Eric sat on his bags in the aisle and watched his fellow travelers. They were all British, they spoke English, and they were all on their way to an internment camp, but that was all they had in common with each other. All of them were from varied walks of life and social classes. Many of them had never ever before had to mix with each other. Now they sat silently side by side staring grimly out at the darkness that had settled over the countryside. Eric prayed silently as the train rolled along through the night. “God, help me to shine Your light among these people.”
The train took sixteen exhausting hours to reach Weihsien. Stiff and sleepless, the passengers climbed awkwardly from the train. They were then told the internment camp was two miles outside the city. Whispers went around the group. According to those who had visited Weihsien before, they were probably going to be interned at the American Presbyterian Mission Station just outside of town.
Since there were no trucks to take them the two miles to the camp, once again they all picked up their luggage and began to walk. Eric shifted his luggage from one hand to the other as he walked along. Then, finally, the gate to the American Presbyterian Mission Station came into view. The rumor was true. This was where they were going to be interned. As Eric walked up to the gate, he noticed the sign in Chinese hanging above it. He translated it out loud as he walked under it: “The Courtyard of the Happy Way.” No one was happy to be in the courtyard that night!
Inside the gates, Japanese guards led the group along a pathway between two buildings and out into a small open field with a rugby goalpost at one end. When the group had gathered on the field, one of the guards pointed to a tall, dark-haired European man with glasses. The men stepped in front of the group and turned to address it. “Welcome to Weihsien Internment Camp,” he began in a clipped English accent. “I know you will have many questions, but the one thing we have here is plenty of time to answer them.” He gave a little chuckle at his own joke, but no one else seemed to find it funny. He continued. “For now, I am going to tell you that including yourselves, there are about eighteen hundred of us here. We come from three cities, Peking, Tsingtao, and, of course, Tientsin. We are placed in dormitories according to where we come from, and there are three kitchens within the compound, so each group gets to cook for itself and eat together. Now, if you would separate into families on the right and singles on the left, we can get you settled into a room, and then you can get your dinner.”
Eric shuffled to the left. In some ways, he envied the people on the right; they were families and could comfort and support each other. But in other ways, he hated the thought of his wife and daughters being in an internment camp.
“One more thing,” said the man, raising his clipped English voice above the crowd. “The bathrooms are to your right in the long, low building. They’re not in great shape yet….” His voice trailed off apologetically.
Eric and five other men were directed to one of the dormitory buildings. One of the men was A. P. Cullen, who had been a teacher at Eltham College in London when Eric was a young student there. A. P. Cullen had also been a fellow teacher with Eric at the Anglo-Chinese college. On the way to the dormitory, the men stopped by the bathrooms. Eric almost wished they hadn’t. He had been in China long enough to experience many types of bathrooms, but the one he saw, or smelled, when he opened the door was a hundred times worse than anything he’d seen before. It was easy to see the bathrooms had once been the sparkling-clean pride of the janitor of the Presbyterian Mission Station. The toilet bowls were all new and sunk low into the ground like all Chinese toilets. Above each bowl dangled a polished bronze chain, which when pulled should have produced a flush of water. But therein was the problem. All the water pipes in the toilet had been ripped out, and the toilet bowls were already backed up and overflowing. A man in the bathroom explained that there was no running water in the whole camp, no plumber to repair the pipes, and no Chinese servants to clean up the mess.
At that moment, Eric grasped the enormity of what lay ahead. Somehow the eighteen hundred people interned in the camp, cut off from families, friends, and countries, would have to find a way to work together to form a community. It was going to have to be a community where many people would need to do jobs they had never even dreamed of doing before. They were going to have to cook meals, clean toilets, pump water, and hand wash clothes. Eric sighed. It was going to be quite an unusual experience for many of the people in the camp who were used to being pampered by Chinese servants.
Eric did not spend long in his new dorm room. There was absolutely no furniture in the room and no sign of the bed he had loaded onto a Japanese truck several days before in Tientsin. He shoved his bags up against a wall and headed outside again. It had turned into a cloudy, damp night, and he could hear people coughing as he walked past the doors to other dorm rooms.
The beam of a searchlight mounted on the compound wall constantly crisscrossed the camp. As it moved across the area outside the dormitory, it illuminated a pile of shattered furniture and bent pipes. The Japanese had apparently completely demolished the compound before making it an internment camp.
Eric stepped past the pile of broken furniture and walked to the wall at the north end of the compound. He decided to measure the compound. His years of running had made him fairly accurate at measuring distances with strides. He stared at the corner of the north wall and walked in a westerly direction. “One, two, three…” he counted aloud until he reached the opposite corner. One hundred fifty yards. Then he strode along the west wall in a southerly direction. Two hundred yards. Eric let out a low whistle. The entire compound was only one hundred fifty yards wide and two hundred yards long. That was only the size of two rugby fields. And into that space were packed eighteen hundred people.
