The Leper Spy (14 page)

When the hellfire stopped, there was an eerie calm.

“Now there's nothing more I can do but sweat,” Griswold told the radioman. “I've given them all I've got and they're under a higher command.”

T
he gravediggers were exhausted. They were burying four, maybe five prisoners a day, death rates ridiculously higher than in Nazi prison camps. And the guards on the perimeter had swung their big guns around so they were now pointing inside, at the internees and at Father Fred Julien, who had just celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday, his fourth in a row as a prisoner of the Japanese army.

In the past two weeks, the Allies had freed inmates at Baguio and Camp John Hay and Old Bilibid. They'd rescued thirty-seven hundred civilians at Santo Tomas, the largest camp, where they had discovered documents that gave orders to the commandant at Los Baños, twenty-four miles away, to liquidate all internees if withdrawal became necessary.

The prisoners looked like scarecrows standing in front of their barracks before roll call as a saffron sun rose on the morning of February 23, 1945. From beyond the hills came a great rumbling.

“I wonder what that is,” a Dutch priest said.

“Either the Japanese up there are running or the Americans are coming,” Father Julien replied. “Whichever it is, it could be very good for us.”

The planes came in low over the hills, and white clouds exploded behind them, then descended like daffodils on the wind. A smoke grenade popped in a dry rice paddy beside the camp. A grenade
exploded in a bunker near the front gate. The daffodils landed, ditching their chutes and shouldering rifles. Guerrillas poured out of hiding places in the undergrowth and charged the wire, attacking the gun house where the Japanese guards, caught doing calisthenics on the ball field, had left their weapons. Tracer bullets ripped through the camp, and the priests dove to the ground, praying the rosary on hot breath.

“Spare my life, almighty God,” prayed Father Julien, frozen facedown with fear.

In a blink, the shooting stopped and the paratroopers fanned out, barking instructions to the frail prisoners.
Get up. Get your shit. Let's move.

The barracks were burning now, the paratroopers pulling prisoners toward sixty amphibious vehicles bound for Laguna de Bay, toward American lines. Planes roared overhead, targeting gun emplacements and laying down cover.

One thousand one hundred seventy-four captive sunrises. Three hours, in and out. Freedom sounded like a cluster of men peppering the paratroopers with questions, learning about Santo Tomas and the destruction in Manila and the movements on the western front.

Father Julien stepped on a scale, figuring he'd lost 20 or 30 pounds off his prewar weight of 135 pounds. The needle stopped moving at eighty-seven.

T
he weeks and months after the battle wrecked Manila were tumultuous, with every system of government in chaotic flux. Public transportation did not exist. Water and sewer lines were wrecked. There was no electricity. Forty percent of the city's one hundred bridges were destroyed, including the six over the Pasig River. The University of the Philippines and Philippine General Hospital, surrounding the Ateneo de Manila, were destroyed. The same for the government center. The Americans had left the Japanese stragglers with no escape route, so they simply holed up, recklessly, forcing the Americans to clear the city building by building, floor by floor, closet by closet. It was a fight of attrition; for every American killed, US soldiers killed seventeen Japanese. Filipino civilians were caught in the middle. For every dead American soldier, one hundred civilians lost their lives. Their bodies were stacked like cordwood around the city, bayonet wounds on their backs, missing arms and legs, and sometimes, oddly, with no noticeable injuries. It is commonly believed that more than one hundred thousand civilians died during the battle. When the number of claims submitted for the deaths of Filipinos at Japanese hands were tallied after nearly four years of war, it would exceed one million.

“The war has left behind it a world suffering from destitution and seething with discontent,” read the lead editorial in the
Philippines Free Press
of February 23, 1946, the first publication after four years of blackout. “The old standards of living have disappeared, swept away in the whirlwind of destruction.”

Destruction at Intramuros, the walled city in Manila, in May 1945, after the Battle of Manila.
Wikimedia Commons

Bodies were turning up bearing signs of torture. Judges were sentencing traitors and collaborators to death. Frauds in spiffy new uniforms were filing claims for back pay with the US Army, saying they had fought for the resistance and deserved their due. Some signs of normalcy were creeping back in, too, and certain sections of the city were struggling to get their beat back. You could dine and dance to the music of Tirso Cruz and his orchestra at the world-famous Manila Hotel. You could catch a business flight on one of four routes offered by Philippine Air Lines. You could finally buy a “squeak and rattle-free” six-passenger Nash 600 from the Bachrach Motor Company. But the war had razed 70 percent of utilities, 75 percent of factories, and 100 percent of the business district. Only Warsaw compared in terms of devastation.

Joey's life remained in flux. Her home in Ermita was lost. She didn't own a single beautiful thing anymore. She sought refuge
where she always had, with the Jesuits, who again found a way to provide. They, too, were refugees, but they found her a little room—only eight feet by six feet—in the ruined laboratories of the Ateneo. A mortar had penetrated the roof and created a gaping hole. Water poured in when it rained, which wasn't all bad. It was all the water she could get.

The campus was full of refugees, and Joey treated them the best she knew how. She couldn't resist their appeals. The food the priests set aside for her she gave to others. Father Monaghan became aware that she was only eating one meal per day. She did the same with donated clothing, picking out the outfits she liked best and giving them away. Since Father Monaghan was her spiritual counselor, he finally forbade her to give anything away without his permission.

One day he received an urgent message about Joey. Someone had informed the military police that a leper was living on the premises and the authorities thought it best that she be segregated. The priests at the Ateneo were well aware of the national embarrassment that was the state-run leprosariums in the Philippines.

