This is a true story of a young American girl and her family, who were prisoners of the Japanese Army, during the Second World War, in Manila, Philippines.  They were interned in Santo Tomas, prison camp #1, for over three years.

This is her story...

Sascha Jean Jansen was born and raised in the Philippines, on her grandfather's sugar plantation, Calamba Sugar Estates. Her father was German/Hawaiian and her mother was German/Tahitian. She had polio when she was 18 months old and every year and a half went to San Francisco for re-constructive surgery on her legs. She had to have physical therapy and get fitted for the new braces after each surgery. Her father would meet them in the States and the family would go on vacation.

June, 1939 -

I was seven years old and my parents took me and my sister on a vacation to Europe to visit my father's relatives. We were left with my nursemaid (my Filipino "amah") at the home of my aunt and uncle in Speyer, Germany, while my parents went to different places in Europe on business and vacationing.

Unfortunately, my sister and I didn't have our own passports since we were on mother's passport. Normally this would be fine, but the war was threatening, and while my mother was in Genoa getting ready to come and pick us up so we could take the boat to New York, the borders closed. We couldn't get out of Germany and my parents couldn't get to us.

They decided that my cousin would take us and our "amah") to Switzerland, right on the border, and somehow, we would be able to meet my father in Basel. We spent a terrifying time on the train where we weren't allowed to speak English because there were soldiers everywhere and if they found out that we were foreigners, without passports, we'd be arrested. We spent hours every day changing trains, dodging officials, hiding here and there, so we wouldn't be detected.

I don't know how we did it, but we got to my father in Basel and he was able to get us back to Genoa by having my mother hide out in a hotel room, while he got us through customs with her passport. We were booked on the Contessa de Savoia and had loaded all our baggage on it, when we found out that it wouldn't sail all passenger ships were cancelled. My father was very resourceful, however, and discovered a freighter, the President Monroe, which would be sailing the next day. He negotiated our passage using his prestige as a frequent commercial shipper of the sugar from his plantation with the President Lines. The amazing thing was, he even got an agreement to take another 250 displaced people who'd been left stranded in Europe and couldn't get home. They were all sitting around in the port at the docks and father said, "Well, if you're going to take us, what about all these people who have no way to get home?" The shipping agent said, "Definitely not, we have no accommodations for passengers. This is a freighter!"

My father insisted and everyone agreed that we'd all sleep on the deck, just to get back home. This was one of those rough Atlantic crossings, but we did it. We all slept on the deck and tried to stay out of the way of the seamen. My father and the other men took on the job of waiters to serve meals to these unexpected passengers. Halfway across we were stopped by a U-Boat, that signaled our ship to stop. The captain did not let on that he had passengers, so this was a dangerous moment. All of us were sent below and had to be totally quiet. There were some other children on board, and we were all scared, but we tried to stay as quiet as we could. Their crew could have detected if there were many people on board if we hadn't stayed quiet.

The U-Boat came alongside and this was a tense half hour. Luckily they didn't board us. They believed whatever the captain told them, and we proceeded on to New York. At the dock in New York, the press was there to welcome us. They made a big to-do about it, and we had our pictures on the front page of the paper. Of course we didn't have any luggage, but we were thankful we'd gotten out of there alive. We continued on across the country and took another ship from San Francisco back to the Philippines.

Life for us was pretty normal; the war in Europe seemed a long way away, but suddenly in late 1941, it came to our doorstep. The Japanese attacked, and the Philippines quickly fell. I was supposed to go to San Francisco again in early 1942 for the surgery and new braces, but we were put in Santo Tomas prison camp during the war, and by the end of the war, I had of course outgrown the special shoes and braces. My legs were as bad as they were when the doctors first started to operate. I had to start all over again after the war with more re-constructive surgery.

We had heard rumblings and rumors about the Japanese military aggressiveness even before Pearl Harbor. The Japanese took over Indonesia, Nanking, and Manchuria, so the attack on the U.S. didn't come as a total surprise. Their idea was to build a "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere," as they called it. They wanted to take over the whole Far East and then take on America.

Carl and Shelly Mydans were visiting us when the war started, a photographer/writer team from Time Life. They were doing a picture story of sugar plantation life in the Philippines, among other things. They immediately switched to being war correspondents and later were captured and put in prison with us. Later they were sent to prison in Japan and then repatriated. I suspect the U.S. government wanted them home to give crucial information about the Philippines. Carl was the first man into Santo Tomas prison with the liberation troops, in 1945. He was extremely important to the liberation.

