Admiral Nimitz Historic Site National Museum of the Pacific War

Center for Pacific War Studies

Fredericksburg, Texas

Interview with

Katherine Ream Sobeck (World War II -Interned in Philippine POW Camp) July 7, 2001

Παγε 1 οφ 56 Admiral Nimitz Historic Site National Museum of the Pacific War Fredericksburg, Texas

Interview with Katherine Sobeck (Interned in Philippine POW Camp)

Today is July 7, 2001. I’m at the home of Katherine Sobeck. We will be conducting an interview about her experiences during World War II in the Phillippines. Mr. Lightfoot: I was very interested to hear about your experiences and I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about yourself; where you were born, where you were brought up, etc. Ms. Sobeck: I was born in Manila. I was my parents’ third child. My older sister was born in the United States. My Dad was in the Phillippines as a teacher in 1915 and was there for about ten years. He came back to the United States, married my Mother, got an opportunity to go back to the Phillippines and went. I was born in Manila. We lived in the Manila area, in San Pablo, Laguna until I was about three years old, and then we moved up to the mountains in Baguio. My Dad worked in Baguio as a manager for a mine and mill supply company and also managed M. P. Tranco Co., which was a bus and trucking company that did all of the transportation in the northern Luzon area all the way down to Manila. Mr. Lightfoot: Was it an American Company that he worked for? Ms. Sobeck: Yes. They were owned by an American of Dutch background. His co-manager for the transportation company was a white Russian, Mr. Zuganoff. I don’t know what ever happened to him. He did not end up in camp with us. Mr. Lightfoot: So it was somewhat of an international community that you grew up in. Ms. Sobeck: Yes. My whole family went to the Mary Knoll School, the Catholic Mission School, as day students until my older sister

Παγε 2 οφ 56 graduated from 8th grade, and then we all moved over to the Episcopal School, which was a boarding school where many of the students from the southern islands were educated. It was an Episcopal Missionary School, but you didn’t have to belong to the mission. Mr. Lightfoot: How large of a community were you part of – the international community? Ms. Sobeck: International community makes it sound as though we lived in fenced-in areas, and that is not true. We were just part of the town. In those days, in the early 30's, most of the Government offices were run by Americans. Our Chief of Police in Baguio was an American, but they were changing over to a Philippine Government because in 1935 the Phillippines became a commonwealth. I believe they were scheduled for independence in 1944 or ‘45. This mixes up all of the passport information for me when they ask me where I was born. They say, “Well, then you are not an American citizen, we have to have birth certificate, and all of that kind of stuff.” I say, “You can be born anywhere in the world and if your parents are American, then you are American.” I had the option of choosing Philippine citizenship when I turned 21, which I declined. The community – There was a big Army camp up there. It was an R&R Camp, but it was complete with hospital. The Army personnel from the Manila area, from the airfields and Ft McKinley all came up to Baguio, in the mountains, during the hot season in Manila, which is completely unbearable. That was a fluctuating population there. Baguio was really a very small town. It was their summer capital. International people – I think there were probably less than 2,000 non-nationals. It was a small town. We knew everybody – all the businessmen. My sister and I used to ride our horses in the High Commissioner’s backyard when we

Παγε 3 οφ 56 knew he wasn’t in town. Mr. Lightfoot: So, was it kind of an easy-going, relaxed...? Ms. Sobeck: Yes, it really was. Just years later, in this country, when our family got together with my Mother and her sister, my siblings and my cousins, we talked about the things we used to do and my Mother was aghast that we did these things and she didn’t know about them. We did have rules. If we went out away from the house, out of the yard, walking down the paths and into town, or anywhere else, we had to go by twos. I’ve had those rules for my kids in the mountains. It is just natural. My sister and I had ponies and we rode everywhere. We rode to the Country Club and got the Sunday paper every Sunday. Mr. Lightfoot: Did your family have much contact with the military? Ms. Sobeck: Yes. We had a lot of friends our age. My sister and I used to ride over to Camp John Hay to visit the Denckers. My Dad’s sister came over as an intern at St. Luke’s Hospital, and she met and married a man in the military at Ft McKinley, but continued her medical practice. She had an office in Manila and an office in Baguio. When they came up for the summer to avoid the weather in Manila she would open her practice in Baguio. We rode to their house. I also used to ride my horse over to Camp John Hay every Saturday to see the Eye Doctor. There was no Eye Doctor in town and I had chronic conjunctivitis that needed attention. It was very acute so the Army Eye Doctor took care of that for me. Mr. Lightfoot: That is interesting. Were the Army medical facilities open to you, or was this a favor they did for the family? Ms. Sobeck: I think this was because he was a specialist that wasn’t available. I doubt that they would have done it for the ordinary Philippine citizen. They would have had to have known somebody to contact to get into this.

Παγε 4 οφ 56 Mr. Lightfoot: But there was cooperation between the U.S. Military and the U.S. civilian community that was there. Ms. Sobeck: Yes. Mr. Lightfoot: Did you sense that there was any tension with Japan? Ms. Sobeck: That is funny because we had a lot of contact with local Japanese. The fellow who built our house, actually he was our first camp commandant. He was a carpenter. He built our house and he also worked for Baguio Gold Mine as a carpenter. One of the other fellows who ended up in our camp administration was Suda, who was the photographer for the Japanese Bazaar. I know that there was some undercurrent, but I really didn’t feel it. My older sister felt that there was something going on, but I don’t think that my parents had any thought that something would really come about like the war. Actually, my Dad’s sister, who married the military man, he was in the Quartermaster Corps. He had retired just before Pearl Harbor and they were packing their things. A lot of their furniture was all boxed with their names stamped on it – Major Allen. When Pearl Harbor occurred, at the same time they were bombing in the Phillippines. They landed in the Phillippines and we suddenly knew that there was really major problems here, and Mom had all of us kids help in the uncrating of Beulah’s furniture, put it around our house and we had a can of black paint and we had to paint out the “Major H. H. Allen” on all of the wood so that they would not come in and feel that we were involved with the Army. Here he was retired, ready to come back to the United States, and he was back in the Army and sent to Bataan. I don’t know if this poor guy had ever fired a rifle in his life. He did not survive. Mr. Lightfoot: When was the first that you can remember hearing about Pearl Harbor? Do you remember where you were when you heard there had actually been an attack?

Παγε 5 οφ 56 Ms. Sobeck: When we went to school. I want to say something here. December 7th is my birthday. They had no right to start a war on my birthday! However, in the Phillippines it was December 8th when Pearl Harbor was bombed. That was in the “wee” hours of our morning, so I think that my Dad knew about it. Somebody must have called him before we left for school in the morning. He used to drive us to school and drop us off. There was a little bit of talk and we were dropped off at school, and because it was an Episcopal school, you have chapel every morning before you started school. As soon as we came out of the chapel, there were planes flying over. We looked up, and “Hey, airplanes.” Yes, there was talk about Pearl Harbor, but nobody really knew what had happened and how bad it was. The planes flew over, and we looked at them... “Gosh, look at those, I wonder what planes those are?” Within a few minutes you could hear the bombs dropped on Camp John Hay. The school was notified, and then they decided they should send all of the students down into the trees at the bottom of the hill. My Mother had been downtown shopping. She called the school and said, “I’m going to come in five minutes and pick up my children, don’t send them anywhere.” She came by. We went home. I was worried for weeks because I left my peanut butter sandwich in my desk. Mr. Lightfoot: How old were you at the time when all of this happened? Ms. Sobeck: Twelve years old. Mr. Lightfoot: So you witnessed the Japanese bombing Camp Hay. Ms. Sobeck: Yes, that’s right. Then my parents had a bomb shelter dug into the side of the hill that we lived on. I do not do well in caves. They couldn’t make me go in. I would stand at the edge, but I would not go in. Mr. Lightfoot: That is interesting that they had a bomb shelter prepared, so they

Παγε 6 οφ 56 must have... Ms. Sobeck: No, they had it built then. Mr. Lightfoot: As a result of the attack? Ms. Sobeck: Yes, but it took them two days to do it and then it was done. To this day, if I hear a prop plane, this is what it reminds me of. There is a special sound of prop planes that takes me back. We never went back to school. Before Christmas the Japanese were in our town. My Mom and Dad discussed it. They decided as the Japanese landed at Lingayen Gulf, which is down the coast from Baguio--- the Army was holding them off there for a while. They couldn’t get Filipino drivers to drive all the way down to deliver stuff, but my Dad had two black Americans (drivers) and they were fearless. They were great guys, Johnny & Henry Curtis. They did the runs all the way down to the gulf. Then the Army, as they retreated, commissioned my Dad to go and blow up the arsenals that they had secreted in various mines. So he would go out; he knew where all of these places were. He would go out and blow them all up so that the Japanese wouldn’t get them. As they retreated through Baguio, they declared Baguio an open city and moved all the Army out and over the mountains to Bataan. MacArthur pulled out of Manila and it was declared an open city, which didn’t seem to slow any bombing down. My Dad sent my older sister and myself up to the mountains about a week before Christmas. He had his old friend, Sy Sorrell, take us up and leave us with some friends of my Dad’s at a sawmill up there. I was so homesick. I cried for the whole week we were there. The first thing we knew, everybody from the mines came up. So there was this big mob of people up there. My Dad and Mom thought about it, and thought that first of all – everyone thought this war would be over in three weeks or a month. Nobody thought it would last as long as it did. Then,

Παγε 7 οφ 56 when they decided it was not going to be over “next week” they decided they would rather have their young girls with them than out alone in the mountains. So they sent Sy back up to get us and we came home the day before Christmas. The Japanese were in town on Christmas, but they didn’t pull in the civilians until the day after. They came around and took all of my Dad’s guns and then they asked everybody to meet at Brent school. My Mother had the foresight to pack the big breadbox we had with sandwiches and food. We took a couple of changes of clothes with us. We were one of the few people that had food with us. When the Japanese had said that we would meet at the school, they didn’t think about feeding us. This was Christmas vacation and the school was not prepared to feed the whole international community. The only people with beds were the students that were housed there. Here they were there, and their parents were down in Panay, Mindoro, and places like that. So, what the school did was assign teachers to certain students so that they had an adult in charge of them. Some of them were first graders. Mr. Lightfoot: That young? Ms. Sobeck: Yes, and even the high school students were assigned teachers. Mr. Lightfoot: Do you have any idea of how many people we are talking about? Ms. Sobeck: Hoards. It did not include the mine population from the mines surrounding Baguio and it did not include the far out missionary schools. I have books that I can look it up in, but in my recollection there had to be at least 500 people in the diningroom that night. Then there were people in the other buildings, so there had to have been at least a thousand people that were pulled in. Then, obviously, the plumbing couldn’t deal with this. We had a talk by the Japanese Officer (I think it was a Colonel), on the tennis

