But 66 years later, Stone still wonders why so many friends and neighbors know nothing about the more than 3,000 American, British, Australian and other allied nationals, herself among them, who were interned by Japanese forces in the Philippines for more than three years.
“What really sets me off is they’re pushing for the people that were interned here, and I say that’s fine — I agree with it — but what about us?” Stone asked.
With Pearl Harbor glowing on fire in the distance, the vessel carrying Stone and her family turned around and headed for the Philippines for safety, she said.
They were met with the opposite.
On Jan. 2, 1941, when Japanese forces rolled into Manila, Stone, her father, American mother and five brothers and sisters were rounded up and taken to the University of Santo Tomas, a college the Japanese converted into an internment camp.
With the men separated from the women and children, and teenage boys and girls also segregated, the internees slept in converted classrooms or outdoor shanties, she said.
“The rich people lived in the shanties,” she said.
For the first year, when Japanese soldiers still accepted food gifts from the American Red Cross and passed Spam, canned milk and chocolate to the internees, life at Santo Tomas was “decent,” Stone said.
But as the war pressed on, conditions grew grim. The Red Cross items, instead of going to the internees, were given to soldiers’ dogs, she said.
So twice a day, Stone and others subsisted on rice and water.
When times were better, they got rice and talinum, a green leaf that Stone likened to spinach.