The Japanese attacked Cavite, Manila's port, the same day as they bombed Pearl Harbor. (They bombed Borneo, Hong Kong, and Singapore the same day, too but not many people mention this.) It was Monday, December 8, 1941 (because we were across the International- date line) and I was in Manila, one hour away from home at my physical therapy session with Mrs. Shay, my amah, and chauffeur (also with me was Gen. Lim's daughter who had polio, too). We had to work our way back to the plantation avoiding rubble and refugees, and we could hear the bombs in the background. We were scared, but I didn't really know what was happening. The amah, and chauffeur were talking a mile a minute in Tagalog, but I didn't know what they were saying. I was just glad when we got back to the house.  We were waiting to see what would happen, and within a few days, the Japanese were bombing our plantation. We had railroad tracks to our place which were used for shipping sugar, but they were bombing anything that looked strategic and railroads were a good target. The U.S. Army was trying to defend the territory and even set up an airfield in our cane fields. They disguised it during the day and used it for some raids of their own, but soon this had to be abandoned and my father realized we had better get out.

After much organizing, we all piled in the car and headed for Manila. There, we managed to get a room in the Bay View Hotel with other American and British refugees. We got word that the Japanese troops were coming in and later had to watch as they brought down the American flag and raised the Japanese flag. This was a sad moment for all of us and the beginning of a long, difficult period, a different reality for all of us.

We were told to stay in the hotel and not leave they would come around for inspection. My brother was only three months old, my sister was three years old, and I had these heavy braces on. When they came, they made me wait on them and were crude and rough with us. They announced that the mothers with small children could stay out, but everyone else had to go to prison. My father had to go.

They put us in cars with eight other women and children and many of the amahs who didn't want to leave. They took us to the home of the Kneedlers who owned the Bay View Hotel. We bivouacked there for a while, and the Japanese officers took over the Hotel. The Japanese were going door to door picking up all aliens and putting them in Santo Tomas prison, but we were given arm bands to show that it was OK for us to go out and get food at the store. Presumably, we wouldn't get picked up, but they were very aggressive, and they would scream and yell at any of us in the street. My mother was worried and told all the children not to ever answer the door. One day, I opened the door when someone was knocking and a gruff Japanese soldier marched in. He reached over and tweaked one of my breasts and laughed.  I felt terribly humiliated and cried for hours. It took me a long time to forget the pain of that incident.

After that, my mother said we needed to move to a safer place, and she went to the Assumption convent nearby asking if we could take refuge there.  The Mother Superior said no, it would be too dangerous for them, until she heard our name, Weinzheimer. She remembered that grandfather had been lending them his beach house every year for many years for their annual retreats. Then, she relented. My mother said that all eight women and their children (close to twenty-five people) should come too and again the Mother Superior said no. But after more conversation, she agreed. Now, all of us came to live at the convent.

We tried to maintain a very low profile but it was hard. We all lived in one room and the kids were screaming all the time and some people were sick. We knew we couldn't continue there for long, and the nuns finally asked us to leave because the Japanese wanted them to reopen their school. My mother was determined. She went to a French convent, St. Paul, nearby and asked them for help. They hid us for a while with one other family, and the rest went into Santo Tomas.

The Japanese were starting to send their own nuns to teach at these schools for language classes-it was inevitable. I wanted to go to school and did so for a while, but soon my mother put her foot down. It was too dangerous on the outside.

Every two to three weeks we'd go and visit my father. It took a long time to get there in a horse drawn cart but we wanted to see him. We brought him food and supplies if we could. The almost 3,000 internees at Santo Tomas were allowed to set up their own government, a committee to manage their own affairs as prisoners of war. For the first year and a half the Japanese let the front gate be open to visitors once a week for a few hours, and many of the people on the outside and some of the former Filipino servants of the internees came and brought food.  Sometimes they could visit for ten minutes or so.

We survived outside for almost a year, and finally my mother said, we should go ourselves inside the camp. We felt we'd be safer inside since many atrocities were still being committed and many women were being beaten and raped; others were being brutally murdered. Sometimes my mother would send me to Mrs. Shay's with my amah for my exercises, and I had to pass a building that had been taken over by the Japanese soldiers. They would sit around outside and harass people going by. Usually I tried to go around in back of this building, but one day I saw that the soldiers were torturing a Filipino boy who had been doing errands for them. There was an old bathtub out in front, and they were drowning him. We were terrified and went running back to St. Paul's to my mother. After that we didn't go outside of the convent again.

