Tears in the Darkness (47 page)

 

ONE AFTERNOON
in February 1943, Ben Steele was crossing the inner compound on his way to the galley to see Merrill Lee. For more than a month he'd been feeling well enough to get around and had slowly been exploring the half of the prison that served as the hospital. He'd visited a couple of the Air Corps men in other wards, taken a look at the prison store (such as it was with its handful of items—horse sugar, bananas, and a few peanuts—that no one could afford), looked in the library, and taken general stock of his surroundings. Around the corner from his ward, he noticed a rusty metal door in one of the prison's interior dividing walls. The portal was painted orange, and it appeared to lead to another section of Bilibid. On this particular day, passing by that door, he heard screams coming from the other side, the kind of screams made by men who are being beaten.

“What the hell's going on over there?” he asked Merrill Lee, when he got to the galley.

“That,” Merrill Lee said, “is where they keep the special prisoners.”

 

ON THE ISLAND OP PALAWAN,
a long, narrow strip of land between the Sulu and South China seas, on the night of Tuesday, February 2, 1943, Don Schloat, a tall, lean twenty-one-year-old Army medic from Los Angeles, waited until his fellow prisoners had fallen asleep, then slipped out of his barracks, scaled two high barbed-wire fences, and scampered down an embankment between some palms and through the undergrowth toward the beach below to begin an escape.
²⁶

His partner, a man he knew only as Hanson, was right behind him in the drizzle and mist. It was roughly one in the morning, they guessed, which would give them about five hours of darkness to get as far as possible from the airstrip work camp.

They walked north along the shore, keeping an eye on the sea and sky, and when the first glow of light revealed the horizon, they headed inland to find a spot to hole up the rest of the day.

Their hiding place was a tangle of roots, hanging vines, and dangling branches in a mangrove swamp. After a while, from somewhere outside the tangle, they heard a commotion, a kind of clatter! Monkeys, they
thought. A short time later, they heard another noise. Sounded like the door of an automobile slamming shut. Then they heard barking. They thought about abandoning their hiding spot, changed their minds, watched and waited.

Schloat was sure that by now the guards back at camp would have held
bangō
and discovered them missing and sent out search parties.

Suddenly, from somewhere very close, they heard a voice, a flat, matter-of-fact voice.

“What will you do?” it said.

Through the tangle they could see a man in uniform, and he was pointing a small silver-plated pistol at them. The man was Kempei Tai, the Japanese secret military police.

“What will you do?”

Schloat and Hanson had agreed they would never be taken alive. They'd both seen fellow prisoners beaten almost to death for making escape plans, and they knew the enemy's standing order: Anyone caught trying to escape would be executed.

Hanson jumped to his feet.

“Don't shoot,” he yelled, raising his hands high above his head. “Don't shoot. We surrender.”

The Kempei Tai man motioned them forward, and as they stepped over the vines and roots and out of the tangled grove, they saw that the policeman had company, Negritos, Philippine bushmen the Japanese used as trackers, standing nearby with long spears.

Maybe it was his experience as a medic, someone who'd watched how other men handled pain, or maybe it was his sense of self-possession, the staunch Presbyterianism of his youth. Whatever the case, Don Schloat guessed what was coming and started to gird himself.

He thought, “You're going to be punished terribly. Whatever happens now, eventually you're going to be killed, executed, decapitated. So don't allow yourself any hope. Don't allow yourself fear. Be numb, completely numb.”

The Kempei Tai man had brought an interpreter. The interpreter was holding a
bokutō,
a wooden practice sword the Japanese used as a punishment stick, and he rushed the two prisoners and started to beat them on the shins.

The prisoners were put in a truck and hauled to Puerto Princesa and headquarters, a two-story cement building with cells in the basement. “Looks like a fortress,” Schloat thought.

Guards separated and questioned them. “Where were you going? Who else was involved? Why did you want to escape?”

Between questions, the prisoners were beaten.

“Bide with the blows,” Schloat told himself. “Feel nothing.”

They beat him across the day and through the night and into the next day. Then they told him, “Tomorrow morning you will be beheaded in front of your people.”

Instead, they denied him food and water, deprived him of sleep, gave him another beating.

“Don't faint,” he thought. “Don't let yourself get hungry. Don't let yourself feel pain. Don't let yourself hope.”

But it was hard not to hope, for his reason kept getting in his way. He reasoned that every day he survived, he made his death less valuable as an object lesson for his fellow prisoners. If the Japanese were going to kill him, he thought, they'd have killed him straightaway, walked him into the compound, made him kneel in front of his comrades, and left his head rolling in the dirt.

They asked him to sign a confession, a document written in kanji. He signed. Who cared? If they were going to kill him, they were going to kill him anyway.

A month passed, another month. Off and on, a Filipino or two would be thrown into jail with him. One had a mirror, and Schloat was shocked to see himself: his hair was falling out and his scalp and face were so white his blue eyes seemed to glow against his cretaceous skin. He had a full beard too, and it was bright red. He looked bizarre, he thought, a haggard albino in a crimson frame.

Finally, in late April 1943, nearly ninety days after he went over the wire, he was told that he and Hanson were being taken to Manila to be court-martialed.