Παγε 8 οφ 56 courts. He had everybody go to the tennis courts and he gave this big speech telling us that we were nobody and they were the Imperial Japanese Forces and we were lucky to be alive, etc. I think we were there only one night, maybe two nights, and then they decided that they would move us to the barracks in Camp John Hay, where for some weird reason, the Americans had collected all of the Japanese from town and put in this barracks situation, the women and children too. Looking back on it, it didn’t seem right. It is hard to know what is right at the time. They were there only a week, maybe two weeks. Then we were marched, except for the very small children and the very old people. They requested all of the Filipinos in town to line the roadway that we were going to be marching on. We had to carry whatever we had and walk three miles form the school through town, through Camp John Hay, up to the barracks where we were going to be staying. There wasn’t a Filipino on the road. Mr. Lightfoot: Can you remember what your reaction was to this Japanese Colonel giving his speech? Ms. Sobeck: I didn’t listen to him. He was a very pompous person. I don’t like pompous people. If they start out like that, whatever they say is not of any interest to me whatsoever. I don’t listen to them now either. Mr. Lightfoot: Can you gauge what the reaction of the crowd was? Do you remember how your parents, your sister... Ms. Sobeck: You know, it is funny because this is the thing that really stymied the Japanese. They could not understand why we weren’t scared to death, why we weren’t groveling. What we did was we made the best of whatever situation came long. It is like “playing the hand you are dealt.” You can cry your whole life through, or you can make the best of it and laugh and have fun. I think what we

Παγε 9 οφ 56 were doing at that time, the adults especially, was trying to decide what was going to be happening, what they were going to have to be doing. Should they be figuring out how to get hold of the money in the bank, or were these people going to give us beds to sleep on, were we going to be here very long, was the war going to last very long. It wasn’t until I was a Mother of young children where I thought, “How did these women handle the situation where if something happens to me, what will happen to my children.” Unless you go through that you don’t realize what they suffered. We had an instance in Camp John Hay -- there was a Mother with a baby, probably about 4-5 months, a colicky baby that cried. Everyone hated this person because the whole barracks floor was covered with mattresses and here was this baby screaming all night long. The sentry marched all around the inside the building all night long. One night he stopped and asked the Mother to give him the baby. Can you imagine what she thought? He picked it up, he walked it, his whole duty time, his whole shift. Everybody was so grateful. The next night he came on and he walked the baby around his whole shift. We were very grateful. Mr. Lightfoot: I bet. That is an interesting point. The Japanese came into your town just after Christmas, and then you were taken to the school – how obvious was the presence of the Japanese Army? Did they do anything to try to intimidate the population? Ms. Sobeck: We really didn’t see anything. My Dad might have, but he never said anything about it. I think the Filipinos were also mostly wondering what they should be doing and worried about what should be done, what’s going to happen. I think, it could have been a horror story, and it wasn’t. We were civilians; there was no military in Baguio at all. The missionaries that didn’t get pulled into camp right away were not mistreated. They stayed in their

Παγε 10 οφ 56 apartments. They didn’t go anywhere unless they really had to. I think that it was a relatively easy takeover. There were some Caucasians who were married to Filipinos and were Filipino citizens who were allowed to stay out because they were Filipino citizens. Some opted to come in to camp because they didn’t want to be out with the Japanese. Fortunately, my Dad was there for many years and he had a lot of friends among people like the Police Chief and the Mayor, and they helped us right at the beginning where the Mayor had gone up to our house and had sent in a bunch of mattresses for us and had taken what clothes he could and sent them in to us. Mr. Lightfoot: So, where possible people looked after each other? Ms. Sobeck: Oh yes. As soon as we were in Camp John Hay it was obvious that the Japanese didn’t know what they were supposed to be doing. The Americans who were in the Philippines – it is not like taking a cross section of a town or city here in this country. The people over there were engineers, teachers, professional people – doctors and lawyers. They were all well educated, or had been there for a long time and knew the ins and outs. They were a special group of people. As soon as we were in camp, a group of the big businessmen, for instance, got together and said, “We have to organize this place. We’ve got to have some food.” So they went to a young man who had just taken over the management of the local hotel, he was a Russian fellow, Alex Kaluzhny. They said, “Alex, since you are the hotel guy, you are going to be the cook.” He said, “Me, I don’t cook, I don’t know anything about cooking.” In some book I noticed they said he had been the chef at the Pines Hotel. He had not been the chef. I got this out of his mouth. He was the manager, but they said to him, “You are the only one who knows how much to order for “X” number of people. You are in

Παγε 11 οφ 56 charge of the kitchen. We will give you all of the help you want.” So Alex was in charge of the kitchen for the whole three years we were there. When we were rescued and repatriated he joined up with his buddy in Oakland and opened a little restaurant down near the water in Oakland. It did so well that he opened one in San Francisco, and then there was one in Seattle, and one in Los Angeles, one in New York, one in Tokyo, one in London. That was Trader Vic’s. He learned how to cook in camp. He did a wonderful job with what little he had. Mr. Lightfoot: How many people were in the camp? Ms. Sobeck: Within our camp the population fluctuated because of times when the Japanese would say, “Well, all of the missionaries can go out.” Then they would come back, and then the Mary Knoll sisters could go out, and then they came back. Then they would let the old people go out and then they would bring in people from the mountains, so we had between 400 and 600 people at one time. Mr. Lightfoot: You say, can go out.... Ms. Sobeck: Go out and live in the town. Mr. Lightfoot: So they would go back and resume as normal a life as was possible. Ms. Sobeck: Yes. Mr. Lightfoot: There must have been guards. Can you describe that? Ms. Sobeck: The first camp we were in, Camp John Hay, we were there from right after Christmas until right after the fall of Bataan, which was on April 9th. I think we moved mid-April out to the other side of Baguio to Trinidad Valley. There was a row of barracks and there was a large flat, I suppose a parade ground, and then officers’ quarters on the far side of the parade ground. Except for one of those buildings across the grounds, that we begged for use as a Hospital, we were kept in the three barracks. One large barracks was full of Chinese. The Japanese tried to keep the Chinese

Παγε 12 οφ 56 interned. They kept them in Camp John Hay and then when we moved to Trinidad, our next camp, they moved them and gave them a large barracks in Trinidad, but it was obvious that they really didn’t want to feed as many Chinese as they had. So they let the Chinese go into Baguio and go on with their regular living. Then we took over their barracks. We had nothing to do with the Chinese prisoners, not even their feeding. Very shortly after we were put in Camp John Hay, less than a week, they put all of the men in one barracks, and all of the women and children in the other barracks. The only exercise area was the space of double tennis courts and that was on the far side of the women’s barracks so that the men going to the tennis courts had to walk in front of the women’s barracks and go into the tennis courts. They weren’t allowed to talk to the women, although we did. They had divided the tennis courts so the men had one side and the women had the other. I can’t remember the men coming into our dining room, but one of the books written about our camp said that our dining room was in the men’s barracks, but it wasn’t. It was in our barracks because we went to school in the dining room too. I tell my students that I talk to here in schools, “You guys haven’t got a chance, we weren’t there a week and they had school – no books.” We went into the dining room and had lessons. Kept us out of trouble I guess. We had the dining room and kitchen at the back of the women’s barracks. This was an Army barracks. Most of the occupants used to be men, so their bathroom was two rows of toilets against the wall, a wall of showers against the far wall and faucets and sinks down the middle. There were no walls, no curtains, nothing. If you want to know what this does to a teenage kid – what it does is you don’t go to the bathroom till after ten o’clock at night after the lights are out. They finally did hang

Παγε 13 οφ 56 sheets in front of the toilets. Because the men were in the barracks the same time as we were, for about a week, what they finally decided was every half hour was a switch over. The hour to the half hour was the women’s time; from the half hour to the hour was the men’s time in the bathroom. I really do not recall ever taking a shower in that camp. Maybe I’ve blocked it out of my mind. I don’t know what the men’s barracks was like. The guard house was between the two barracks. The women’s barracks had a very wide outside veranda and there were people also sleeping in the veranda. It had a roof over it so that when it rained you wouldn’t get rained out, but the inside was completely bare when we came. Around the perimeter, against the walls, everybody put mattresses and then there was a double row of mattresses down the middle. They measured everything out and you could have the width of a mattress plus 27-30 inches on one side of the mattress for personal space. On our two twin-bed mattresses, we had seven people sleeping. That was when my Dad was there. When he moved we had less. When we first came into camp my Mother had a little Jewish boy that was a boarder at our house. He came with us until his mother could come and get him. Then, because they were German Jews, and the Japanese weren’t that “up” on the Jewish situation in Germany, they allowed them to be out of the camps as allies. When we had the two mattresses before we were finally able to get a few more, I think I slept across the bottom of the bed with everybody’s feet in my face. Mr. Lightfoot: These mattresses were put on the floor? Ms. Sobeck: Yes, put on the floor. There were no bedsteads. Mr. Lightfoot: You mention decisions made and you made reference to “they” made decisions. Obviously this is the Japanese/ Ms. Sobeck: OK, please tell me when I say “they.”

