsa Colquhoun wrote on New Year’s Day 1945. “People in it are nothing more than spectres, grey ghosts. Their minds, as well as their stomachs, are void.”
The exhausted doctors and nurses, who each day manned the front lines in the camp’s battle against starvation, resorted to using blood plasma as a food substitute. Even then desperate internees went so far as to steal the precious bags from one another. “I saw many cases of beriberi come into the hospital so bloated that the patient was unrecognizable,” wrote Adams, who personally dropped fifty pounds. “The patients lost all control of their normal functions. We were unable to get laundry done; consequently a patient would sometimes have to lie on the same sheet for a week. The situation in the hospital was horrible. The wards were in an awful condition.”
Starvation brought out the worst in people, even Episcopal missionary Raymond Abbitt, who worked in the camp’s isolation hospital. Abbitt went so far one day, as he walked a tray of food to an eighty-year-old patient, to contemplate murdering the man just so he could eat his plate of watery rice. “What bothered me was that it entered my mind that I could very easily just have bumped him off and killed him to get that tray of food,” Abbitt recalled. “You were that hungry at that point. It always bothered me after I got food to eat that I would ever have such a thought.”
The camp’s doctors battled incredible ethical dilemmas, including who was entitled to more food, children or pregnant women. Hartendorp witnessed an elderly veteran of the Spanish-American War pleading with a doctor for milk. “If there were any milk, I’d prefer to give it the children,” the doctor leveled with him. “We can’t be sentimental about this.”
Three to four internees died on average each day in late January. “The aged and infirm died first, most from complications set in force from weakness,” Earl Carroll recalled. “Then the late middle aged group started to go.” Roka and her fiancé played a macabre game of guessing who would be next. “In the last year, we could pick out who would die,” she remembered. “You didn’t say anything, but you knew.” Holland likewise learned to spot it when he landed in the camp hospital with beriberi, surrounded by men swollen like balloons, most of whom succumbed in the early morning hours. “Day in, day out the struggle goes on—against disease and against starvation: against death.”
The Japanese often left the bodies in the rooms for hours, where rats nibbled the fingers and toes. The motor hearse that once had been used to haul the dead with dignity was replaced by a steady stream of small and shabby carretelas or horse-drawn wagons. “As I watched the carretela carrying today’s dead out of the camp, I saw that there was not only a scarcity of food but everything else,” Roka wrote. “One of the coffins was far too short, and the corpse’s feet stuck out of the coffin in a grotesque manner.”
Funerals also proved primitive affairs. Goldthorpe attended the memorial for Henry Umstad, who had died after suffering a high fever for several days. “What a pitiful group we were. All hungry, emaciated, threadbare in patched rags. I thought of this as we stood there in the mud floored Nipa shack singing ”Lead Kindly Light,’ ” she wrote in her diary. “I hope the fever burned the hunger out of him.”
The January 21 passing of John Shaw, the seventy-three-year-old former head of the Canadian-Pacific Steamship Company in the Philippines, stunned many in the camp. One of Manila’s leading business executives, he had been a wealthy and prominent figure with a sizable physical stature to match. Internees gathered at ten-thirty a.m. to watch two Filipino boys push his shrunken remains out of Santo Tomas in a handcart normally used to haul a few five-gallon water cans. One of those who watched was Robin Prising, whose parents had been close friends with Shaw. “Uncle John Shaw, the magnificent gourmet, lost over a hundred and fifty pounds as a prisoner of war,” Prising later wrote. “The fattest man I have ever known died of starvation.”
Chairman of the internee medical staff Dr. Ted Stevenson dutifully logged each passing as either “malnutrition” or “starvation,” a fact that outraged the Japanese, who demanded he change the certificates so as not to embarrass the camp administration. Stevenson refused, prompting the commandant on January 30 to order him locked up in the camp jail. “He was,” Carroll said, “too stubborn and too honest to yield on a matter of principle.” Incarcerating Stevenson proved a futile gesture. “There were twenty-three deaths in December and thirty-two in January,” Adams recalled. “We were dying at such a rate that we were afraid that our troops might not find any of us alive.”
Internees struggled to hold on as the war inched ever closer to Manila. “For the last week, we heard heavy blast and earth-shaking rumbles,” Roka wrote. “North, east, south and west—everywhere we looked we saw smoke and flames.” Frank Cary likewise studied the horizon. “Still here, still waiting,” he wrote in a February 1 letter. “It is clear that our forces are making progress as the battle sounds are coming this way. Fires blaze each day—some set by our bombs, some the result of demolition bombing. A great black column of smoke is rearing its head nearby. It smells like oil and rubber.”
Despite the excitement, inside the camp the hours crawled past, a slow-motion blur of hunger, anxiety, and suffering. “In the anguish of waiting,” Prising wrote, “freedom appears like some grotesque mirage.” The question on everyone’s mind, of course, was how much longer the internees could persevere. “We survived on hope,” recalled Carroll, “hope that the American forces would arrive.”
*STIC = Santo Tomas Internment Camp