Elizabeth M. Norman (29 page)

In time Cassie’s prison life took on a pattern. She had her work, her friends, her growing friendship with Terry. And it was just about then, just as she was getting accustomed to the camp and its routines, that she decided to work for the underground.

Weekly, through the package line, word would filter into camp about the treatment of the twenty thousand American soldiers, sailors and marines who had been captured during the fall of Bataan and Corregidor. Those who had survived the Death March had been taken to prison camps in northern Luzon, and there, between April and July, some two thousand POW’s died of malaria, beriberi, dengue fever, gross malnutrition, dysentery and the incessant assaults of their keepers. Many were flogged so severely, the guards literally beat the flesh off them. Many were worked so hard, they simply dropped dead.

Finding a sufficient number of able-bodied men among the prisoners to bury the dead was not the least of the problems with which the camp authorities were confronted. It was not unusual to have several of the burial
detail drop dead from exhaustion and overwork in the midst of their duties, and be thrown into the common grave which they were digging for their dead comrades. Not infrequently men who had collapsed from exhaustion were even buried before they were actually dead.
⁶

The internees at Santo Tomas were outraged by this ruthless cruelty, and many of them, particularly the army and navy nurses—comrades of the men the Japanese were slowly and savagely exterminating—were determined to help. Most of the military doctors from Bataan and Corregidor, along with their corpsmen and medics, had been sent to Bilibid Prison in Manila, another pestilential hellhole. When the nurses discovered that their colleagues were imprisoned nearby, many began to work for the Philippine resistance movement, which was smuggling food, clothing, medicine, money and information into the military prisons.

Early in 1943 Cassie had a relapse of malaria and the camp doctors, worried about her liver, sent her to Philippine General Hospital for tests. (The Japanese commandant regularly allowed STIC’s doctors and nurses to transfer their sickest patients out of camp to better equipped facilities in the city for surgery and complicated treatment.)

Leading the underground smuggling operation were a group of Roman Catholic priests, and just as she was about to leave STIC for Philippine General Hospital, one of them approached Cassie. The father came right to the point. Would she be willing to serve as a conduit for money and messages? She promptly said yes, and during her first days in Philippine General, Cassie tried to find sympathetic Filipinos to act as couriers to carry messages to the prisoners in Bilibid and Fort Santiago.

“I would try to engage anybody who would talk to me while I lay in bed,” Cassie remembered. “I could speak enough Spanish and a little bit of Tagalog so I figured the Filipinos were apt to [work with] me.”

Straightaway she made several contacts and became part of the underground. The priests from STIC visited her often and passed her money, which she hid under her bedclothes. Then, when the time was right, she would pass the cash to her contacts, in this way funneling thousands of pesos to her imprisoned male comrades.

“I worried a little about the risk,” she said. “But you had to trust these people if you were going to be a conduit and help some GI out in some awful hellhole.”

When she got back to camp, she, along with other nurses, kept at it, smuggling notes and money in hollowed-out fruits or stuffed inside medical supplies that were sent to the prisons.
⁷

In addition to all of this—her work, her sports, her smuggling and her circle of friends—she took up writing. In a creative writing workshop at the adult school, she sat through lectures on “effective sentence structure” and “rhetorical questions” and “matters of emphasis,” then sat down to execute a series of essays, some formal, such as a disquisition on the pleasures of reading, and some personal, such as her ironic account of the first days of the war.

When War in the Pacific broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans. The reason for this egotistical view of one of history’s great disasters was that few young women could have been less forewarned and conscious of the War’s imminence than I was; but in particular, no one could have been more ignorant of the meaning of war-time Army Hospital Service. I had arrived in Manila six weeks before the War prepared for a two-year tour of duty which would be filled to the brim with the excitement of the tropics
.

[After the first attack] as I sat there with my hand raised [to volunteer for duty at Fort Stotsenberg], I found it hard to believe that not far away men had been slain ruthlessly, and their poor disfigured bodies heaped together and crowded, in ghastly indiscrimination, into quickly provided common graves, as though they were nameless vermin. What did the immediate future hold in store for me? How would the War ultimately affect me?
⁸

T
HE DIVERSIONS ASIDE
, prison was still prison, with all its discomforts and deprivations.

When the army nurses moved to the main camp, they were housed at first in a small structure behind Main Building—sixty-four women squeezed into four small rooms; each woman had a space about six feet long by forty inches wide, an area the size of the average front door. The women slept head to toe (for privacy), dressed standing (side by side), waited to use the one available toilet (with dysentery such waiting seemed an eternity), and took turns brushing their teeth at the only sink.

“The close proximity to so many people—even in the army you had more privacy,” said Alice Hahn. “There wasn’t any room to read a book at night or do any of the other little things people like to do.”
⁹

On duty they ate in the hospital kitchen, but most of the time they were caught up in the one activity that consumed all internees—standing in line.

At breakfast they queued up to get their meal tickets verified, then queued up again to get a ladle full of mush and a weak cup of coffee or tea or some other anemic simulacrum. After breakfast they lined up at tin troughs to do their laundry. (The nurses adopted the camp custom of soaking their clothes in buckets overnight to loosen the dirt, which saved soap and cut down on scrubbing and waiting time.) They strung a clothesline near their quarters and assigned one of their number to sit guard over the drying garments, lest one of the camp’s chronic looters make off with their clothes. In the afternoon they queued up again to buy supplies. Then came dinner and more waiting as the men on the serving line slowly ladled out vegetable soup or vegetable stew. Finally came bedtime and the last lines of the day, these to brush one’s teeth or use the toilet.