We felt much safer inside the camp, and we were glad to be with my father again. Some people set up little tables to sell things that had been brought in from the outside-maybe a cigarette or some kind of vegetable or even a sanitary napkin (much prized by the female inmates). These enterprises were tolerated at first by the Japanese.

Each prisoner had some kind of job and worked at it for some period each day. My dad was head of the kitchen sanitation. The women and kids were part of the vegetable detail. At first we cut off parts of the vegetables as we did at home and discarded them, but when the Japanese military took over the camp, our rations were cut in half and the food was very inferior. Now, we got wormy vegetables and didn't cut anything off-we ate worms with pleasure. They were a good source of protein and filling. Soon we had no vegetables at all, so some of us were out of a job. The military closed the front gate, and no visitors were allowed after that. There was no milk and nothing extra for the babies. We got only rice gruel (lugao-watery rice) and not a full scoop of that. We'd have that for breakfast and an even smaller quantity for lunch and dinner with a watery soup concoction.

One time the bulletin board did announce "Duck Soup for Dinner! " That was true but it was kind of a joke. There was a duck pond in the back and twice we had duck soup. There were possibly eight ducks in the pond and they'd be killed to make the soup. But by the time you serve 3,000 people you have to stretch those eight ducks a long ways. We could barely taste anything in the warm water.

There were classes for the kids when we first came in, since there were many teachers among the internees. That was fine for a while; the classes were held out under the trees. Then the classes were moved to the roof of one of the buildings and the only access was walking up eight flights of stairs. I just wasn't strong enough to make it up there, and with the poor food we got, it used up too much vital energy to climb. Soon none of the kids went to the classes anymore.

My mother decided to have me sit down and write a diary of what was happening to us in the camp.  We always had to hide it, because the Japanese had forbidden that anyone keep a diary or notes on the situation there.

At first we were put in the big section of women and children with about forty people to a room on little cots that were placed right next to each other. It was awful. Kids were screaming all night and many were sick. No one could get any sleep and disease was rampant. The Japanese let some families build their own shanties to relieve the congestion in the dorms. These were built using palm leaves of nipa and bamboo, and they let my father build one for us. We grew patola vines and a little banana tree next to it, and it was very nice. Eventually we were forced to eat these vines and palm leaves so the shanty looked pretty bad at the end. We even ate the whole banana tree, stock and all. By the end we had cut most of the shack up for firewood.

I started my period in prison when I was ten years old, but I only had it for four months. All the women in the camp eventually stopped getting their periods because of malnutrition. Until then, though, we had to scrounge rags and diapers, fold them to the proper thickness, sew them crudely, wear them, undo them, wash them by hand, hang them up to dry and use them over again. Little wonder we were thrilled when our periods stopped. When we started eating again, after our liberation, it took some of us five weeks to start up again.

For everything we did in camp we had to wait in line. There were lines for food, of course, lines for washing up, lines for the bathroom, lines for showers, lines for everything. I was in charge of emptying the potty bucket twice a day and had to take it to the toilets and stand in line there. My mother's job was standing at the toilet entrance, handing out two little pieces of toilet paper to each person going in. Sometimes I helped her out there.

My father's job in the kitchen didn't mean that we could get extra food. He was in charge of sanitation and had to keep other people from stealing. He was very careful and very fair. We had to stand in line just like everybody else, and each portion was monitored. You had to have a ticket and if you were getting food for your family, the ticket had to be punched that many times so you wouldn't try to come back for more. My dad was always working the hardest, yet he would always give us kids a spoonful from his plate. He had a big heart, but we didn't realize he was suffering himself from hunger.

People inside the camp who had been bank presidents or industrial magnates were scrounging for food in the worst way. I saw them going through garbage cans for food and rummaging outside the Japanese headquarters to find something to eat. One lady had a two year old baby and would tie a rope onto it and lower it into a garbage pit to pick up food. She would point at what she wanted, and the baby would get it for her. My father told us never to do that. Some of the kids would go around the Japanese sentries (some of them liked kids), and sometimes they would give out cigarettes or treats.  My mother told me never to do that, so we always stayed away. She said it was a disgrace to beg.

Our day started very early with roll call. We were taught how to bow in the traditional Japanese fashion over and over again. When they called your name you had to bow correctly or get kicked or bayoneted or hit on the head.

People did a lot of strange things. When the liberating forces came into camp, Lt. Abiko was the Japanese in charge. He ran into the plaza and was seen ready to throw a grenade. A U.S. soldier from behind a tank saw this and shot him. Immediately some male prisoners saw what happened and dragged Abiko into a building. There they found the grenade in his hand and took his knife, slitting his throat from ear to ear and his belly. He had been so mean and cruel to all of us for so long, we were not sorry he died in this manner.