Παγε 14 οφ 56 Mr. Lightfoot: For example: The segregation – it was decided that the men.... Ms. Sobeck: I think the Japanese decided on the segregation. As far as what we were going to do about arranging day chores and things that had to be done, that was done by the committee in our camp, the group of businessmen. They had at least one Doctor on the committee all of the time. We governed our own camp from the very beginning. Later on there were elections, but when we first came into camp, the big businessmen who knew how to boss everybody around took over. They picked Alex for the cook. Old Mr. Kingcome was old, I think he must have been close to 90, and he sat in the women’s barracks and he rang the gong for breakfast and rang the gong for lunch. Mr. Lightfoot: Timekeeper. Ms. Sobeck: Yes. That was his community service. That was about all he could have done. That was good – it gave him something to do. The Doctors ran clinics. In this big barracks there were three rooms at the end that were separate rooms. Probably officers’ quarters when it was a military barracks. One of them was the medical clinic. So the community job for the Doctors all through the whole three years was Doctoring. The Dentist was dentistry, but he never had any equipment to use. He could repair teeth, he could file down, or pull, whatever. There were a lot more nurses than they needed. For instance, my Mother was a nurse, but she worked in the vegetable detail. She didn’t work as a nurse. All of the teachers in our schools had to be credentialed. One of the fellows who came in from an outside mission, not at the beginning of our camp, but he came in later and took over the responsibility of the schooling. If there was any question as to your placement in school when you came back to this country, you were to contact him and he would give them the information. He would write the

Παγε 15 οφ 56 school a paper and tell them. Mr. Lightfoot: So you had a set curriculum? Ms. Sobeck: Yes, that is correct. Sometimes we had a school building and sometimes we didn’t. When we first started out we had school in the diningroom. We had no books. The teachers were fantastic. It must have been very challenging to them. They were wonderful. It was terribly challenging to the science teachers at the high school level because they didn’t have all of the equipment, but they learned and they learned to do things from scratch. Mr. Lightfoot: Did the Japanese cooperate at all with supplies? Ms. Sobeck: When we first started out, no they didn’t have anything. Camp John Hay was really sort of a shake-down area where we figured out how things were going to go. The fellow who had been in charge of the electrical company in town was called on a lot to do work. The Japanese were taking him back and forth from town because he had to go to town to help straighten things out. Ray Hale was an electrician, and he did that sort of work. He also drove the market truck to the market. I don’t have all of the information on the financing. It vacillated so much. The Japanese tried to take everybody’s money away when they first came into camp. Of course people hid money. You couldn’t get anything out of the banks. They took over all of the banks. A lot of people had good Filipino friends who helped them. Then there was a group of missionaries who had been sent out to China. Why, when China was in the war, I don’t know. Once Pearl Harbor occurred they could not go on and they sent them to the Phillippines. Fortunately for them, they were sent up to Baguio and not to Manila because the people in Santo Tomás and Manila depended on outside help. There were too many. They depended on the Filipinos and Germans, and other friends out in the city to help them. In Baguio

Παγε 16 οφ 56 our camp was small enough that they could get by. They were very fortunate that they were up in Baguio when it was taken. Mr. Lightfoot: Do you remember being aware that there were other camps? Ms. Sobeck: We knew there was Santo Tomás. Mr. Lightfoot: Did you have any contact with them? Ms. Sobeck: Occasionally the Japanese allowed some mail to go. We had one time in our camp where they had found the people in the southern islands and brought them up to Santo Tomás. A lot of them went to Mindanao and were submarined to Australia. Some of them did stay on the hills in some of those other islands. A lot of them did come to Santo Tomás. There was an exchange of kids. The kids whose parents were down there were moved down to Santo Tomás and when they opened up Los Banios down in the lowlands they took a lot of single people. A lot of the young, high school, and college aged boys went out to Los Banios. There were so many people in Santo Tomás and they had a low percentage of Doctors. We had mega-Doctors in our camp. So, some of them volunteered to go down to Santo Tomás. My Aunt, who was a Doctor, whose husband was in Bataan, volunteered to go down. She had two small children, one very small child, and she also took an Army nurse with her who had been in camp with us. Mr. Lightfoot: So you knew all of this was going on around you? Ms. Sobeck: Yes. Actually, the Army nurse that was with Aunt Beulah was Ruby Bradley, who was on the Tom Brokaw show as one of the “unsung heroes.” Ruby died in May 2002 and was buried in Arlington Cemetery with full military honors. She was in prison camp for three years in the Phillippines and then she volunteered for the Korean War and won lots of medals. She sort of became the Nanny for Aunt Beulah’s children in camp. They took some of our Doctors. We had lots of Doctors. When we moved, after the fall

Παγε 17 οφ 56 of Bataan, which was kind of interesting because the guards had a ball. They were up all night drinking and carousing. In the wee hours of the morning, they came and hammered a sign on the tree in front of our barracks that said, “At last Bataan has fallen. At last, Asia for the Asians.” That was on April 9th. Mr. Lightfoot: What was the reaction amongst the Americans and the others in the camp?

Ms. Sobeck: Sad, but there was nothing that you could do. Fortunately we never really knew too much about the “death march.” A lot of those people had relatives there. After that, the Japanese moved us to Trinidad Valley on the other side of Baguio. There was an Agricultural school there. It was like truck farming there. The Filipinos brought the vegetables into the market in Baguio. The place they moved us to was a Philippine Constabulary Camp, so they had barracks, they had the facilities, and it was absolutely the most beautiful place you could have put a camp. There were mountains up on one side of us and you could look down the canyon all the way to the China Sea, 50 miles away. It was cool up in the mountains. It was a large camp. We had the barracks on one end of the parade grounds. The perimeter fence in Camp Holmes (our second camp) was just behind the barracks. There was almost no room between us and the fence. It extended all the way down, it took in all of the officers’ housing. There was a parade ground, and then there was a drop-off to sunken gardens and tennis courts, and then across from the tennis courts was a two-story building, which we took over as a hospital building. Next to that was another small house that we took over as the “baby” house so that the women who had very small babies, and who were pregnant and about to have

Παγε 18 οφ 56 babies, stayed in that house. Then there was another house near the gate that went out into the road, and that was used for various things and finally ended up being the Japanese Officers’ Quarters. It was used as the high school building for a while. There was a sunken garden between that building and the baby house, which for a while the terraces were used as a school too. We moved our school around. Up on the parade ground the barracks were at one end and then on the far end of the parade ground was the flag pole, and beyond that were the shop buildings. Behind the shop buildings, still supposedly within our camp, but not for everybody to go out there, just the people that were needed for the job. We had a cow, a couple of pigs, and some chickens. The eggs from the chickens went to the baby house. They split it up between four kids. They took turns. One egg would be for these four kids today, and the next egg the next day for these four kids, etc., so that the little kids were not deprived of necessary nourishment in their early youth. The milk all went to the baby house. They had a couple of high school kids that worked with the fellow that took care of the livestock back there. There may have been a couple of ducks – I don’t remember. My Dad was in charge of the shop. In this situation, you don’t do much in the shop except repair, but he was in charge of repairing the kitchen utensils and the hospital utensils. They had the electrical shop out there too. They had a grinding wheel, a hand-operated grinding wheel. My Dad repaired a lot of the stuff in camp, but also the Japanese guards would bring stuff for him to repair. He’d repair glasses, and there was one time when the Japanese guard brought his glasses, and he sat there watching Dad repair them. He was whistling and my Dad could not stand whistling. He got really angry and says, “Oh, shut up!” The guard shut up — instead of shooting him. He did a lot of stuff out there.

Παγε 19 οφ 56 He showed a lot of the young boys how to use coconut shells to scrap off the rough part and polish them up and then cut them out with the little jig-saws and make buttons or little brooches for their girl friends. He helped a lot of kids that wanted help, that wanted to know how to do things and what to do. He made knitting needles out of bamboo and out of umbrella ribs. Anybody that wanted them could ask for whatever they wanted. He also had lost so much weight eventually that his lower dental plate didn’t work. It was too loose. He, with the help of the Dentist, made a mold and melted down an aluminum pan and made himself an aluminum lower plate, which was wonderful except that he figured out what was wrong with it with his first cup of hot coffee. Aluminum is a very good conductor. The aluminum plate is now residing at the National Dental Museum in Baltimore. My family got together and decided that that was the only place that it wasn’t going to get lost. Every book that I’ve read about our camp talks about Dad’s aluminum teeth. He also spent a lot of time making things for my Mom and for us. He did a lot of brass pounding. He took a old copper fire extinguisher and pounded out a beautiful tea kettle for my Mother, which was lost in Manila when the Americans came in and we were evacuated from our camp there. He made a lot of little stone jewelry for my Mother and me. He made me a little jewelry box. He was a tinkerer at heart and he enjoyed doing all of this little tinkering. He pounded out brass spoons, which came in handy when we moved to Manila. He showed people how to make cups out of old tin cans using heavy gauge wire to wrap around the tin can and wrap around itself to make a useable handle. He pounded out little ashtrays for whatever little cigarettes that they could get. In Camp Holmes, we ran the camp as a community. Everybody had to give community service. The committee was in

Παγε 20 οφ 56 charge and even the school kids – the school age children had to go to school, but they had to give three hours of community work, either picking the bugs and rocks out of the rice, helping prepare vegetables, working in the camp garden (when we finally got a garden), helping in the hospital. For most of the time that we were in Camp Holmes, the Japanese separated the men and the women. There was a co-mingling hour in the latter part of the day, maybe between 5 and 6 o’clock, where they could walk around the parade grounds for a while, but they would say that you couldn’t touch. Then, they would say that they could only hold hands. There were several couples that managed to get around all of this and we had a couple of babies born later in our internment time. We were very fortunate in our second year, or in the later part of our first year of internment, where the Japanese brought in the missionaries from the school up in Segada, and among the teachers was Nellie McKim and a Miss Spencer. From my juvenile eyes, Miss Spencer looked to me to be about 85, and Nellie McKim had to be at least 70, and I’m sure that Nellie was probably was 40 and Miss Spencer maybe was 55. They both spoke Japanese. Nellie McKim was born of missionary parents in Japan, so not only did she know the language, but she also knew how to present it, and I’m sure she saved us very many bad situations by being able to present a solution without appearing to be pushing it. She was the “go between” between the Japanese and the Committee. I think that she was probably the most important person in the camp. She may not have realized it and she may not acknowledge it. Mr. Lightfoot: Were you aware of that at the time? Ms. Sobeck: Yes. Mr. Lightfoot: Can you remember any of the situations that she handled? Ms. Sobeck: There was always the business of not talking to Filipinos

