The observation of Remembrance Day on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of this year was deeply touching. I watched that one held in Ottawa over the television. It was preceded by a two-minute silence, followed by the singing of the national anthem with the Canadian flag up high and four armed forces plane flying in missing man formation. As this was going on, flashes of faces of the audience mirroring the sadness and poignancy of the occasion came through the old veterans of the Second World War, some with tears flowing down their cheeks, wrinkled by time, mothers, wives, daughters, sons, sisters and brothers of those who perished in more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, members of royalty, Prince Charles and his wife, the Duchess of Cornwall, high government officials like Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Governor General Michaelle Jean, representatives of different countries, youth groups and the general public that came to attend the occasion,
It looked like all sectors of this multicultural country were represented in that gathering. The crowd was made up of white, black, yellow and brown and of all shapes of faces and eyes. Two languages (our official languages) were used in the ceremony but I am sure the crowd represented more than a hundred languages from around the world.
The people of Canada were one at that moment under one flag, singing one anthem, praying for the men and women who gave their lives for their country and for peace.
It was estimated that there were about five thousand people in that crowd. There were more who shared the moment in their homes, through the power of technology or in other observations of the day at Queen’s Park or at the Old City Hall in downtown Toronto. They were people of various faiths praying to their own gods for their loved ones who perished in several wars, and also for peace.
The newspapers, television and other forms of media recounted during this week – the horrific experiences of some of the veterans of the Second World War. They recalled their relatives and friends who were lost in land and sea and of those who survived but forever affected by the trauma of war – physically, mentally and psychologically. Some of them mentioned that no words could really accurately describe the atrocities that those who go to war suffer.
The people of Canada may be one in their pride for their war heroes and are united in their passionate wish for world peace but the experiences they remember are as varied as the places they came from in this enormous world.
To us Filipinos Remembrance Day brings to our minds our experiences of the Second World War as an occupied country by enemies. People of North America never experienced being conquered in their own land. Americans and Canadians fought during the first and second world wars and succeeding wars after, in foreign lands; Filipinos fought right there in their homeland, side by side with the Americans during the Second World War. The Philippines was then a US Commonwealth.
I was eleven when Japanese forces bombed Pearl Harbour. I was in school when the teacher announced that we were all being sent home, because the Philippines was included in the war. That was in 1941. The Second World War started in 1939 but we were barely aware of it. There was no television at the time. WE heard about the war in the radio and read the news in the papers but life went on as usual until that day in December 1941.
The City of Manila was a target for early occupation and it was in danger of being bombed. People were told to evacuate as soon as possible. My father hired a truck to transport us to a town in a nearby province (Bulacan) about fifty kilometers away from Manila. My mother started packing the belongings that we would bring. When the truck arrived we were hardly able to load anything except ourselves. People in our street started climbing up and filling the truck to overload.
It was a horrible scary trip in the dark night. WE were packed like pigs in the truck that traveled slowly through the lightless roads. A blackout was already declared. The truck had very dim lights. The fifty kilometers we traveled became endless because the passengers had different destinations dictated to the driver. We had to stop at different towns on our way. We took several routes wherein we got lost several times. The sun was high up in the sky when we reached our relative’s home.
I was just a child at the time but I remember that my body ached all over because I hardly sat during that trip. There was no room and I had to hold my younger sister who was only two years old. My mother was six months pregnant with my youngest sister.
Our family of nine (six children, my grandmother and my parents) lived for three weeks through the generosity of our relatives who accommodated us in their nipa house. We slept in one room like sardines in a can and ate three square meals a day of rice, carabao milk, and vegetables from the backyard and fish from the nearby rice paddies. All these were through the hospitality of my aunts, uncles and cousins.
And then Manila was declared an open city. Residents were allowed to come home. Our trip back was not as bad as that one in coming but the truck was still crowded, this time with relatives who also evacuated to the same place.
The three years of Japanese occupation were days and nights of fear, anxiety and depravation. There were blackouts at night when you could hear military sentries marching in the streets, with gleaming bayonets. Food became difficult to obtain, prices of prime commodities went up, thieves rose in numbers, and paranoia started to grow. Collaborators with the regime could report anyone of disloyalty to the government of the time or the armed forces of the occupying army and that would be enough for one to be imprisoned and tortured.
Then there were those dark days of defeat in battle, the Fall of Bataan, the “Death March”, the imprisonment of thousands of soldiers. I had a cousin who was eventually allowed to go home but he was never the same person I knew before. My eldest brother was taken, as part of forced labour. We never saw him again. He was only seventeen when he was taken. My mother kept on praying and walking on her knees at Quiapo Church, hoping for him to one day come back home and that hope stayed to the day she died.
My father and my mother were the heroes in our family during the Second World War. My father worked very hard with a meager income because business was at low ebb and prices of basic needs were very high. My mother sold her jewelry piece by piece until there was no more to sell. She re-saw her beautiful “sayas” into clothes for us her children. She roasted rice, for our coffee and made soup and omelets out of “tulya”, (a shellfish). She boiled corn kernels for hours to make binatog, which we ate with salt and grated coconut. She extended the use of our rice by making “lugaw with sweet yams (kamote).
My father planted “upo” in a little one by one half meter of land in one corner of our land and made a trellis that extended to the roof of our home. He planted pepper in flowerpots for the leaves that my mother sautéed with those small fish called “dilis”.
I share Remembrance Day in Canada with reminiscences of my own heroes and their contributions to what I am now. And like the rest, I humbly thank God for the peace that we enjoy here in Canada. I just hope that this world attain the peace that everyone aspires for but has not attained. ****