How did the war change me? The experience during the war never leaves my mind for very long. I don't dwell on it to be sure, however, there are daily occurrences that remind me of incidents during our imprisonment. For one thing, I always feel like I'm on the outside looking in. I especially felt that way when we came back to the states after the war. I met kids who'd never stopped being kids. But during the war, I had to stop being a kid way before my time. I had to be grown up and get smart at an early age. I had to develop a survival instinct. I saw people decapitated; I saw blood and guts on the ground, arms and legs and bodies. We had a game that we used to play, "I saw..." We'd play one-upmanship with other kids. Each would tell what "I saw" and find who could tell the worst story. The awful thing about this game was it was all true!

Even now when I go to work and see the coffee pot is almost empty, I will make a fresh pot. Taking out the old grounds to throw away reminds me of a time just before liberation. At the end my mother almost died. She weighed only 73 pounds, and she's 5'8" tall. She couldn't get up out of bed. She would have died in a few days, and my father decided to try one last remedy. He bought a pound of Hills Bros. Coffee on the Black Market for $350.00 in IOU form. He knew the coffee would give her strength, and he gave it to all of us. Maybe it would buy her time for a few more days. We re-used the grounds over and over and over again. We had coffee left over when the liberation troops came in, and we shared it with them. My mother survived because of it, I'm sure. She had nursed my brother until he was three years old, and he was always chubby, but it depleted her strength terribly. The adrenaline from the coffee gave her the energy to jump out of bed when those American soldiers stormed in to save us. This is a daily reminder when I feel I am "wasting the coffee grounds."

When I fix dinner and peel a turnip or carrot or potato, cutting off the ends to serve the best part, I can't throw any of it away. I save it in a container in the freezer, and when it's full, I make soup from it. These are everyday things that I can't forget. I developed a sense of self-reliance and a bigger imagination as a result of my captivity. I had to use all the stuff that was inside me to survive. How am I going to get the most out of this or that without hurting anybody else? I would always ask myself that. The self-assurance that I have today comes from those experiences. The ability to handle problems- when I'm faced with a problem, I go up and around it, I go in and under it until it's solved, and then I go on to the next. There's always a solution to every problem, believe me. I find a solution and do away with it. It's an intuitive or visceral response, I have, that's built in. Because of my experiences, too, I have greater tolerance and compassion for others. I can survive a lot of things and this instinct doesn't leave me. In my family, we all have a very high level of humor-we enjoy humor and have kept our sense of it. It has come in handy so many times- I can't do without it.

Manila destroyed during Liberation

Just before the war my mother wrote and asked my grandfather in the states to let us come to visit, because it looked like the Japanese were going to start something. He answered that it was a foolish idea and it was just her imagination-her place was with her husband. She and the children should stay there and not worry. When he found out what happened to us, he became ill and literally died of a broken heart.

Quite a few months before Pearl Harbor, we learned that the military dependents had been evacuated from the Philippines. Of course, this was a clue that something was going to happen. American and European businessmen went to the High Commissioner's office and asked what was going on and should they plan to evacuate too. They were told that there was no threat, but there was an elaborate evacuation plan in place should we need it-there was nothing to worry about. After the war, the High Commissioner, Francis Sayer, testified to the Congress that there were never evacuation plans. Roosevelt felt if we all pulled out it would undermine Philippine morale, and, besides, the President was more concerned with the war in Europe. We could have been spared all that. We were hostages of our own government, so the USA would look good. There are organizations working right now to right the wrongs that were committed at that time. This was a hostage situation by our own government all the way around. Make no mistake about it.

As a young adult, my sister Doris developed a severe condition of paranoid schizophrenia. In fact we had to suppress her hysteria by stuffing things in her mouth when the Japanese guards terrorized us-we did that so she wouldn't scream. She always had terrible nightmares for years after the war. My mother suffered malnutrition and most died and in spite of this she nursed my brother until he was almost three years old. My own leg and back muscles deteriorated early due to malnutrition and exacerbated my post-polio condition.

The except above is from a book, "Interrupted Lives: Four Women's Stories of Internment During World War II in The Philippines."

Copies of this book are available by e-mailing Sascha Jean Jansen in the link below.

Today Sascha is taking tours back to the Philippines, which focus on the POWs, who were captured in the Philippines, the forces who liberated the Philippines, and for those who wish to relive their pre-war days, in the Philippines.