Monaghan hustled to the Ateneo and listened to Joey's story. A doctor employed in the hospital across the wall from the Ateneo had informed the police against her. He was the father of Joey's closest friend, a girl with whom she had spoken of her affliction in confidence. The American army health authorities were planning to take swift action. Father Monaghan had an idea: to get her out of the Ateneo and try to hide her in seclusion. He hurried off to find a friendly army sergeant he knew, and the man helped get Joey out of the college and into the home of the family of her friend Lulu Reyes. Lulu and Joey's other friends, now in on the secret, would not tell, but they all began working to find a long-term place for Joey to stay. The Reyes family's home was ruined, and they, too, were set to move into the Ateneo in a few days.

“Is it going to be Novaliches?” Joey asked Monaghan a few days later. “I keep repeating the word to myself. At first it had a terrible sound. By forcing myself to repeat it, I am getting used to it. It is
like the taste for olives—you have to cultivate it. Who knows? I may eventually come to like the thought of Novaliches.”

Meanwhile, her friends were having no luck finding a place. Monaghan told Joey that it looked as though Novaliches would be the only place she could stay if they couldn't find other housing. The next day, he drove to the outskirts of town to see the leprosarium for himself. “Such another God-and-man-forsaken place as that Novaliches leprosarium I hope to never see,” he wrote later. “In the midst of a wilderness of high sawgrass lay a cluster of frame houses. The director, a good man, showed me about. The objects Stevenson called ‘butt-ends of humanity' squatted on the ground or lay in bed. They were given a weekly ration of food, not half what they needed; this they cooked for themselves. They had to gather their own wood; worse than that, they had to fetch all their water—for washing, laundry, and drinking. The wards were foul; no disinfectants were provided. When the poor lepers tracked up the floor with their open sores, the filth and stench and the danger of graver contagion remained. The lepers, I learned, had become brutalized from despair and the sense of their abandonment. They stole from one another and lived in complete promiscuity. The government did not provide enough money to hire help to maintain separate establishments.”

When he left, Father Monaghan was sick. He thought of Saint Ignatius's picture of a soul locked in a corrupting body and banished to a wilderness among brute beasts. What was the crime of lepers that they were still treated so inhumanly by their fellow man? And why must a pure, cultured young woman be sent to a lifelong exile in a hellhole like Novaliches? There was plenty of pity for other diseases, foundations for the study of cancer and tuberculosis, but lepers were always the outcasts from whom men fled.

The next time he saw Joey, Father Monaghan told her exactly what he had seen at Novaliches. He wanted her to know the worst and to be prepared for it. He tried to offer spiritual consolation: God must have a plan for her in a place like that. He told her that
if God was taking her from all the support of society to place her among those poor, forsaken creatures, it was because he meant to replace those supports with an infinitely stronger and sweeter intimacy with himself.

“Consider,” he said, “that you are going to an austere cloister, a Carmel, where Christ awaits you.”

The next afternoon, he drove Joey to Novaliches. Lulu and her other friends came along. They joked and laughed the entire way. When they pulled onto the campus and Joey saw the derelict compound and the crude houses, she spoke up.

“Father,” she said, “how do you like my convent?”

They ate supper with the director, then packed up to leave. Lulu and the girls kissed Joey. Father Monaghan shook her hand. Joey knelt before him and asked for a blessing. He gave it, then climbed into the car and drove away. No one spoke on the drive back to Manila. They thought about how much she had given and how little she had received in return. A hero. An outcast.

I
t started with a letter. On August 8, 1945, Joey Guerrero sat before a typewriter at the leper colony in Novaliches and composed a meek cry for help. Conditions were so dire she felt she had no choice but to ask for charity, which, the Ateneo priests knew, went against the Filipino's nature. She addressed her letter to Marie Dachauer of Sacramento, California, whom she had heard about from a friend of a friend. Dachauer, tall and efficient and originally from Milwaukee, had retired her job as manager of the Enos department store and was on her way toward founding Friends for the Lepers, a Catholic lay organization to help leprosy victims around the world. Joey tucked the note into an envelope and sent it to America on a prayer.

Dear Miss Marie:

One lovely afternoon last week a young army chaplain came to an isolated part of the world with four young Jesuit scholastics. The young army chaplain was also a Jesuit. They came to visit a young woman, a very good friend of the other four young Jesuit scholastics. The place is about twenty-eight kilometers away from the city of Manila but they came in an army jeep and although the roads were all ruts and holes and rough travel, they
got there in a very short while. This out-of-the-way and almost forgotten and forsaken place is a leprosarium and the young woman they came to visit is the person who takes the liberty to write to you. The young army chaplain is Father (Captain) Luis Torralba, S.J. and the twenty-eight year old young woman is called Joey—Joey to all her friends and hopes that in time you might be one amongst them and that she be Joey to you also.

And now that I have (I hope) properly introduced myself, may I say that Father has spoken so highly of you and thinks you are a very wonderful person. He said I may write and so I have. I do hope you will not think this an intrusion, nay, an imposition on the goodness and greatness of your heart which Father has told us about. However, I took courage to do so for he spoke of your great interest and devotion to the needs and fate of the leper.

Someday I hope you may come to the Philippines and perhaps pay us a visit, but in the meantime, I'd like to tell you all about us. May I? Father says I must tell you everything. But the inside story of the life of the leper in a poor and sadly abandoned leper colony is too full of heartaches, misery and want. I always argued and thought that to dump our many troubles and vicissitudes on the laps of other people very inconsiderate and unfair: and many are the times when I feel that it is truly an imposition to ask even my own friends out here into this no-man's land of a leper colony but my little girl's heart always wins out by the thought that this is what my friends are for; that I may turn to them in times of stress, that I may unburden to them the weight of the cross that lies heavy at times in my heart.