NOTE: I’m excited to bring you a number of guest posts in the coming months from writers doing similar work, and highlighting some ways of doing research and/or writing about family history that I don’t touch on in my work. This is the first such post, and I’m grateful to Martin Tompa for having written it to share with us !
Jewish Refugees in Manila
by Martin Tompa
I am writing a book with the working title Topfentorte Tales about my family’s history during World War II. The book describes how my parents, their siblings, and their parents escaped from Vienna after Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, and their adventures in the decade that followed.
In this article I will explain the research that went into understanding just one of the many experiences of my maternal grandparents. En route from Shanghai to the United States in December 1941, they found themselves waiting for their ship connection in Manila in the Philippine Islands. While they were stuck there, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Manila. By the beginning of the next month, Japan had vanquished the U.S. forces and occupied all of the Philippines. Imagine, my grandparents had escaped the Nazis in Vienna just to fall into the hands of the Japanese occupying forces in Manila.
They were stranded in Manila for four years until after the war ended in 1945. I wanted to write about their experiences, but at this point you know as much about their Manila life as I did.
I discovered one exciting clue in a German-language Jewish newspaper called Aufbau that was published in New York. During the war, Aufbau published stories and lists of Jewish survivors and victims. Buried on page 19 in the May 4, 1945 issue, I found a small article that mentioned my grandparents (https://archive.org/details/aufbau111945germ/page/n282/mode/1up?view=theater).
My grandparents are the third ones listed, Ernst and Ottilie Feiks. Here is my translation of the article’s beginning:
Jewish Refugees in Manila
The following Jewish refugees were recently liberated by the Americans from a camp 20 miles from Manila and have now been brought to Manila. They can be reached by mail at the address c/o Jewish Refugee Committee, St. Thomas University, Manila, P.I. In parentheses after each name are the birthdate and birthplace of the person.
As much as I searched, I couldn’t find any more information about this camp or this incident. I eventually discovered a promising group called Civilian POWs on the internet that focuses on World War II Allied civilian prisoners of war in East Asia (https://cpow.org/about-cpow/). I wrote to their Commander, telling her that my grandparents were Austrian Jewish refugees who were in a Japanese internment camp near Manila, and attached a copy of the Aufbau article. I asked if she could help me learn more.
To my delight, I got a reply within an hour. It was a very nice message in which she'd copied two other people that she said might be able to help. One was a German woman named Lotte who she said had been a girl in Manila during the occupation and was well connected in the refugee community. Lotte soon wrote to me and said she'd looked through the list of names in the Aufbau article and knew about six of the families, but that they were all deceased. It was now, after all, 77 years since the war ended. However, Lotte said one of the families listed had a daughter Ursula, who was a few years younger than Lotte and whom Lotte knew in Manila. Lotte had a friend now who was a good friend of Ursula and would ask this friend for contact information. The next day Lotte sent me Ursula's contact information, including an email address.
I sent Ursula a message laying out the whole story, but I got no response. The next message from Lotte had a different theme. She wrote that she didn't know why I and the reporter kept calling it a camp: the Japanese didn't intern any Germans since Germany was an ally of Japan. The newspaper article was wrong, she wrote, it wasn't a camp from which the Americans had brought these refugees in 1945, but rather a Jewish community house where those refugees who needed assistance had been housed. She knew this because she'd recognized another name on the list, a doctor whom she knew was in this community house in a suburb of Manila.
Shortly after, I got another message from the Commander of Civilian POWs saying she heard that Lotte had resolved my question. In this message, she confirmed that she'd looked at all the camp rosters at the time of liberation, and my grandparents weren't on any of them. In fact, there was only one German on all the rosters.
At this point I was very confused. My memory was that my grandparents had been in a Japanese camp, and much later I'd found the 1945 Aufbau article saying they'd been liberated from a camp. How could this be untrue? What had my grandparents been doing in Manila for more than three years if they weren't interned? And what story was I going to write about them? I couldn't write that they were interned if it was a historical fact that practically no Germans were interned by the Japanese. I sent a message to my brother asking what he remembered, and he replied that his memory was the same as mine.
To my relief, I got a short reply from Ursula about five days after I'd written her. She gave me her phone number and said she'd be happy to talk with me, but she said she didn't know how much she'd be able to help. I arranged to call Ursula the following day and we talked for quite a while. It turned out Lotte was right that the Aufbau reporter was mistaken in that 1945 article, but not as mistaken as Lotte thought. The story Ursula told me was fascinating. Here's a summary, though she supplied a lot more detail.
It occurred during the 1945 Battle for Manila (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Manila), when U.S. forces fought for a month to recapture Manila from Japan. Ursula and her family were squatting in an empty house in Manila and there was shelling all around. American soldiers came to their neighborhood and told the refugees there that the Americans couldn't hold that area any longer and that the soldiers needed to get the refugees behind American lines. They walked a long distance to get behind the lines and, from there, American soldiers took them in trucks to what had been a Japanese internment camp, now liberated, in a jungle area 20 miles from Manila. In this camp, the Americans took care of all these German refugees, putting them in tents and giving them three meals a day for the entire time that the Battle for Manila raged on. Ursula told me a few times how wonderful it was and asked me what army these days would take such care of refugees. It was from that camp that the Americans brought the refugees back to Manila after the battle was over, and that's what the 1945 Aufbau article was reporting, though the article mistakenly reported that the refugees had been freed from the camp by the Americans.
My assumption now is that my grandparents and all 43 Jewish refugees in that article were in a similar situation to the one Ursula described: never interned by the Japanese but unable to leave Manila because of the occupation, somehow surviving in Manila for three years, and then rescued from the Battle for Manila by American soldiers.
Ursula didn't know where the camp was. With some more research, I discovered that another German family listed in the Aufbau article delivered a baby at a U.S. army hospital while at the camp. A 1946 ship’s passenger list from Manila to California gives this baby’s birthplace as “Montnlupa”, which should surely be Muntinlupa, a town that is 20 miles south of Manila. Muntinlupa is where the Japanese internment camp called New Bilibid Prison was located (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Bilibid_Prison#World_War_II_internee_camp).
It was a cathartic experience to be able to talk with someone who was in the same camp with my grandparents. Ursula was 10 years old at the time, so I am not surprised that she didn't remember my grandparents, who were in their 60s.
Martin Tompa is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Washington. In addition to numerous academic publications, he is the author of the book Winning Schnapsen. Researching his family history led him to publish articles in JewishGen Success Stories and to become an administrator of the 1800-member Austrian Genealogy Group and the 7000-member Czech Bohemian Genealogy Group. Topfentorte Tales is his first foray into the world of historical fiction.