Manila — THE flight from San Francisco to Manila seemed endless, even though my mother had treated us to business class and its bedlike chairs, parade of meals and free-flowing champagne.
More than 60 years ago, my mother, Leanne Blinzler Noe, had traveled the same route by ship -- taking 18 days instead of 13 hours. That realization was the first of many on a two-week tour last spring to my mother's childhood home in the Philippines, a place where she had run free across the Baguio Hills, learned to speak Tagalog, eaten the world's best mangos -- and where she was a prisoner during World War II.
Her best friends in the prison camp, Dorothy Mullaney Brooks of Las Vegas and Connie Ford of Grass Valley, Calif., and a group of about 50 former soldiers and other Americans who had some connection to the Philippines during the war -- had joined us on this trip. Because of them, this tour of battlefields and memorials on the 60th anniversary of their liberation became indelibly intertwined with their memories, creating for me a personal sketch of the war in the Philippines.
Before we left the U.S., Mom had said she was reluctant to return. "How was my childhood so different from others?" she had asked self-effacingly.
Manila before the war
FORESTS of high-rises and smog-clouded, car-clogged streets dominate Manila, a sprawling metropolis with a population of 10.9 million. Group members said the capital looked nothing like the one they had known before the war. Then, Manila was called the Pearl of the Orient, an elegant city with broad, tree-shaded boulevards. That city was largely destroyed in World War II, changing the lives of my grandfather, mother and aunt.
On Jan. 2, 1942, the first Japanese soldiers arrived here. Thousands of civilians -- executives of U.S. companies, ship passengers, diplomats, journalists and my grandfather, a mining engineer -- were rounded up, told to pack food and clothes for three days, then taken to the University of Santo Tomas in the heart of Manila, where they were imprisoned for the rest of the war. My grandmother had died several years earlier, and my mother, who was then 9, and her younger sister, Ginny, lived safely for a time in a Manila boarding school run by German nuns. But in March 1944, they too were taken to Santo Tomas, each carrying a suitcase containing their sparse belongings.
