Not all veterans of war donned a uniform or carried a gun. And not all acts of heroism involved charging a machine gun nest. There are survivors of war’s most horrific challenges whose steadfast courage earns them a special honor on this particular day. For me, I would choose Agnes Newton Keith.
I first learned about her seven years ago when I discovered the original 1947 hardbound book of hers entitled, “Three Came Home,” which describes Keith’s three-and-a-half-years ordeal in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. But this is not a saga of macho heroics and steel-eyed defiance in the face of barbarity. It is instead, the true story of a woman and a mother “enduring the unendurable” along with her toddler son and 33 other children, nearly all under the age of 6.
Keith was an American woman writer married to a British civil servant based in Sarawak on the northern coast of Borneo, then a British colony (now divided between Indonesia and Brunei.) The swift advance of Japanese forces in early 1942 caught her and her family and ensured their confinement in separate gender-based camps for the remainder of the war. At great risk to herself and others, she kept a clandestine diary — an offense punishable by death — written on whatever scraps of paper she could find and hidden underneath floorboards of barracks and the latrine.
Not surprisingly, the behavior of her Japanese captors gets special attention but Keith tries and often succeeds in refraining from dehumanizing them. Not that she omits their crimes. Tens of millions of Asians and defenseless Allied POWS suffered unspeakable atrocities at the hands of the Japanese during the war, victims who should be included in any future Hiroshima Day commemorations. And yet, Keith does not hate the Japanese, making the distinction between who people are and what war transforms them into.
She has an unusual relationship with the camp commander, Colonel Tatsuji Suga. Suga, who attended college in the United States, admires Keith since one of her books was translated into Japanese to much acclaim. He denounces the anti-Asian racism he experienced in America and hopes with her that someday people of different races can live together in harmony. Keith credits him with saving her husband’s life from the dreaded Kempeitai, the Japanese version of the Gestapo. Periodically, he brings food and treats for the kids in the camp or scoops them up to play in the swimming pool at his nearby villa. Every few months, however, he cuts the camp rice ration to starvation levels. Upon liberation, Keith weighed less than 80 pounds. He is strangely absent from camp whenever his subordinates brutalize the women with physical violence and constant humiliations. Women would be slapped if they didn’t bow properly. At the end of the war, Suga learns that his entire family has perished in Hiroshima and facing a war crimes tribunal, kills himself.
In the camp, the Geneva Convention doesn’t exist. The women are utterly helpless but do whatever they can to ensure the survival of the children, aided by a community of formidable nuns. The women steal, smuggle, bargain, manipulate and sacrifice in order to get much-needed food and medicine which they share among themselves. They never sell their bodies. When her little son, George, is sick, she trades a $100 evening gown for six aspirin. The half-naked children run about in a feral pack, learning at a young age the habits of survival but like their parents, whatever they steal, they divide equally among them.
And at night, they sing. Lying on their mats in a tiny squalid hut, they sing childhood songs together in voices that Keith observes would melt the hardest heart. Herself exhausted, famished and dispirited, the singing never fails to make her weep with gratitude and give her hope.
Keith, her husband and all the children survive the war. Not so much a miracle as a testament to the determination of these women with no weapon at their disposal except their refusal to give up.
Keith ends her remarkable story with the following coda.
“This I believe. While we have more than we need on this continent and others die for want of it, there can be no lasting peace. When we work as hard in peacetime to make the world decent to live in, as in wartime we work to kill, the world will be decent and the causes for which men fight will be gone.”
Daniel A. Brown lived in Franklin County for 44 years and is a frequent contributor to the Greenfield Recorder. He lives in New Mexico with his wife, Lisa and dog, Cody.