By this time, the internees had set up nine major departments in the camp: Accommodation, Discipline, Education, Employment, Engineering, Entertainment, Finances, General Affairs, and Medicine. Since a number of nurses and doctors were among the missionaries interned, for the first few days, everyone worked hard to get the hospital up and running again. Some of the equipment was still intact, but a lot of it had been so badly damaged it was no longer of any use. Several people had arrived at the camp sick, and they were the first to be treated in the newly opened hospital. However, one man with appendicitis could not wait for the surgery unit to be reassembled. A couple of days after his arrival at the internment camp, the Japanese sent him off to an outside hospital to be treated, but he died on the way there.
Eric was in demand both as a teacher and as a member of the athletics department. In the end, he agreed to work a half day for each, which meant that instead of having a three-hour workday like everyone else, he had a six-hour workday.
Teaching was the biggest challenge. The teachers had no chalk or chalkboards, and the children had not much paper and very few pencils. The children would use the same piece of paper over and over, erasing everything they had written on it at the end of the day so they could write on it again the following morning. Eric and the other teachers were particularly concerned about the high school students, many of whom were nearing the age when they would be attending university and had already planned to leave China soon to pursue their education. With few textbooks and no equipment in the camp, it was very difficult for these students to do upper high school work. The teachers tried hard to make up for this lack, but it was difficult to overcome.
One of Eric’s students confided in him that her dream was to study chemistry at university in England. Eric made it a priority to do everything he could to help her. He spent evenings sketching and labeling chemistry equipment she would need to do experiments. Then he wrote about how the equipment would be used to conduct the experiments. Even though the young woman never touched a piece of real chemistry equipment in the camp, Eric’s sketches were so accurate that she was able to imagine doing the experiments. When she left Weihsien Internment Camp and finally got to take a university acceptance examination, she scored so well she was accepted to study chemistry.
Many of the missionaries in the camp were from the China Inland Mission, founded by English missionary Hudson Taylor in 1865. As it happened, the oldest intern in Weihsien was Hudson Taylor’s son Herbert, a snowy-haired man of eighty-three. Herbert Taylor, or Grandpa, as everyone called him, came to the camp with a group of ninety-seven parentless children, most of whom were children of China Inland Mission missionaries and had been at the China Inland Mission boarding school in Chefoo. When the school was captured by the Japanese, all the children there were sent to Weihsien Internment Camp. Some of the children learned that their parents were in other internment camps; others heard the awful news that their parents had been killed in the fighting. Whatever their circumstances, the ninety-seven parentless children needed a lot of extra help and love from the adults in the camp.
“Uncle Eric” soon became one of the children’s favorite people. He gave every spare minute of his time to working with the children. He supervised hockey games, and after each game he took the hockey sticks back to his dormitory to repair them for a game the next day. He had found Flo’s dining room curtains in one of the trunks under his bed and had torn them into strips, which he wrapped around the hockey sticks to repair them. Eric also ran a Friday night youth group with square dancing, chess tournaments, puppet plays, and quiz shows.
Eric was especially concerned for those who got sick in the camp. Although some of the best surgeons and doctors in all of China were interned in Weihsien, they did not have the medicines and equipment needed to properly treat all their patients. Typhoid, malaria, and dysentery were common ailments. At one point, there were too many sick people to house them all in the hospital, so it was decided that the two patients who had typhoid and were extremely contagious would be housed in the morgue. The two patients were a Catholic nun and a twelve-year-old girl. The girl was one of the parentless children from Chefoo, and Eric could only imagine how frightening it must have been for her to be lying deathly ill in a morgue. In spite of the fact that he might catch typhoid himself, he visited her every afternoon in the morgue. He would cheer her up with stories of what had happened in school that day. Several days after the two patients had been moved to the morgue, the nun died, and young girl remained there alone. Eric’s visits gave her the will to live, and eventually she did recover. She was always grateful to Eric for his extra care.
Eric was probably the most popular person in the whole camp. His roommates got tired of the constant stream of children parading past the door looking for Uncle Eric. Finally, one of Eric’s roommates made a big sign and hung it outside the door. The sign read, “Eric Liddell is IN/OUT,” with either the “In” or the “Out” covered up. This was the only way that Eric’s roommates could think of to get some peace!
The most difficult thing about camp life was that it could become very boring. Nothing seemed to change from day to day or week to week. (Eventually, the monotony drove some internees to suffer mental breakdowns.) The food was always a major topic of conversation, though it was the same food day in and day out. Breakfast consisted of two slices of bread, without butter, and a bowl of porridge, without milk. Lunch was nicknamed “S.O.S.,” which stood for “Same Old Stew.” It was a grayish, globby mixture made from eggplant and chopped-up weeds picked from around the camp. Dinner was the S.O.S. from lunch, with water added to it to make soup. Of course, this didn’t fool even the smallest children in the camp, who soon realized they were being fed a repeat of lunch.