Παγε 21 οφ 56 over the fence. They caught a fellow who was trading liquor over the back fence. He could have been destroyed. What they did was they only beat him up, and I think that she was head of the committee that talked to the Japanese. They only beat him up in front of the camp with baseball bats. Nobody was out in front to watch. You could hear him all over camp. I think that is one of the times where she saved the day. They finally let him go. There were a lot of little situations where they threatened to – we had two escapees who just walked out of camp one night and joined the guerillas. The Japanese were ready to take ten men out and kill them and they never got that far. It was not just Nellie, it was one of the Commandants that was there at the time. We were fortunate in our Commandants because most of them were civilians and people that we knew. The first Commandant was Nakamura, who was a carpenter who built our house, worked for Baguio Gold as a carpenter. Suda was one who was a photographer at the Japanese bazaar. Hikawaya was not a Commandant, but he worked with the Commandant and he was from the Japanese Bazaar in town also (pre-war). Then we had this wonderful teacher, Rikoru Tomibe. He was there for about a year. He was the only reason that we ever received a Red Cross package. They had been getting them in Santo Tomás, and he heard that they had some. I don’t think he asked anybody, he just took our driver, Ray Hale, and said that they were going to Manila. They drove down to Manila and he loaded up all of the Red Cross packages and everybody in camp got one. It was about Christmas time. It was wonderful. He also brought back a bunch of mail. He was replaced right after the guerilla incident, the escape incident. Mr. Lightfoot: They escaped while he was Commandant? Ms. Sobeck: Yes. He also interfered for us. They took a bunch of guys

Παγε 22 οφ 56 downtown to the Japanese equivalent to the German SS, whatever they called them and they were really badly handled. Mr. Lightfoot: This is a result of ---- Ms. Sobeck: Because of the escapees. They had them for about a week or ten days and he went down there and said, “OK, these guys know nothing, they are coming back. I’m responsible for them.” He just took them out of their hands. He was gone after that. They sent him up to fight. He was a teacher, not a professional military man. Mr. Lightfoot: Now these Commandants, were they civilians, or did they induct them into the Army? Ms. Sobeck: They must have inducted them into the Army, but they had been civilians. They were not professional military people. Mr. Lightfoot: They were there, worked with you, lived amongst you? Ms. Sobeck: Yes. The thing that they did to help us out, especially Tomibe, was that they would come and tell us, in camp, that “tomorrow there is a Colonel or a General that is coming through. Please don’t look so happy.” Mr. Lightfoot: Really? Ms. Sobeck: What are you going to do? You have to live your life and do things that you enjoy doing. You are not going to just sit and mope. If you do, there is something wrong with you and you are going to make your situation worse. So, especially the young people had a great time. He would say, “If they come and see how well you guys appear to be doing, they are going to cut your rice ration again. Be sure to bow and don’t smile.” He always helped us out in that way. I’m suddenly thinking – one of the community jobs that all of the guys wanted to be on, especially the young men, was the garbage wagon because we had to haul the garbage out every day. They would haul it out and that was their time to get out

Παγε 23 οφ 56 of the camp. Often Filipinos would put Gardenias on the bushes beside the road, picked, they weren’t Gardenia bushes, and the young men would bring them home to their girl friends in the camp. Also, our stove was a wood burning stove, so the young men went up on the hill, cut the trees and brought it down. Also it became evident that some of the high school, the late teenage boys were really not getting enough to eat, so they put them on kitchen duty so they could have the scrapings of the pots. That was special duty. People would like to have it, but they didn’t always get it. They did have little stoves in the barracks. We had a stove in the back of our barracks, a little kitchen, and it had a big surface. It was also a wood burning stove and you could cook your own little things. For a while we had a little store where we could purchase things from outside, but it was not a constant thing. The Japanese would say, “Oh, no more stuff coming in.” Then we wouldn’t have a store. We did pretty well for food for most of our time. It was a barely adequate diet, a lot of rice. The Doctors were concerned about the vitamins and not getting enough B Vitamins because the rice was all polished rice. My Dad figured out that we could make yeast out of rotten bananas. They had this yeast machine in the dining room and you would get your spoon of yeast. I didn’t get my spoon of yeast. Mr. Lightfoot: You didn’t like it?

Ms. Sobeck: The smell is enough to kill you. Also there was a problem with handing out bananas. They figured that the guy handing out bananas would give the good bananas to his friends, so my Dad fixed a machine where it was like a water wheel. The guy would put the bananas in and turn the wheel and you got the banana that came out next. I only remember two meals a day, but we had three

Παγε 24 οφ 56 meals a day until food got really scarce. We were fortunate because we were up near the source of food, where they grew it up in the mountains. Also, we were a small camp. In Manila, they had to haul it into town. We didn’t have enough things like coffee. They had coffee and submarine coffee, and sub-submarine coffee. That was when you boil the grounds again, again, again and again. Eventually it didn’t taste like coffee, but it was brown. Water was a problem because in the tropics you have rainy seasons and dry seasons and we did have holding tanks, but they weren’t enough to use freely, like in showers, etc. In the dry season we had to really ration water. Even in Camp John Hay, toilet paper was rationed. They had one of the older ladies who couldn’t do other things, would sit there in the ladies side and ask if you needed two squares or three squares. As far as I’m concerned even three squares isn’t enough. As long as we had toilet paper it was rationed, and when we ran out of toilet paper in the barracks we were in the bathroom was down the hill, outside the barracks. It was another building, but the walk way was covered, and there was a big climbing rose bush there. So we had our little square of material, you knew which was yours because you recognized the fabric. You used the fabric and washed it and hung it on the rosebush. In the dry season you really couldn’t waste water by flushing, what they would do is you get your bucket of water, you would bath in it, you would wash your clothes in it and then you would take it into the bathroom and leave the bucket in the bathroom so they could flush the toilet. Shortly after we moved to Camp Holmes the Japanese released the Chinese prisoners and the men took over the double barracks that was the Chinese barracks. Then the women had a double barracks that they used for the women with children, and then there was a single story barracks for women with older children, women

Παγε 25 οφ 56 without children, highschool and college age kids that were there because their parents were in the southern islands. That had a big veranda so that you could spend time out there in the rainy season and watch the rain pour down. Mr. Lightfoot: How long did the dry season last? Ms. Sobeck: In the Phillippines they didn’t call them long rains and short rains like they do in Africa, but they were like that. There was the typhoon season, which I think was about two or three months. Right now it is typhoon season in the Phillippines. Then there was a winter time where there were rains also, but it wasn’t typhoon type rain. Dry seasons were 2-3 months (the long dry season). The rains were not very cold. I know my sister and I used to ride horseback through the rain and it never bothered us. We were soaking wet by the time we got home. When we moved to Camp Holmes we had beds. We had bunk beds, and then the carpenters got really creative and hung another level from the ceiling so that you would have some floor space so you could sit and you could put up a little table and you could have some space to play cards there if you wanted to. There was a commingling time, but also in the evenings in the dining room, after the food was served, I think it was from 7 - 9 until lights out, the dining room was available for playing cards. They had bridge tournaments. By the end of three years the cards were worn out. You would wash them with a wet rag and then you would put some kind of powder on them so that you could move them, and you could hardly read them. Mr. Lightfoot: Now was this still segregated – the men from the women? Ms. Sobeck: No. Men and women could join in the dining room. We had also a “Flo Zeigfield” in our camp. He was a very colorful fellow. He said, “OK, I’m going to be the entertainment committee here.” He organized what we called lecture nights, Wednesdays

Παγε 26 οφ 56 and Saturdays. They started out as being lectures. We had a camp full of experts. We had lectures by a fellow who was in the submarine service for many years, and he was a decoder. We had a lecture by a geologist. We had lectures on astronomy. We had lectures on all kinds of things. We had a bunch of really creative people who put on little skits. They would take Othello and they would make it into a musical. No costumes or a suggestion of a costume. They would stand on the tables and we would sit on the benches. They would take the story of Othello and make it into a little operetta. Our Town was put on by the high school. It was perfect. No sets were required, only a couple of ladders and a couple of chairs. Mr. Lightfoot: Improvisation. Ms. Sobeck: We had a lot of musicians. We had this fellow who was a Quaker Missionary. He was a singer. He organized Barber Shop Quartets. He organized a mixed choir and a a women’s choir. They sang for any church services that wanted them. They put on any programs they wanted them to. Mr. Lightfoot: So this was every Wednesday and Saturday night that you would have a constant program of entertainment? Ms. Sobeck: That’s right. Mr. Lightfoot: Was that throughout the entire time you were in the camp? Ms. Sobeck: It got down to where it was just Saturday nights. We also put on a couple of Christmas pageants outside. We had these electricians and they created the lighting. That is all you needed. Dye a couple of sheets. We had the audience on the hillside and the nativity scene down on the tennis courts, and the choir to sign the songs. It was beautiful. It was so simple. One of the best ones was an Easter pageant in the sunken garden where they set up the scenes and then turned the lights on in the various places. We had

Παγε 27 οφ 56 the last supper, the scene in the garden, Christ carrying the cross, and then we had the three crosses. It was so beautiful. The Japanese came to all of these. They complimented us on it. I was only a teenager and I was crying it was so beautiful. Mary Dyer sang and it was absolutely gorgeous. I don’t think anybody with all of the equipment in the world could have done a better job. Steven Spielberg couldn’t have done a better job. Mr. Lightfoot: Sounds like a lot of effort went into this. Ms. Sobeck: Oh, of course. What else did they have to do? As far as schools went, we got the Japanese to allow us to go and loot the Brent School. We got as many books as we could. They said that we couldn’t have any American History or Geography, but it was taught anyway. Mr. Lightfoot: They wouldn’t allow American History or Geography? Ms. Sobeck: No. Mr. Lightfoot: Did they give a reason why? Ms. Sobeck: They were fighting the Americans. They didn’t want us to know anything about them. Even before we got any books some of the teachers drew maps in the dust so that if anybody came through you could just walk on it and nobody knew what you were doing. We eventually did get some of those books though. There weren’t enough. For instance, I remember we were reading Julius Caesar and we had one book. I think there were five in my class. So if I took a book right after school and did my homework, then I would hand it to Evelyn, who would do her homework, and hand it to June, who would do her homework, and give it to Carroll, who would do his homework, and everybody got it done. We had to do that. You couldn’t not give it to somebody. By the next day the homework was done, whether it was well done or not, it was done. I was telling you earlier about my sister’s boyfriend was David