“How can I best describe my three years at STIC?” said Sallie Durrett, “waiting, waiting in a long line for a meager meal two times a day, waiting in line to go to the bathroom or take a shower, waiting in the hot sun for three hours for a half a cup of salt, waiting in line to wash my clothes in the tin trough, waiting for some word from home.”
¹⁰

The interminable lines, the incessant crowds and the dunning monotony of the long hot days affected everyone differently.

Hattie Brantley concentrated on “keeping body and soul” together: “By the time you filled your day with four hours of duty and washed your clothes, dried them and did a few things for yourself—read a book—the day was gone. They passed with amazing rapidity. And every day we said, ‘Help is on the way; it’ll be here tomorrow.’ We lived on faith and hope and trust and good prayers from home.”
¹¹

Anna Williams took classes in public speaking and joined a chorus: “I did different things to keep my mind busy. I didn’t get upset. I wouldn’t let myself worry ahead on things.”
¹²

Bertha Dworsky held on to hope—“If you gave up hope, you would have just folded up and died”—and a good book. She liked all-consuming novels, such as
Gone with the Wind
, but soon noticed that fiction had its own discomforts. “Every time you’d start reading, the people in the book were always eating or drinking or doing something that made you always think of food.”
¹³

And food was often all they thought about. Their subsistence diet left them continuously hungry and in many cases weak. “We could only work three or four hours a day on the amount of food we were getting,” said Rose Rieper.
¹⁴

Each meal revolved around one of three main dishes:
lugao
, a watery
rice concoction;
moogow
, a vegetable ragout that only occasionally had a few slivers of caraboa in it; and finally, in Anna Williams’s words, a “weevily cornmeal,”
¹⁵
which, according to Frances Nash, “tasted like wallpaper paste.”
¹⁶

If they had money the women would queue up to buy a duck egg or a little caraboa milk, a papaya, perhaps, or a banana. “I traded the cigarettes I got for cans of milk,” said Ann Mealor.
¹⁷

They also struggled to keep themselves clothed. On duty the nurses worked in their khaki blouses and skirts—a uniform without insignia. Off duty they wore whatever they could scrounge. “We made underwear out of worn outer clothing,” said Eunice Young. “I wore wooden shoes for three years to save my one pair of leather shoes for the day of liberation. I thought it would take only a few weeks or months at the most.”
¹⁸
When their clothing developed holes or tears, they covered them with embroidery floss, sometimes stitching monograms or meal-ticket numbers and even scenes from camp over the holes. When their pajamas and housecoats began to wear out, they made new ones out of bedspreads and curtains and towels.

At night they slept on
bejucos
, rough-hewn cots of woven fibers or reeds or sometimes wooden slats. These natural materials allowed for good ventilation in a tropical climate, but they also invited bedbugs. “Every morning you poked through the weaving of your bed looking for them but they didn’t come out until nightfall,” said Cassie.
¹⁹
The women tried pouring hot water or kerosene on their cots, but nothing worked. “If you’ve ever been bitten by [bedbugs], it’s pretty awful,” said Earlyn Black. They “were our biggest enemy.”
²⁰

Mostly the women tried to keep busy, to distract themselves from the heat and the crowds, the vermin and the deprivation. “The people who went down the fastest were those who didn’t have anything to do,” said Ruby Motley. “If you had work to do, you were so much better; you didn’t have time to think—that’s what ruins you.”
²¹

Eunice Young and a friend decided to volunteer for the night shift at the hospital. No lines for them, no crowds. In the morning, at the end of their shift, they ate in the hospital mess hall, then went to bed in a small but quiet dormitory set aside just for the night staff. “At night we’d wake up, eat the evening meal and go back on duty. That way we didn’t have to fret about what was going on in the camp—what the Japs had been up to that day, who had been taken out and brought back, all the petty things that can go on in prison camp. The secret to being a survivor is to keep busy.”
²²

The other internees worked too, of course, and the camp rule that everyone had to spend at least two hours a day laboring for the commonweal produced some interesting, if incongruous, scenes—society matrons up to their elbows in rice and cornmeal looking for worms and weevils … bank presidents scrubbing urinals and toilets … business executives wielding picks and shovels in sanitation trenches or reclaiming landfill for a garden. Most accepted their new station with equanimity, but several, those to whom the status life was everything, seemed to lose, along with their identity, the will to live. They walked around camp looking pale, dirty and disheveled. A few even refused to get out of bed and after a short time appeared at the hospital with intestinal maladies, heart problems and other complaints characteristic of chronic depression, anxiety and emotional distress.

Imprisonment, in fact, took its toll on everyone. Jammed together on queues and in quarters much too small to accommodate them, the internees lost their psychological space and thus their individuality. In the shower, for example, people washed in groups, circling under a spray head. “You stood there in front of everybody,” said Gwendolyn Henshaw. “You had no privacy, so you just kind of close your eyes, and pretty soon you just kind of keep closing down and closing down because you can’t stand that stuff.”
²³

To Sally Blaine, the shower circle, with eight or so women rotating under a sprinkle of water, seemed like a kind of human merry-go-round, and when she lost her inhibitions and began to study the figures on this impromptu carousel, she noticed that one of them, a determined smoker, had found a way to have her morning cigarette while she washed herself. (As the woman stepped under the water, she would stick out her lower lip and tilt the cigarette straight up, out of the way, a neat maneuver that allowed her to lather, wash, rinse and rotate under the sprinkle of water without missing a puff.)