Occasionally, the Swiss consul was allowed to visit the camp. He would bring medicine and Red Cross parcels for the prisoners. It was as though everyone in camp had a birthday when Red Cross parcels arrived. Not a crumb of the food in the parcels was wasted, nor were the containers the food came in. The Engineering Department, comprising men who had previously overseen the construction of some of China’s finest buildings and bridges, collected all the empty cans and reshaped them into molds to be used to turn coal dust into small bricks that would be used to fire the stoves in the kitchen and the boiler in the hospital.
The Red Cross also arranged for letters to be carried in and out of camp, though the letter writers had to obey very strict rules. Eric, like everyone else, was given a form letter, on which was a space for the name and address of the person writing the letter and the name and address of the person receiving the letter. Underneath was a grid five rows across and five rows down, making twenty-five spaces. In those spaces a prisoner was to write his or her letter. One word per space was strictly enforced, so the writer had to think very carefully before he or she wrote anything down. On the back of the form was another twenty-five space grid for the receiver to send a response. On the average, it took six months for the letter to get to the intended person and another six months for the response to get back to Weihsien.
Even though they were being held against their will, many of those interned in the camp, including Eric, did everything they could think of to make the experience as pleasant as possible. Different people got together and offered over a hundred classes for adults to attend when they were not working. The classes ranged from Latin to ballroom dancing, opera to algebra. (Some classes were a lot more popular than others!) Every weekend there were concerts or plays, and on Sundays there were church services, beginning with the Salvation Army service early in the morning and ending with a Catholic mass in the late afternoon.
The camp also had a thriving black market. Cash and belongings from inside the camp were smuggled out in exchange for eggs and fruit. A group of Roman Catholic Trappist monks were very useful here; their long robes were perfect for hiding things. The leader of the monks was an Australian named Father Scanlan. Night after night, Father Scanlan would collect eggs from a drainage tunnel that ran under the camp’s brick walls. Small Chinese boys would crawl into the tunnel and leave the eggs where the monks could reach in and scoop them up and hide them under their robes.
One night, the plan backfired, and Father Scanlan was caught. The entire camp waited and wondered what his punishment would be. Finally, the Japanese called a community meeting, where Father Scanlan’s fate would be announced. The Japanese commander of Weihsien Internment Camp announced to everyone that Father Scanlan was to receive a severe punishment for trying to trick the Japanese. He was to spend two weeks in solitary confinement. When it heard this, the crowd broke into wild roars of laughter. Old women laughed until tears rolled down their cheeks, and men slapped each other on the back.
The Japanese led Father Scanlan away, totally bewildered at the reaction of the crowd. What they did not know was that Father Scanlan and his group of Trappist monks, before arriving at the camp, had spent fifteen years without saying a word to anyone. When they joined the order, each monk had taken a vow of silence! Because of the unusual situation they faced being interned, they had been temporarily released from their vow. The monks were used to solitude and silence, and putting Father Scanlan in solitary confinement for two weeks was not punishment to him at all. It was more like returning him to the way he had lived before being brought to the camp. Father Scanlan’s “punishment” was the camp joke for months afterwards. The Japanese, though, never understood why their foreign prisoners had laughed so much when the monk’s punishment was announced.
Numerous competitions were held to help cut the monotony as the weeks rolled into months. Rat-catching contests were sponsored by the Medical Department. The record was held by one of the Chefoo teachers and two of his students, who had managed to catch sixty-eight rats in a day. Fly catching was even better. Some of the boys in Eric’s Bible study class found that they could catch over fifty of them during one lesson alone. Naturally, there were also many sports competitions, most of which Eric organized. There were cricket and hockey matches, and baseball, courtesy of the American prisoners. The Trappist monks somehow managed to make up the best baseball team and won most of the games.
Eric also organized running contests. Those interned in the camp knew that he held an Olympic Gold Medal in running, and they all loved to watch him run. Towards the end of 1944, though, something happened at one of these running contests that sent a shock wave through Weihsien. It was a crisp autumn day, and Eric was entered in a race. Whenever he ran, he always ran as fast as he could, but on this particular day, Eric lost his race to one of the schoolboys. Word buzzed around the camp. Eric Liddell had lost a race. What could be wrong with him?
Some people thought he was just slowing down as he got older, but his friend Annie Buchan, the matron from the Siao Chang hospital, knew better. She noticed that Eric was not as strong as he had been and was looking very pale. She urged him to cut down on some of his workload. She felt that he was working far too hard, and he probably was. Aside from the responsibilities of teaching and organizing sports that he had been assigned twenty months earlier, he had accepted the responsibility of being warden of Blocks 23 and 24. These blocks housed two hundred thirty single adults and children. The warden’s job was to make sure that everyone made it to roll call on time and to keep the peace between people who had been crammed together for far too long to keep their tempers.