Παγε 28 οφ 56 Bergamini, who after the war, ended up working for Time Life, who wrote a book about Japan and the Emperor and how rotten everything was. This was before everybody else was writing their books. The Government got him. He couldn’t get another book published. Mr. Lightfoot: The American Government or Japanese? Ms. Sobeck: The American Government. He was a very brilliant young man. He was smarter than most of the teachers in camp. The math teacher just said, “Here’s the trig book. David if you have any problems ask me the question.” He went through the whole thing. He went to school at Dartmouth on a scholarship when he came back. Father Gowen wrote him a very wonderful letter. The other thing you might want to know about was other entertainment was that we had three baseball teams, or softball teams. The Juniors, the Seniors, and the Missionaries. The Juniors were the high school, college aged kids. The Seniors had a fellow on their team who was very strong. Every time he came to bat he broke a bat. He would hit a home run out over the hill. So he wasn’t allowed to hit. He could play, but he couldn’t hit because there was a limit on how many bats you could get. You couldn’t run down to the store and get any. We had a little, single sheet, posted at the dining room entrance newspaper, run by Jim Halsema, who was the fellow up near Philadelphia. Mr. Lightfoot: So this was a men’s team? Ms. Sobeck: Yes, a men’s league. He would say who was playing who, when they were playing, whatever little tidbits he could put in, what the Committee was doing today, etc. We got our Red Cross packages. The Japanese made us go through each one. A select group of people had to go through each one and take out the cigarettes because on the back of the cigarettes was some

Παγε 29 οφ 56 nationalistic comment, you know – America First, or something. I think they were all old cigarettes. So they had to go through and remove that sort of thing. We got everything out of our packages. I don’t think they took anything out of them. On these Red Cross packages, not everybody smoked and so you could use your cigarettes to trade. They also sent some cloth, like that daisy pattern that I have on my suitcase. That is some of the cloth. Everybody was wearing daisies. When our shoes wore out, we used what the Filipinos called bakyas, which is a wooden sole with a strap over the toe, either leather or cloth. As far as the school books, I talked about those, but paper was in very short supply. When we firsts moved into that camp, down in the bodega near the warehouse near the gate, there were roles of target paper. Target paper is like very unstable newsprint, but we got them so that we could cut up little squares to write on and we used what pencils we could down to the very nub, down so you had just a little bit of lead and the metal piece with the eraser. There was no store to go out and buy the rest of your supplies. In Father Gowen’s English classes, he would take notes as he would ask questions and we would do our little recitations. He used one of those kids’ slate, those magic slates, and we tried to peek around and see what he was writing about us. He was writing it in Chinese. He had been a missionary in China for many years. Mr. Lightfoot: Very confidential. Ms. Sobeck: After Tomibe, as far as Commandant’s went, we got a professional military man. At the time he had what we called “shell shock.” Now they call it post traumatic stress. He was crazy. He would issue orders at the top of his voice and then turn around and issue something that was contrary to what he had just said. Most of our guards were convalescing from wounds. Most

Παγε 30 οφ 56 of them were Formosans who did not really feel that they were Japanese. Mostly, if they weren’t helpful, they didn’t mingle. They were very good to the little kids. I think they were all very homesick. We did have a fence barrier that was minimal for a while and then they put up a double fence where we really couldn’t see outside. There was one incident between the baby house and the officers’ quarters. There was a sunken garden and along the edge of the perimeter road there was a high volcanic rock and sort of a natural rock bridge. We had a little boy in camp who was hyperactive. I don’t know why they didn’t keep a leash on him. His Dad was down there with him and he fell off of this little bridge into the cesspool on the other side. His Dad just jumped right in after him. Then they were on the outside. He just jumped right in. I guess nobody saw them go until they came walking in through the front gate – “Hi Guards, here we are!” That was very weird. The little kids were allowed to go up the hill. My brother went up the hill. He found a cave with mummies in it. Mr. Lightfoot: Must have been quite a shock to him. Ms. Sobeck: He probably thought – “Oh, look here.” He didn’t touch anything. He told people, but he didn’t touch them. As far as children went, they had a ball, and Mothers really had a lot of help because they didn’t have to keep an eye on all of their kids. Everybody in camp was watching the kids. You couldn’t do anything. One little girl had been told so many times that we came from the land of the free. America is the land of the free. She got here and said that they had to pay for everything – how could they call it the land of the free. Mr. Lightfoot: This is after the war, when she got back? Ms. Sobeck: Yes. Which brings to mind, her Mother has saved a lot of recipes. Everybody tried to supplement their diet, if possible,

Παγε 31 οφ 56 because there just wasn’t enough from the kitchen. You ran out of a lot of things. So they would say use ½ cup of butter. If you don’t have butter, use lard. If you don’t have lard, use cold cream. Yes, they cooked with cold cream. Use flour, and if you don’t have flour, use this, use this, use this.... They just really improvised. Mr. Lightfoot: Did you ever eat anything with cold cream in it? Ms. Sobeck: I probably did, but I didn’t know about it. I don’t know. I didn’t eat a lot. As far as health in the camp, everybody was pretty healthy. There was a certain amount of dysentery, but we tried to stay on top of it. There was one incident of infectious hepatitis. I assume it came from the kitchen, from food. I got sick with hepatitis. I felt fine as long as I was lying down, but if I sat up I passed out. It was really miserable existence. I couldn’t eat anything and there was a lady in our camp, she looked like a gypsy. Her name was “Tex.” She wore those jangling bracelets from her wrist to her elbow. She had black and gray hair, long that she wore in a braid. She looked like a gypsy. She was the one who ran the little shop in the Pines Hotel before the war. Her birthday was the same as my birthday, so every year she would give me four bananas or something for my birthday. That saved me. When I was sick with hepatitis that was all that I could eat – bananas and condensed milk. I was really sick. We had one very bad diabetic and I asked Ruby Bradley, the Army Nurse, just within the last 20 years, I asked her, “How did Frieda get her insulin?” There was a certain period of time when the nurses were allowed to go out to the Notre Dame Hospital, a Catholic run hospital in town, and they had the nuns secret a certain amount of medications for them where the Japanese would never find them. This was where they kept the insulin for Frieda. That kept her alive the whole time. She was really a very bad diabetic. We had another really interesting character, Miss

Παγε 32 οφ 56 Leggett, who was heir to the cigarette people. Mr. Lightfoot: Leggett & Meyers? Ms. Sobeck: Yes. You would have never known. She looked like a homeless person. She had been in India for many years studying Theosophy and she was a vegetarian. She grew her own little bean sprouts. She kept little tin cans and kept them down along the side of the steps and would sprout the little beans and she would eat all of her little bean sprouts and all of the things in her little tin cans. I don’t know what she ate. It didn’t look appetizing to me. She was very thin, very thin. She was one who apparently used to get her rations from the dining room and feed a stray cat. This annoyed people that she was giving food to a cat. It was her rations, she could do anything she wanted. Others really resented it. They thought it was ridiculous. There were a lot of people like that. Actually when we were in Camp John Hay, after the first month we were there a couple of the high school girls got together and wrote a little skit. They didn’t call anybody names, but every time somebody came on and did a little thing everyone in camp knew who it was. Mr. Lightfoot: Do you remember some of the characters that were there? Ms. Sobeck: Oh yes. There was a little lady who was always talking to herself. She would wear a great big sun hat, one of those Chinese type hats and she would always talk to herself. She would be walking along and just talking to herself, answering herself, complaining, etc. It is probably not fair to talk about people like that. We did have somebody, but I will not give you a name, but even I knew that this guy was a bad person. He was a Doctor and had a prestigious position. He had a following because at that time a Doctor was above reproach. Whatever he did was great. He was a surgeon, he was a butcher. The only thing that I can say is that if

Παγε 33 οφ 56 you have ever read “Kings Row” he was a Doctor Gordon from “Kings Row.” He is the one who maimed almost everyone in the town that he didn’t like. This guy was really bad and put quite a few people in the graves. I feel that it is gone, it is done, and he is gone – there is nothing to be gained by bringing it up. I think that was the only really bad thing in camp. Ask another question. Mr. Lightfoot: OK. You told one story earlier about the baby who cried all of the time because it had cholic. I don’t think we got that one on tape. Ms. Sobeck: I think we did. I will tell it again. I was talking about Camp John Hay and how the mattresses were set against the walls all around the building and a double set of mattresses down the middle. The guards at night, the Sentry, walked this middle isle, up one side, across and down the other side and across. Mr. Lightfoot: He was actually in the room with you? Ms. Sobeck: Yes. On the wood floor, clunk, clunk, clunk. Not very far from us. The mother with her little boy, I think this was her first child too. She would try to calm the baby down and that baby just screamed at the top of his lungs and she could not quite him. We weren’t supposed to be walking around. She couldn’t get up and walk around. That is what would stop a colicky baby from crying. Mom needs some sleep too. She was just beside herself and everybody hated this. It really disturbed the whole barracks. Then one night the Sentry just came up to her and this was the guy walking with a bayonet and he asked for the baby. He motioned that he wanted the baby. She just knew, I’m sure she thought this was the end of the baby. She had to give it to him. He just took it and put him over his shoulder and walked around on his rounds his whole shift. When the baby went to sleep he came back and brought it to the mother. The next night he came, picked up the baby and walked him, walked him and walked him, brought him

Παγε 34 οφ 56 back sound asleep. Everybody was grateful to that guard. That was in the very beginning. Mr. Lightfoot: Were there many examples of that kind of kindness by the guards? That kind of contact? Ms. Sobeck: There was a certain amount, but we didn’t have a lot of contact with the guards. They would come through the dining room when we were playing. They really talked to the kids. They were very homesick and missed their children, loved the kids, gave them candy a lot. There was an incident where an officer from town came and asked the Committee if some of the young women from our camp could go and work as waitresses in the Officers’ Club. Up went all of the red flags and they said, “No, we don’t have any, they are too busy,” and from that minute the girls worked the night shift at the Hospital and slept during the day or were in school. They were not obvious within the camp as not having anything to do. I don’t remember which Commandant was there, but if it were during Tomibe’s time, he would certainly not have backed it up and he would not have told the Officers that they were available. The people in camp were very careful about having the young women, late teens - early 20's, where they could be seen. Mr. Lightfoot: As the war progressed on, was it noticeable? I mean did you get news to begin with? Ms. Sobeck: We had Tokyo Rose every afternoon. Mr. Lightfoot: So you had a radio?

