Letters Across the Sea Genevieve Graham (best inspirational books .TXT) 📖

I cleared my throat, determined to go on. “Do you remember anything about that battle?”

He looked away. “I do.”

He shut down so quickly it was like a door slamming. I moved on, hoping Ian would get those details from one of the younger soldiers.

“Where were you taken?”

“North Point Camp near Victoria, Hong Kong. It had been a refugee camp to begin with. A few months later we were moved to Sham Shui Po in Kowloon. That place was originally built as a British army barracks, and it’s where we’d stayed when we first arrived in Hong Kong in November ’41.” He smiled to himself. “Funny to think of how nice it was back then. Big, comfortable, fairly modern. When we returned to it as POWs, there was little left of it besides badly cracked walls.”

He looked tempted to stop speaking again, so I asked him to describe the camp for me. I had found that men opened up more when they talked about physical attributes.

“Sham Shui Po had two main barracks with fourteen huts in each. Not nearly enough room for all of us prisoners. I don’t think they’d ever imagined capturing so many men. The place was surrounded by ten-foot, electrified, barbed wire fences connected by guard towers. During the initial invasion, the place had been bombed, then the local Chinese had ransacked it and removed all the windows and wood. We ended up using metal roofing material as shutters to try and keep out the rain.”

I scribbled away on my notepad, not wanting to miss a single detail. “What about the food?”

He winced. “All we were fed was watery, mouldy rice. Two meals a day of it, occasionally flavoured by rat droppings and maggots. It went right through us, if you’ll pardon my saying. The whole camp was a walking boneyard. If I ever see another grain of rice in my life, it’ll be too much.”

As he spoke, I couldn’t help but remember the POW camp Ian and I had visited in Bowmanville, with its daily fresh bread and healthy vegetables, of the lake where they swam without guards.

“Sometimes the Chinese people hiding nearby would try to pass food through the fence to us,” he said, his eyes losing focus. “That wasn’t allowed. The Japanese made sure they never tried it twice.”

I wanted to know everything, but the sea of pain in his eyes was too deep for me to cross.

“And where did you sleep?” I asked.

“We had cots of a sort, but usually we chose the cement floor instead. Between the bed bugs, the fleas, and the lice, we figured we were better off sleeping on the ground. But then we had to worry about the red ants and tarantulas, the scorpions, the termites, and the rats.” He seemed briefly lost in his memories. “Those rats tasted just like chicken, and they were big as cats.”

I swallowed the bile that had shot up my throat, and he caught himself.

“We didn’t have those too often, though. Rats are greasy, and all that grease was hard on a body if it hadn’t eaten anything but rice in months. Speaking of which, don’t ask me about the latrines. Trust me on that. When we got there, there weren’t any. And we didn’t have any tools to dig them.”

I wished that what he described were shocking to me, but by that point, I’d read so many reports on the conditions of the camps, I was able to steel myself for the most part. But there was one piece of research I needed him to verify. I’d come across a list of regulations for prisoners, and the black ink on the page had detailed exactly which crimes would result in an immediate execution by the Japanese. I wasn’t sure if the regulations had been exaggerated for intimidation purposes, or if they were true.

I flipped over a page in my notepad. “I’ve read that the Japanese were strict disciplinarians. Is that right?”

He huffed. “That’s a charitable way to put it.”

I looked up, allowing him to fill the silence. Before he spoke again, he took a long swallow of his scotch.

“Personally, I wouldn’t call them disciplinarians. I’d call them sadistic monsters. We weren’t allowed to talk without permission. We couldn’t take a step without an order to do so. Even using more than two blankets was forbidden.”

Those were a few of the crimes I’d read on the list. “And what happened if you did?”

He frowned slightly. “You sure you want to hear about that, Miss Ryan?”

“As you said, Sergeant Cox, that’s what we’re here for. To tell Canadians the truth of what happened over there.”

His voice lowered. “Okay. I’ll tell you about my friend, Albert. One day he picked up a used cigarette butt—we never could get full cigarettes—and one of the Kempeitai—that’s what the guards were called—stormed over and whipped it out of his mouth. Well, my friend was pretty determined. He picked up that butt again then stared down the Jap while he lit it, like he was daring him. Albert was gutsy, but incredibly stupid.” He took a breath, stared into his drink. “He was damn near beaten to death after that, then he was staked out in the yard for a week. We weren’t allowed anywhere near him, and nobody fed him. He got gangrene in his hands and feet from the beatings. They put him in the hospital building after that—of course they wouldn’t ever give us medicine, so I don’t know why they bothered—and he died two days later.”

My stomach rolled, thinking of Arnie. “Unspecified illness” was how his death had been listed. “What would have happened if anyone had gone to help Albert?”

“Nobody was that stupid.” He took a big pull of his drink. “Once you see a man’s head chopped off, you learn to obey orders.”

My pen stilled in my hand, and I forced myself to ask, “Did that happen often?”

He nodded. “One time, after one of the guys tried to escape, they