The hearing was quick, the verdict reached in minutes. Hanson was given four years in jail, Schloat five. Sentences to begin immediately in Bilibid Prison, the section for special prisoners.

 

THEIR “CELL”
was a wooden box, one of ten such boxes, or enclosed rooms, that had been built inside a regular adobe cell block, a kind of
box within a box. This particular chamber was roughly ten feet wide, thirty feet long, and twelve feet high, a long narrow I of a room. At one end was a short barred door, four and a half feet high and two feet wide. On either side of the door was a small observation window for the guards. The floors, walls, and ceiling were polished mahogany, Schloat guessed, beautifully joined and fitted. At the rear of the room were two traps cut into the floor; beneath one was a drain, beneath the other a shallow tin box the prisoners used as latrine. Overhead a single naked lightbulb burned day and night. The room was otherwise bare, save for the prisoners, ten in this case, all escapees.

Their hair and beards were clipped short, and they were issued baggy gray shorts and a plain blue cotton jacket and trousers with coconut-shell buttons. They were to wear the blue uniform only for morning and evening
bangō,
which took place at the far end of the room, standing at attention.
(Gohyaku yonjū ichi,
Schloat would shout, “five hundred and forty-one,” his prisoner number.) At all other times they were to wear only their shorts.

From seven in the morning to nine at night, all day every day, they were made to sit and face the wall. Just sit.

A Japanese-Filipino guard, a slob of a turnkey the prisoners called “Mister-Big-Number-Three,” read them the rules:

 

You are not to talk to each other.

You cannot lean against the wall.

You must sit on opposite ends of the room with your backs to each other while facing the wall.

You must not look up at this door or window.

While sitting, you must not put your hands on the floor to rest.

You can sit [with] your knees [up] or cross-legged. In any other position you are breaking camp rules.

Whatever you do, you must always face the wall.

And you must never talk!

 

Breaking any of these rules invited a slap in the face, a cuff on the ear, a punch, but these beatings were nothing compared to the real torture, the real punishment that was taking place in the special prisoners section of Bilibid Prison, brute boredom.

“You must always face the wall . . . You must never talk!”

Five prisoners facing one wall, five the other, their arms folded and resting on their knees. Ten men, sitting all day, staring at a blank wall.

 

DON SCHLOAT
wondered, naturally, why he was still alive.

At every prison and work camp in the Philippines, the Japanese had warned their captives that if they were caught trying to escape they'd be shot or beheaded. Don Schloat had lived in the shadow of that falling sword since the morning he and Hanson had been caught in the mangrove swamp. Why had the Japanese spared them? Why had the enemy spared any of the other special prisoners? And what were they sparing them for? For this? Sitting all day in front of a blank wall?

“How long can I sit here?” Schloat wondered. “Just sit and wait. How long is this going to go on?”

The more he asked the question, the more time became his torturer, present time, the moment that never passes. It is “the now that is agonizingly slow,” he discovered. “How many heartbeats are there in an hour? Must I count them all?”

At first he thought he might escape “the interminable present” by slipping into the past, taking himself back to the locations that had defined his life: 2650 West Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles, his home; the “Wilshire Crest Presbyterian Church where he sang in the choir; Los Angeles City College where he had studied entomology and the Los Angeles County Art and Natural History Museum where he'd worked as a summer volunteer mounting insects.

But how could he think about where he had been without remembering where he was? There was simply no escaping the stillness of the moment. Besides, thinking about home made him sad, and being sad made him weak.

So he tried some other tricks. He studied the section of wall in front of him. “Sometimes I feel I am almost a part of it. I am flesh, and it is wood, but we are both made of atoms. Can the atoms of my body pass through the atoms of wood and the steel bars beyond to freedom? If no guard is watching, I will press my hands against the wall, atom to atom, testing the reality of the walls, hoping to see my hand go through—The wall remains impenetrable. I wonder what Hanson's thinking, Hanson behind me facing the opposite wall.”

AS THE MONTHS PASSED,
the ten men in the wooden box found that when the guards were out of earshot they could whisper to one another. And when one of the ten died, and another became so sick a Japanese doctor thought he was dying, the survivors started to scheme.

For reasons none of them could explain, the Japanese did not want their special prisoners to die in the box. When a man became mortally sick, the guards always removed him, picked him up and carried him out through the orange steel door in the wall that led to the regular prison hospital.

Schloat and a couple of cell mates thought, why not make themselves so sick, so malnourished, they too would appear to be dying? And, one by one, they secretly started to starve themselves, passing their pitiful ration of rice to the other men in the box.

It was a risky gambit, and Schloat knew it. “How,” he asked himself, “could the pretense of dying be done without dying? It cannot, of course.” All the same, he was desperate.

Don Schloat got thinner, weaker, more worn and wan. Finally, after several weeks starving himself, he looked so bad the guards called a Japanese doctor, and on October 22, 1943, after almost five months in a wooden box, Don Schloat was put on a stretcher and carried though the orange door in the wall to the regular prison hospital, a “grinning skeleton” with only one thought: “What bliss!”