MY HERITAGE OF DARKNESS – THE R*PE OF MANILA.

MY HERITAGE OF DARKNESS – THE R*PE OF MANILA, FEB 3-MARCH 3,1945 (Memories of a World War Before My Birth)

My father was a child of war, a casualty of the planet’s bloodiest conflict.

He lost everything but his life in World War II. His wounds never healed. Every waking moment, they festered, till he went to his grave.

His legacy of darkness embedded itself in my consciousness. 

I became a writer, he saw to that, as he can’t set down his own story on paper. His nightmares were too close, too real.

He made his memories mine too… made me see the Rape of Manila through his eyes…

From the ashes, Manila, my father’s beloved birthplace, Pearl of the Orient, Queen of the Pacific, Venice of the East, emerged as the second most destroyed city on earth, drenched with the blood of a hundred thousand to over half a million civilians slaughtered.

MLA WW2-1

Pa was three years old and his sister, eight, in this portrait. 

It was the only World War memento of his family, minus his pianist-composer dad, who perished, aged thirty-two, shortly before the shot was taken in their Sampaloc residence.

Pa’s mom, the Lola I never knew, also thirty-two, would starve to death not long after.

The pictorial was my Lola’s last with her brood before they parted. Manila has been declared an Open City to spare her from destruction. But the Japanese bombed everything to rubble anyway – heritage sites, government buildings, schools, homes, churches, hospitals.

Lola sent her daughter to safety among her kins in Lucena. But she tarried with Pa in the capital, until both of them sickened. They ended up trapped in the carnage, in the heart of the dying city.

The loss of her husband broke Lola’s heart. “I can’t even remember my father’s face, just the feel of his last embrace,” Pa lamented. “He never came back. We don’t even know where he was buried.”

Somehow, Pa knew my Lolo was dead. He saw long tapered fingers, skittering under his bedroom door, playing a soundless concert over ghost keyboards, before his mom arranged for the portrait. My Lola said he imagined it. But her eyes betrayed her worst fears.

The family portrait survived only because Lola sent it to her older sister, then first lady of Lucena, the city her forebears founded and named after their own birthplace in Spain. Lola begged her for help. But no one came.

In Manila, Filipino guerrillas and American soldiers advanced, taking the fighting street by street. The Japanese troops knew they’ll never come out of it alive and descended into an orgy of atrocities.

feb 9 1945 colorado st ermita mla

The Japs turned their wrath on the innocent, unarmed Filipino civilians, bayoneting babies, gouging out the unborn from their mother’s wombs and beheading everyone they find – priests, doctors, bankers, judges, teachers, students, old and young. To save on ammunition, the Japs herded them in buildings and burned them alive or tied them up and threw them in the river to drown.

The Japs gang-raped women and children before mutilating and eviscerating them. They even forced brothers to rape their sisters and their moms; fathers to rape their daughters. Many of those who escaped starved to death, if they weren’t blasted later in the crossfire by machine guns, grenades and bombs.

DEAD MLA BABY WW2 EDTD

Pa and his mom took refuge at San Lazaro Hospital. Every day, they watched people die around them.

The hospital rationed “sisid” rice, so called because divers retrieved sacks of the staple grain from torpedoed ships at the sea bottom, at the risk of being shot and killed by the Japs.

Lola boiled their ration of rancid grains blackened with crude oil, then she’d scrape the rice off the kettle top to stave her hunger pangs. Everything else, she gave her son.

So starved was Pa, he didn’t notice his mom consumed almost nothing. He always went to bed hungry, unable to sleep, his stomach growling.

Gradually, his mom grew weaker and weaker. One by one, Pa’s friends, children his age, older and younger, succumbed to starvation. What money or goods they had, they traded for toasted coconuts, which was tasty and filling but not nutritious enough. Pa bartered his rations for canned meat and sardines. Others ate dogs, cats and rats.

To amuse himself, Pa often scrambled up the hospital roof with the other kids to watch dogfights – American planes, with stars on their wings, exchanging fire with Japanese Zeroes, with the red sun on theirs, until one or both duellers fell from the skies.

Never mind that he had to duck fast to avoid getting hit by stray bullets. Sometimes watchers on the roof just tumbled down, wounded, or dead.

Strange, Pa can’t remember any of the doctors or nurses. What he can’t forget was the prankster undertaker and the hospital’s Moro handyman, a burly but gentle hulk.

One night, the undertaker loosened the bulbs in the morgue, throwing everything into darkness. He asked Pa to summon the Moro to fix the “defective lights” then lay down among the shrouded corpses and

Thanks for reading.