The realization shocked Eric. How could people get any privacy when they were crowded in so tightly? And how long were they going to have to remain crammed together in the camp?
Eric was still thinking about this when A. P. Cullen grabbed his arm. “You’d better get in line for dinner, or you’ll miss out,” he said, pulling Eric towards a pool of light. Soon Eric was in line with five hundred other people. They were all from Tientsin, and they were all hungry. Only those who had carried food with them from the British concession had eaten anything in the past twenty-four hours, and Eric was not one of them.
Slowly the line edged towards a woman with a huge pot of liquid that she was ladling into bowls.
“Where do you get the bowls?” Eric asked a man in front of him.
“You bring them with you, of course,” he replied, producing his own bowl from a bag he had slung over his shoulder.
Eric and A. P. Cullen looked at each other and groaned. Why hadn’t they noticed sooner? They had been standing in line for a half hour by then. They both slipped out of line and walked quickly back to their room. Fortunately, both of them had plates and silverware packed away in their bags. Others, though, were not so lucky. They had not packed any plates and had to find people who would lend them some so they could eat. Their plight got Eric wondering. He might have brought plates, but what other important things had he forgotten to bring?
When he got back to the line, it was moving more quickly, and within ten minutes he and A. P. Cullen were sitting with their backs against a brick wall eating soup and chunks of bread. Eric looked around. This was the kind of meal most of the British people from the concession would have refused to eat had it been served to them at home or in a restaurant. Now they had no choice. Now they were prisoners in an internment camp, surrounded by high walls and barbed wire.
After dinner, Eric and A. P. Cullen, along with just about everyone else in the camp, headed for bed. Those who had arrived by train that day were exhausted. Most had hardly slept the night before. Eric slept in his clothes on the hard floor. There seemed little point changing into pajamas when there was no bed to curl up in.
The next morning, Eric got up an hour earlier than everyone else, and as he did each morning, he used the time to read his Bible and pray. At exactly 7:15 a.m. a horn blared out, signaling that it was fifteen minutes to roll call. Eric pulled on an extra sweater and headed outside. It was a crisp morning, and he was eager to learn more about the camp in the light of day.
Eric learned a lot that first day. He learned that at least fifteen nationalities were represented in the camp. The one thing they had in common was that the Japanese army did not want them moving freely around China anymore. As expected, there were large numbers of people from Great Britain and the United States, but there were also people from Italy, Belgium, Holland, India, Palestine, Russia, and Cuba. Some had lived most of their lives in China; some were the children or grandchildren of merchants and businessmen who had immigrated to China many years before. Others, like the jazz duo consisting of a native Hawaiian and a black American, or the two Cuban families who had been touring China with a baseball team, had intended to visit the country for only a couple of weeks. They were stunned to find themselves prisoners in an internment camp. The Cuban families spoke only Spanish and had no one else to talk to.
As Eric acquired this information, he realized that language was going to be a major problem in the camp. It would be very difficult to organize things when people did not understand what was being said. Eric also learned that inside the compound the Japanese had decided to let them all pretty much alone. They had made it clear, though, that they wanted those in the camp to do their own chores and run their own affairs. By the end of his first day, Eric knew that this was going to be an extremely difficult task. How would people be motivated to work, and how would their spirits be kept up? In particular, Eric worried about the hundreds of children and teenagers he had seen that day. What was there for them to do week after week? And what about the schooling they were missing?
But as he wondered, Eric’s mind kept coming back to the unanswered question that really mattered, the question that was on everyone’s mind: How long were they all going to be crammed together in Weihsien Internment Camp?
No one that day could have imagined that they would be interned for two years and one month and that during that time they would become a community of people who learned to work together for the common good of everyone in the camp. And they certainly could not have predicted the fate of the forty-three-year-old athlete who would become one of the strongest and most willing workers within their prison community.
Chapter 16
Uncle Eric
Three weeks went by before the convoy of trucks arrived carrying the beds and other belongings of the British internees from Tientsin arrived. Eric had given up all hope of ever seeing his bed or trunks again, so he was very surprised when the trucks drove through the front gate. He assembled his bed and placed the mattress on top. Then he slid the three trunks that contained mostly household items under the bed.
When he was done, Eric sat on the bed and watched enviously as one of the other men in his dorm room put together a double bed. What luxury! And what foresight, though the man hadn’t really planned it that way. Back in Tientsin, he’d had no single bed, so when the Japanese came to collect the beds to transport to Weihsien, he gave them the only bed he could lay his hands on. It just happened to be a double bed. Now, in the cramped confines of Weihsien Internment Camp, a double bed meant that he could claim double the amount of space in the room as his own, and he had double the area to stretch out in and sleep at night. Eric wished he’d thought to send a double bed instead of the single one he was sitting on. Still, he couldn’t complain; his single bed was going to be a lot more comfortable to sleep on than the hard floorboards he’d been sleeping on for the past three weeks.
