Personal Stories of Ancestry

I was dragged to an auction several months ago. It was a mundane show of vases, old attic furniture, old toys and things that had probably spent a better part of the last century in storage collecting dust. Why I keep letting my friends drag me to those things, I'm not sure, but it was for charity so at least it wasn't a complete waste of time.

"Kat!" nudged my friend "Kat, look!"

On the auction table was a collection of old, brown money. I squinted to see the elaborate details - WWII Filipino Pesos - and gasped at the significance. I am a first-generation Filipino-American, I was a child when we came to America and a certain mannerism, a certain turn of phrase, a certain idiosyncrasy in how I speak perfect American English always gave away my immigrant status to the discerning eye.

In all my history classes I had known that the Philippines was involved in WWII, but only as secondary players - the Japanese came, the Americans came, they became POW's in the Bataan Death March when MacArthur retreated to Australia, then MacArthur came back and liberated the islands again - that's the footnote of history the Philippines had during that time period.

I quizzically looked at the money up for bid.

"You should get it!" my friend whispered "You totally love military history!"

But this was more personal than that. This was from the country of my birth and I had never really associated them with the devastation of the Wars. I did bid and win it and proudly showed it to my parents that Christmas, framed and ready to be displayed over the mantle.

"You know, your grandmother was in the war" My mother mused. "She probably experiences the worst of it."

I gazed at my mother and asked her why I had never heard about this.

My mother sighed and mused "Well, she couldn't talk about it for many, many years" she said as she hung the money on the wall "She still has trouble talking about it now. Most people from then still have problems with it."

I dug up old military archives, researched old diaries from the time period and even joined message boards of Historical associations only to discover that what was simply a footnote in most of my American History books or military history books. My research is far from complete. When I finally got the nerve to talk to my grandmother, at the urging of my mother, she gave me snippets of her experience, small illustrations of the images that she remembered from that time period.

She remembered the massacring of her relatives, the loss of her village, the retreat into the jungles and the ghosts that followed her around throughout her life. Vibrant dreams, or nightmares, about her childhood are still vivid in her mind and before it's too late to get those perspectives.

A marathon that honors the veterans of the Bataan Death March held each year at White Sands, NM takes great pains to remind people that each year we lose the valuable first hand perspectives of those who experienced some of the worst atrocities of that war. Their cities burned, their holy sights ransacked, their childhoods lost. My grandmother spent her youth in the harsh wilderness of the Filipino jungles and is still haunted by some of the images she saw all those years ago.

I never knew that such a rich story existed with in my family. This perspective of WWII is rarely published, and it needs to be before it's lost forever. History that is not written down may as well not exist at all and will be reduced to nothing but rumors and myth.

My grandmother is Lucia Ocena Enriquez, she has raised twelve children most of whom now reside in America. If you have any information or leads that would help bring together the story of the Filipinos who experienced WWII, please send me a message. All hat tips and documentations are greatly appreciated.