Ms. Sobeck: No. The Guard House had Tokyo Rose. You could tell by what she was saying what the war was doing. Actually, we did have a hidden radio. The electrician had the radio, but he had to be really secretive because you never knew who was going to turn you in. One time the Japanese did find the radio, but he built another

Παγε 35 οφ 56 one. They would have him come and fix their radio in the Guard House and he would swipe parts and say, “I can’t fix this, this part doesn’t work. You have to get this part and that part.” So he would steal parts from the Guard House and build his own radio. We were aware of what was going on, but by the time it got all around camp, you never knew what was going on. There were a couple of times where we had a couple of scares. There was one night, in the middle of the night, all of a sudden there were bullets flying all over camp. We assumed it was the guerillas coming down, but nobody ever knew. There was no explanation. I’m smiling because I’m remembering that I must tell you one of the big entertainments in camp was that my Dad, in his tinkering, decided to built a Ouija Board. He got a piece of balsa wood and built a heart-shaped board and it had two wooden legs and then a hole where you would insert a pencil for the third leg. You didn’t have to have this Ouija board pick out numbers, you just put your hands on top and it would write. Horrors of horrors, I am so scared of ghosts, but I was the one that could run the board. At night I would hear something squeaking and I would think that the Ouija board was running itself. It was very funny because all of the missionaries in camp said, “This is the work of the devil.” They didn’t say “This is a hoax.” They said, “This is the work of the devil.” Everybody in camp, everybody, no exceptions, always wanted to know what did the Ouija board say today. The Ouija board predicted that incident with the bullets in camp. The Ouija board also predicted an American episode on a certain date, I can’t remember what day it was. It was in the Fall of ‘44, I think in October, and we were all standing at role call in the morning. We had role call every morning. We were all standing there and all of a sudden here is this boom, boom, boom coming right up the canyon

Παγε 36 οφ 56 from the China Sea and there is smoke down there. Everybody was so excited. The Ouija Board said that something is going to happen here. Then, about an hour after role call, one lone fighter plane came right up the valley, right over our camp. It couldn’t have been 30 feet above us, but it had a weird insignia that we had not seen before. It had a blue circle with a white star and bars. That was not the insignia in 1941. We were all trying to decide. It had to have been an American plane, but that wasn’t the American insignia. That was the only thing that happened that day, but it happened on the day that the Ouija Board said it was going to happen. Of course you had everybody asking “Who am I going to marry when I grow up” and all that kind of stuff. Everybody wanted to know what the Ouija Board said. We asked if there was going to be another major war, and it said yes. We wanted to know where it was going to be and it circled Malaysia and gave the year for Viet Nam. It did. I think it was a good thing in camp. I didn’t push it. I just put my fingers on the top. Nobody ever put a full hand on. Mr. Lightfoot: Were you the only person that operated it? Ms. Sobeck: I had to be there. Other people had to be there too. You had to have somebody else, but I was the one that had to be there. Other people tried and they couldn’t do it. It scared me to death. It really did. I was so afraid. My Mother was always into the occult. She thought this was wonderful and she would love to see somebody in the house. I said, “Don’t do that, I can’t stand it.” So our life in Camp Holmes was relatively stable. We had schools; we had graduations. For one of the graduations when my older sister graduated, my Dad made a ball and chain for all of the diplomas for that class. She is the only one that kept her’s. He took coins, silver coins, and made the chains and took a dime and smoothed it

Παγε 37 οφ 56 off and etched the year into it. It had a little stone ball with a silver peg through it for their diplomas. On one of the graduations, Suda, the Commandant, did a sword dance for entertainment. Mr. Lightfoot: Really. Ms. Sobeck: Yes. It was very impressive. Mr. Lightfoot: He was one of the people who had lived in the Phillippines before? Not a professional soldier? Ms. Sobeck: No, he was a photographer. He did the sword dance for the graduation. Mr. Lightfoot: Just for the record, did he actually wear a uniform once he was Commandant? Ms. Sobeck: Yes, they wore uniforms. One of the other people who escaped and was caught was my Dad’s friend Sy Sorrell, who took us up to the mountains. He was what you would call a squaw man. He was married to a Filipino and he was way out in the boonies. I don’t know what kind of work he ever did, but he was a loner. This was the kind of thing he could not live with. He got homesick, so he just went up over the hill and went home. They knew where he lived. They went and got him. We didn’t see him for a long time. I’m sure that they worked him over something terrible downtown. When he finally came back to camp, he was never back in camp. He was kept at the Guard House where he did all of the menial chores, the sweeping and everything where we could see him, but he could not talk to us. Mr. Lightfoot: I meant to ask you, you mentioned that there were two African-Americans that worked for your Father. Ms. Sobeck: I don’t know whatever happened to them. Mr. Lightfoot: They were not in the camp with you? Ms. Sobeck: No, they were not in the camp. They were our favorite drivers when we had drivers someplace because they had all of the

Παγε 38 οφ 56 jokes in the world. At Christmas 1944, and I should mention something about Christmas. Everybody in camp was busy the month before Christmas making toys for children. Just the little kids. We had our own Santa Claus. This guy was as Santa as you could ever get. He had the rosy complexion.. He had the most beautiful, white beard on earth. So he became Santa Claus. He would distribute the toys, or knitted things, or wooden things, or whatever people had made for the last two months before Christmas. We had church services also. There were a number of Seventh Day Adventists. There were a lot of Catholics. The Catholic nuns were interned for a while and then they were released. The Anglican nuns were there too. They must have been released too, but they were there for a long time. One of the things they did was teach all of us girls how to knit socks. To this day, I can knit you a sock without a pattern. They used various buildings that were available. We had one tin building that was an elementary school for a while and then it was taken over by the churches. Then they used it for living quarters, but I can’t remember who lived there. We had a fellow who was an active TB’er, so he stayed in a very small house by himself, very close to the barracks. We had a little tin shack that was our library building. When we went out to get the school supplies we got a lot of books. So we could check out books at the library. There were a couple of shacks where we kept the wood from getting wet for the stove. My Dad started a been sprout system there. When we had to move it from the sunken garden in the rainy season we moved to one of the Nipa shacks. It was really hard to hear because it was just a corrugated iron roof and very loud. On 1944 Christmas they suddenly said that they were moving us to Manila and anything that we could carry would be fine. We were told that we couldn’t take everything that we had, so

Παγε 39 οφ 56 they loaded us in open bed trucks. Mr. Lightfoot: How much time did you get to prepare for this? Ms. Sobeck: A day. Mr. Lightfoot: One day. Ms. Sobeck: Yes. So we cooked all of the food that we had. They cooked all of the rice, which was ridiculous because it spoiled on the way down in the heat. They butchered the cow. They butchered everything and everybody had a good dinner. They did it in two groups. One day one group went and the next day the next group went. It was right after Christmas. Everything seemed to happen to us at Christmas time. My Dad was so thin that the trip was absolute misery to him. It couldn’t have been more than 150 miles by road, but it was down the zig-zag trail. It was an old bus. You had to stop for this and stop for that and it took us from early in the morning until almost at midnight. Mr. Lightfoot: So you were on a bus, not a flat bed truck. Ms. Sobeck: No, truck. I said bus, but it was a truck. Mr. Lightfoot: Open to the elements? Ms. Sobeck: Open to the elements, open to the sun. They stopped at one place where we got down to the low lands and we told them we needed to go to the bathroom. They said that we couldn’t go behind the building. We told them the women were not going to do it out in the open, so they finally agreed that we could go behind the building. By that time the rice had spoiled and we couldn’t eat it. We didn’t know where we were going in Manila. What happened is that we came down into Bilibid Prison, through the front gate, through the area where the military prisoners were. They were all in their barracks. We went into the back section. It was walled separate from the main prison. It had been the hospital compound when the Spanish first built the hospital and it was condemned.

Παγε 40 οφ 56 The whole prison was condemned before the war, and then reinstated for the military prisoners. They still haven’t destroyed the whole thing. The Filipinos are using it for a jail. Mr. Lightfoot: Still? Ms. Sobeck: They are still using it for a jail. I can’t believe that. It is solid cement though. So we came to this empty building. There were some beds. They were full of bed bugs though. They were awful. We came in the middle of the night. We didn’t know that the mattresses were very bad. The next morning they all went out the window. We had a big bonfire. The sanitary system was terrible. There were some showers right under the guard tower. By then I don’t think any of us cared. Just get wet. The latrines were terrible and several people, including my Dad, worked out a water system where you got a drip into a half barrel and when it filled up it tipped into a trough and this length of trough was divided into four separate cubicles where you straddled the boards on either side of the trough and used that for the toilet. The kitchen facility was open to all of the flies and all of the dysentery and everything else that you could think of, but there wasn’t that much to eat anyway. There was a very minimum of rice that was so full of worms that no one ever picked it any more. They were almost no vegetables available. What people ate was soy bean curd, where they had used the milk, they had ground them and squeezed them and taken the nutrition out of them and you ate the curd. At least it was something in the stomach. Then there was the graveyard. It went from half of the compound to the corner and down the other wall. There had to have been at least 160 graves there and the well was right there. This doesn’t seem to have bothered very many people. It bothered me a lot because most of those guys died of starvation, but they had dysentery and almost anything.

