Escape to Manila: From Nazi Tyranny to Japanese Terror

11. Can We Hold Out?

✦ 11 Can We Hold Out? the three hundred Japanese soldiers were pedaling furiously on their bicycles along the Manila Bay frontage road from south of Pasay. An officer was at the head of the column,his samurai sword hanging loosely at his side. When the sweating battalion arrived at the beginning of the paved Dewey Boulevard, still keeping up speed, several bicycle tires popped. A short distance further there were more tire failures. The soldiers jumped off the bikes and hopped onto the rear of another bicycle, towing their disabled bicycles with one hand. Alerted by phone that a “bicycle brigade” was on its way to the city, three young boys had spread small glass shards and metal scraps on the blacktop. The thin Japanese tires did the rest. But the phone call also reached more young boys in the Ermita District who had more time to prepare. Siggi Hellman had just organized the morning’s soccer game, and twelve boys ranging in age from ten to fourteen were assembling on the grassy field near the paved boulevard. The young football players, including me, ran across the two-lane boulevard and back again, slowly depositing tire-popping litter. Then the bicycle brigade appeared, and many more tires went flat. This time the column slowed down, but the soccer players, as planned,did not even cast a sideways glance in their direction. We were running, kicking, and yelling—the game Can We Hold Out? 113 was paramount. The Japanese bicycle column came to a halt, the soldiers’ interest turning to the soccer game. Siggi halted the game for just a moment to beckon individual soldiers to join us, and four of them did, dribbling and kicking the ball. That is, until the fuming Japanese officer ran back from his lead position and used his sheathed sword to beat the now very subdued Japanese players, ordering them back on the road. The column moved off with all riders dismounted—the game thankfully diverting them from inspecting the road too closely.1 We had other, more sedate, entertainments. The Gaiety movie theater’s main attraction had always been its ticket prices—much less expensive than the more modern, air-conditioned movie houses in downtown Manila. Karl Nathan, after many months, finally obtained permission from Japanese authorities to reopen the Gaiety, which at the time was owned by a prominent Filipino family with whom Nathan had struck an agreement, provided he could get the Japanese permit. The projection equipment was, however, stored in Baguio. More negotiations with the Japanese official were necessary, but finally the movie projectors and films came together with the permits—and a lease agreement with the Filipino owners—and the Gaiety could open. People streamed in to sit on the woven-straw, lice-infested seats and watch American westerns. Each performance began with serials of Dick Tracy or Flash Gordon, to the delight of the younger viewers, who eagerly followed the adventures of these comic strip characters from week to week as the serials progressed.2 When the available inventory of westerns was exhausted, they were simply shown over again—and again. These diversions did not diminish the growing concerns for the future among the Jewish community. In a solemn mood, in the fall of 1943, the second set of Jewish High Holidays took place under the Japanese occupation. That year a group of fewer and much thinner Jewish internees was brought from the Santo Tomás Internment Camp to Temple Emil for services onYom Kippur. ✦ ✦ ✦ Far from Manila’s city life,the Emmerich family had temporarily settled into the second story of a house fifty miles north of Davao, the capital of Mindanao .They had arrived by oxcart,and their first priority was food.The lower floor of the house was occupied by Japanese soldiers, who kept chickens. While the soldiers were away, the Emmerich boys cut holes in the floor, dropped a few kernels of corn to the floor below, and then lowered a long, 114 escape to manila looped wire to snatch the chickens up by the neck. The gagging fowl could not utter a sound and were soon made into a meal.But the Emmeriches knew it would be folly to stay in that house, or near the city, because as one of very few white families, they would be under constant watch. Otto Emmerich decided that he preferred to wait...