Παγε 41 οφ 56 Mr. Lightfoot: Now you were about 14 or 15 at this time? Ms. Sobeck: I was 15 at this time. We had the big building that had originally been three stories. It was then two stories because the top had been destroyed so they just tarred the roof. We could not see out over the city because they put galvanized iron shutters, where you propped them open and so you could only see out the edges. There were two or three open cell blocks. They had a roof and a cement base and bars. That was great as far as the breezes going through. They commandeered those for the hospital people. They did an appendectomy in one of them. Mr. Lightfoot: Did you say that the Committee took them over? Ms. Sobeck: Yes, our group, not the Japanese. This is all our group. We took them over as hospital areas. They had an emergency appendectomy they had to do there and so they had to drape everything – the walls and everything so that you didn’t have the wind blowing through. Some of the people that survived some of the horrendous surgery that they had to do on the military POWs was amazing. I don’t know how they could have survived. Mr. Lightfoot: Did your group work for the military? Ms. Sobeck: No. They were on the other side of the fence. We were not supposed to have any contact with them at all. It was not fenced, it was a big wall. We supposedly couldn’t see them, but we could peek through this little crack and you could see them groveling for the slop that the Japanese threw out for the pigs. It was really heart-rending, just terrible to see. We were there for only a month. There was a lot of American bombing. We saw a couple of planes go down, some parachutes – not always. We had no contact with Santo Tomás, and it wasn’t all that far. We had our role call. We were asking the Japanese where the Americans were. We knew they had landed, and as a matter of fact, that was the other

Παγε 42 οφ 56 thing that the Ouija Board told us that they were to land from the east side of the island. Everybody said, “No, no, they would have to come in on the west side, the east side is not where they would land.” Guess where they landed? Anyway, we knew that they were somewhere, and we would ask the Japanese where they were. They would say, “Well, they are in Tarlac.” They were in Tarlac on the evening of February 3rd. When they said, “This is going to be your last roll call. The Americans are in Tarlac.” Well, Tarlac was still 50 miles away. They said, “We are going to be leaving, but don’t go out, you would probably get shot.” That was in the evening. Still light, but in the evening. All of a sudden, here the Americans tanks are rolling down the avenue outside. Everybody was so excited. The Japanese were up on the roof with all of their artillery, with their hand grenades and we were trying to look out the windows. I did see a tank come in. Those guys weren’t even in the tanks, they were standing all over the tops of them. They were obviously Americans. All of a sudden shooting starts and nobody slept that night. Mr. Lightfoot: So the guards actually told you? Ms. Sobeck: They were coming, yes. Mr. Lightfoot: The guards, themselves, were going to leave, you were going to be on your own?

Ms. Sobeck: Yes. So, on the 4th it was our turn. The 1st Calvary went into Santo Tomás. They knew they were going in there. I guess they didn’t realize that we were in Bilibid. The Japanese used Bilibid as a holding facility for the military POWs from Cabanatuan or O’Donnell. They moved them into Bilibid and then shipped them out on the “Hell Ships” to Japan. I don’t know whether the American Intelligence had that information. We heard, across the

Παγε 43 οφ 56 fence, on the morning of the 3rd, “OK Harvey, I thought you knew your way around here.” Of course no one could see. We were almost going to say, “Hey, Harvey, we’re here.” Nothing came of that. Then the day after the tanks came, you could hear guys walking around the outside of the wall. In the military section they were banging on the wall. The guys would say, “How in the hell do you get in here?” They said, “We’ve been trying to get out for three years.” They just banged their way in and then they found us. The military prisoners were in such terrible shape. They took them over to Santo Tomás and set up a field hospital out there. They took the worst ones there. Again, with my ESP, I was standing out in front on the steps, and one of the military POWs came to me and said, “Do you know Dr. Beulah Allen?” I said, “Yes, she is my Aunt.” He said, “I have a message for her.” I said, “I’ll get my Mother.” It was that Uncle Sam had died at Cabanataun, after the death march. I guess that she had found out some way before this because she did know. I did not know, but she had found out. They moved most of these guys to Santo Tomás. I don’t think we slept. That night the arsenal went up right close, within two blocks, of us. The whole town was on fire. The troops said that they were moving us behind the lines. They had as many vehicles as they could, but they were still going forward. They were still fighting. Then, all of a sudden, they have all these people that they have to move out, so they moved us back behind the lines to the shoe factory. Everybody coming through stopped there. On the way into Manila, the soldiers passed the Balintowok Beer Brewery. Between the Beer Brewery and Manila they did come by this factory and shared their loot with us. They had beer in every kind of container they could carry. I did not sleep at all that night. I don’t know how many people did.

Παγε 44 οφ 56 People say, “Oh, yes, we slept there.” I don’t think anybody slept, and everybody was so glad to give us their “C” Rations. It was like gold. It was so delicious. Even that solid butter, cheese-like butter. It was wonderful. Spam – oh my goodness, most wonderful thing on earth. As the guys kept coming through and going on toward the front, they took us back to Bilibid the next day, but the Filipinos thought we were gone and had looted everything. So we had very little. I noticed in the books that I have read, the comments of the people, and everybody laughs when you say this, but those guys were so big and they were so beautiful, so handsome, and their teeth were so white, probably caused by the Atabrine tan. They were just the most beautiful people on earth. I go to these reunions of the 37th Infantry, and these guys are just ordinary guys and they aren’t even all that tall, they aren’t the giants, but at that time they looked like giants. Mr. Lightfoot: I am sure. Ms. Sobeck: They were so nice. They were as glad to see the little kids and the old women as much as anyone else. They hadn’t been home for 2 ½ years. They were out in Bougainville and Guadalcanal, and they were pretty homesick too. I could never understand this, but they set up a bunch of bazookas right behind our camp. Mr. Lightfoot: An artillery emplacement? Ms. Sobeck: Yes. Mr. Lightfoot: The anti-tank gun where you put it over your shoulder and a long pipe, or..... Ms. Sobeck: No, no, no – the ones that were on the ground. Mr. Lightfoot: Oh, mortars. Ms. Sobeck: Mortars. Mr. Lightfoot: Oh, mortars, right.

Παγε 45 οφ 56 Ms. Sobeck: Yes. We used to go back there and we’d watch them and talk to the guys shooting off these things. I don’t know if my Mother knew where we were. As soon as we could we walked around the town. They were still fighting. We walked over to Santo Tomás and saw my cousins there. As soon as they got rid of the mines, we’d go out to the minesweepers. Mr. Lightfoot: They actually took you out on the vessel? Ms. Sobeck: Yes. Mr. Lightfoot: To ride with the Navy? Ms. Sobeck: Yes. You bet. Went out in a Merchant Marine ship and that is my first time I had a Butterfingers candy bar. We had a gay old time. Mr. Lightfoot: How many were you? Ms. Sobeck: My family, there were four children, my Mother and Father, my Dad’s sister was there. She was the one that was married to the military man. My Mother’s sister came shortly after my Mother came out and she married a German who became an American citizen. They had three children. So that was our extended family. They were in Santo Tomás because they lived in the low lands. Mr. Lightfoot: Well, you had pretty much the freedom of the city? Ms. Sobeck: If we needed a pass, they gave you a pass. We went everywhere we should not have been I’m sure. Mr. Lightfoot: How many civilians were there? Lots of you? Ms. Sobeck: The whole camp was there. Mr. Lightfoot: So, a few hundred people? Ms. Sobeck: Yes. Then, Santo Tomás. A few thousand people in Santo Tomás – five or six thousand. Mr. Lightfoot: So actually you are talking about several thousand people, not just wandering, but there and some of you were walking around taking

Παγε 46 οφ 56 rides on ships? Ms. Sobeck: That’s right. Mr. Lightfoot: Quite an adventure. Did you sense that you were in danger? Ms. Sobeck: No. We were Americans. We lived through three years of prison camp. Why would we be killed? Mr. Lightfoot: Right. The first tanks that you saw... Ms. Sobeck: They went directly to Santo Tomás. Mr. Lightfoot: They were 1st Calvary. Ms. Sobeck: That’s right. Mr. Lightfoot: So that is the first contact you had with Americans? Ms. Sobeck: We didn’t really have contact with them. They were sent to Santo Tomás, that is where they were sent. MacArthur did come to Bilibid to visit us. Afterwards, he did not know we were there. It is a good thing that we were moved out of Baguio because they had a big show-down in Baguio. We would have been eliminated. The other thing is, nobody knew that we were moving on the road the day we did. The only reason that there wasn’t any bombing by Americans that day was there were too many clouds wherever they were taking off from. We were just very lucky. Mr. Lightfoot: Interesting. So you actually saw MacArthur? Ms. Sobeck: Yes. Mr. Lightfoot: Did you get to talk to him? Ms. Sobeck: Not me. I have a picture of him talking to Dr. Skerl. Mr. Lightfoot: What was your impression? Ms. Sobeck: Of MacArthur? Mr. Lightfoot: What were you thinking? Ms. Sobeck: He was our hero at that time. Really he was the reason that they made that push to come in. Nobody seems to be able to tell, even now, whether the Japanese were ready to carry our the massacres that were ordered or not, but in reading Ghost Soldiers,

Παγε 47 οφ 56 the Japanese did massacre the whole camp of military prisoners down on Palawan Island and nobody can tell whether they really intended to do that with all of the other camps. Mr. Lightfoot: But the orders had been given? Ms. Sobeck: Yes, the orders had been given. Mr. Lightfoot: Now the 37th Infantry – where did you first make contact? Do you remember the first sight, the first conversation? Ms. Sobeck: It was that night that they came in and moved us out of the ... Mr. Lightfoot: Literally forced their way into the camp? Ms. Sobeck: Yes, that’s right. I don’t remember a personal conversation. We talked with everybody. Mr. Lightfoot: Who did you first see? What is your recollection of the first American soldier you saw? Ms. Sobeck: He was about 7 feet tall, he had white, white teeth, he had brown, brown skin. He had a big helmet on his head and he was so handsome. What can I say? As we waited our month before we were sent down to Leyte where we boarded a ship and left from Leyte, the guys that were around used to come in the evening and sit at the gate, just outside the camp. We could go in and out, but the soldiers weren’t allowed to come into the camp. We would sit out there and talk to them until late at night. Just talk about everything – where they were from, where their homes were, where they were fighting, how long they had been out, etc. Mr. Lightfoot: Have you kept in touch with any of them? Ms. Sobeck: When we (my sister and I) decided we were going to go to the reunion last year, we tried to get in touch with the fellow who was so “struck” with her, who she wrote to for a long time and we couldn’t contact him. We couldn’t find him anywhere. We kept in touch with several of these fellows for a number of years, and then as people grew up they were dropped.

Παγε 48 οφ 56 Mr. Lightfoot: The reunion sounds very interesting. Ms. Sobeck: It was. Very interesting. We did not realize that there were umteen chapters of the 37th. The one that was advertised in the magazine, Nora and I contacted the fellow in charge and he was so excited about our going. They were really very, very interested in what had happened to us. The hero of the Infantry is Roger Young, and they have a song that Burl Ives sang about Roger Young. That was from their battalion when they were fighting in New Georgia. All those guys knew him personally. Coming to this country in the latter part of the war, they still had all of those songs they were singing – “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.” The trip home was kind of interesting too because... Mr. Lightfoot: Yes, I would like to hear some details about that. Ms. Sobeck: To start off with, we were on Leyte for about a month. Some of the guys that we met on Leyte – it was at a convalescent hospital, 1st Convalescent Hospital, had been on the tanks that came in and some of them had stopped at Ang Tibay. Some of them had known us there and been shot up in the Pasig River. My Dad was very, very sick when the Americans came in. He was in terrible condition. So when we went to Leyte they had him at the Army Hospital on the other side of the island. He was not with the rest of us. The night before we left on the ship, the night before we boarded the ship, there was a party. We went to the party, and suddenly I had this terrible, heavy sadness. It wasn’t because I was leaving the Phillippines. Just suddenly I just felt that there is something wrong. I went to take a walk on the beach and cried, and cried. I came back to the camp and laid down on the cot. My Mother was in there and she said, “What is the matter?” I said, “I just feel this terrible sadness.” She said, “I do too. There is something very sad.” The next morning they announced that FDR

Παγε 49 οφ 56 had died. That was also the day that we boarded the ship too. It was a Dutch freighter that they had transformed into a troop ship. It was called the MS Japara. It took us almost a month to get to San Francisco. We were shown our bunks and I never, never, never went down there again. It was like going into the bomb shelter. My claustrophobia said that I could not live in the hole of a ship. I slept on the hatches at night. I leaned over the edge and watched the phosphorous of the wake, the flying fish. You asked me a question and this brings up something that I remember. You asked me about talking to the soldiers. One of the first questions we asked the solders was who the new President was. Then, who is the Vice President. Who is he? No one knew. Only the guys from Missouri would know. We didn’t even stop in Pearl Harbor. A lot of the ships stopped there but we went right by. We did see Diamondhead. We went by close enough. We went straight into San Francisco. Before we left the Red Cross had given us some clothes – some Red Cross Uniforms, and shoes for us girls, but my brother was telling me one day, fairly recently, that he came off the ship barefooted. They had nothing that would fit him. He was ten years old. Mr. Lightfoot: Was he on a different ship? Ms. Sobeck: No, he was with us. Our family stayed together the whole time, which was very good. I think that really helped a lot and I think that helped us to have a good attitude about it, and not feel guilt. A lot of the kids who didn’t talk to their parents about it had a lot of psychological problems. I blame the parents more than the kids. We talked about everybody all of the time. Mr. Lightfoot: You mentioned that at one of the first camps there was a school, a boarding school. Did those kids ever get reunited with their parents during their internment?

Παγε 50 οφ 56 Ms. Sobeck: Yes. Those kids went down to Manila. They brought the parents up from the southern islands and a lot of them went down to be with their parents. Some of them went down to be closer to where their parents would have been, but weren’t there. One of the fellows whose sister wrote a book, he was by himself because they were rescued out of Mindanao and so I guess he didn’t see them until the end. Mr. Lightfoot: But, by and large, most of the people... Ms. Sobeck: Yes, they were reunited. There were a lot of single people like the missionaries who came as teachers in China. There were quite a number of single people too, but all of the families stayed as families. The Japanese did not separate them either. Mr. Lightfoot: What was your reception like when you got back to the U.S.? Ms. Sobeck: By the time our ship arrived, there had been a number of ships already. The Government would have put us up at hotels in San Francisco, but we had so much family that lived in the area. Some of my Dad’s family and most of my Mother’s family. My Mother’s family had gotten boxes and boxes of clothes from everybody. You know, everybody donated something and they took all the pictures that my Mother had sent from the Phillippines and gave them all back, which is very nice. That is the only reason that I have some of them. My Dad’s brother was a Doctor in Hayward, just outside Oakland, and he had a little cottage on his lot so we stayed there for a while until my Dad found a place down near Palo Alto. He worked there for a while and then we moved back up near Oakland. It was a little hard starting school for me. We came in May. We were out to sea when Germany surrendered, three days out of San Francisco. So I didn’t go to school until September. Nobody went with me. They just said, “The school bus stops there.” So I got on the school bus and got off, went into

Παγε 51 οφ 56 what looked like an office and said, “Here I am. What am I supposed to do?” I had no clothes really, to speak of, I was so embarrassed the first week of school. I wasn’t dressed like everybody else and I was a sophomore in high school. I met some of the best friends I’ve ever made, who were very understanding. One of them was a boy. I walked into a classroom. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do – have the teacher sign the slip, or whatever, and I stood in the door and he says, “Well, are you going to stand there, come on in. What do you want?” I said, “I’m supposed to come here.” “Well, let me have that,” and he signed it. The fellow standing in the back explained it all to me and he told me where my next class was. He took me down to my next class. He told me what to do with the other classes. He was so nice. By the time that we graduated, he knew somebody at the University in Berkeley. He took me over there and introduced me around, showed me the campus, etc. Just a really nice person. Nobody came to school with me that first day; they just said, “Go to school.” Mr. Lightfoot: Had you been back to America before? Ms. Sobeck: No. Mr. Lightfoot: That was your first time back? Ms. Sobeck: Yes. I keep saying “back” and then I amend it and say “when we came to this country.” Mr. Lightfoot: What was running through your mind? What kind of impressions did you have? Here you had just been through this internment for three years, through the war... Ms. Sobeck: Yes, but all the Saturday Evening Posts you read were all about this country. We got Saturday Evening Posts and Colliers. That is where I read “My Friend Flicka,” “Thunderhead,” etc. Mr. Lightfoot: But there you are back in California, so the sights, sounds, smells, it must have been very different to what you were used to in the

Παγε 52 οφ 56 Phillippines. Ms. Sobeck: Yes, but everything was so different. It was change, change, change. You just sort of go with the flow. Mr. Lightfoot: Just another change? Ms. Sobeck: Yes. Mr. Lightfoot: Is there anything in particular that you remember most about setting foot in America? The reception after having been in a prisoner of war camp? Ms. Sobeck: No, I think there was too much trying to get settled and all of the relatives. It was a new experience being able to go to a grocery store. Even in the Phillippines we didn’t go. My Mother would call up the Baguio grocery and tell them what we wanted and they would send their car out with the goods. We never really went to a grocery store. The thing that was a little frustrating was they really didn’t explain rationing to me. Mr. Lightfoot: So rationing had not been lifted? Ms. Sobeck: No. We really had not thought about it. Mr. Lightfoot: It was a normal way of life for you. Ms. Sobeck: That’s right. So, when they would say, “The next time you come, remember you have to bring your stamps.” That really didn’t hit home, even when we went to our own grocery store and bought our own groceries, we had more stamps than we needed. Mr. Lightfoot: When did they lift rationing? Do you remember? Ms. Sobeck: I think by the time I went to school in the Fall. I think it was over. It was only for a very short time when we were here. Dad was able to get a job at Freiden Calculators. He was over 50 and it was a terrible decision he had to make. He could have stayed back in the Phillippines. I think he wanted to, but he had a family. His kids were all growing up to college age. He felt a responsibility, but he had nothing to do here, no background anywhere.

Παγε 53 οφ 56 Fortunately, the war was still going on when we came back. He got a job at Freiden Calculators, but then as soon as the war was over and the soldiers came back, they got first dibs on all of the jobs and Dad was over 50. There wasn’t much he could do because he was a manager in all of these other places that he had been. At one time he had been a teacher, but he didn’t have the college degree. Fortunately, my uncle was part owner of a lumberyard and Dad knew everything about lumber. He really knew all of the Asian lumbers and everything. He was very interested in that sort of thing, so he worked as a foreman in the lumberyard. My Mother was a nurse and she had been working in Utah when they first met. She kept up her Utah State License all of the time that she lived in the Phillippines. She didn’t work as a nurse, but she kept up her license. I think it was every two years they had to renew it. We were in camp for three years, but when she came back she wrote to Utah and explained the situation and they reinstated her. Through that she got a California State License. I think she had to take a test. Then she worked as a nurse up until she was in her 60's in a small hospital in Oakland. Mr. Lightfoot: So, California became home for you then? Ms. Sobeck: Yes. The Bay area. Mr. Lightfoot: I understand you were given a Campaign Ribbon to the Pacific Theater? Ms. Sobeck: Yes, we were. Mr. Lightfoot: Please tell us about that. Ms. Sobeck: This was MacArthur’s idea. We were all presented with the campaign ribbons of the Pacific Theater. When my cousin, Lee, whose father died at Cabanatuan, when he was in West Point, he wore his ribbon on his uniform. The other cadets told him that he was not allowed to do that because they had not been in any

Παγε 54 οφ 56 campaigns. He said that it was given to him and he was going to wear it. He was President of his graduating class, and because of that was the one to present MacArthur the yearbook. MacArthur was looking at his ribbon and asked him about it. Lee told him how he got it and MacArthur said, “They are wrong – I order you to wear it for ever.” So he does. Mr. Lightfoot: All of the people that were interned were awarded the... Ms. Sobeck: The campaign ribbons. Mr. Lightfoot: When was that? Was it soon after the war? Ms. Sobeck: Yes. It was after the war. Many of us have lost ours. Some of us still have them. I’m not sure I know where mine is. Mr. Lightfoot: Interesting. Did it come accompanied with a set of orders, or a paper? Ms. Sobeck: No. Mr. Lightfoot: In the military if you are given a ribbon or a medal, you have to have orders with it. Ms. Sobeck: No. Mr. Lightfoot: But it was presented by the country. Ms. Sobeck: Yes. Mr. Lightfoot: Interesting. If you had to sum up your experiences as a POW, how would you? If you were to talk to school children, and obviously they would want to know what it was like, if you had to sum up, is there a way that you could put that into a few words? Ms. Sobeck: Probably not. I think that you learn that just because life goes against you, you don’t have to sit down and give up. I think that you learn to do the best you can under whatever circumstances you are faced with. I think that one of the things that the Japanese could not understand is that the Americans dealt with this situation in a way that they could not understand. We did the best we could; we laughed; we cried, but we laughed; you make the best of what

Παγε 55 οφ 56 you can and you can always survive. You can survive if you really, really, really have to. You can do without a lot of things and it helps to have understanding people around you. I really think that if you can laugh you are saved.

Transcribed by: Wanda Cook Hunt, Texas August 10, 2002

Final editing: December 16, 2002

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