By Joel Keller
THE ERICKSON TRIBUNE

On February 23, 1945, the U.S. Army and Filipino guerillas rescued 2,147 civilians from an internment camp called Los Baños, about 40 miles south of Manila. Donald P. Smith’s family was among those who were liberated.

Twenty years ago, Smith decided that it was a good time to find out the complete story of his family’s life at the interment camp. And the best place to start was with his father. “Before my father died I interviewed him; I revered him, and I wanted to get his life story,” he says.

Those interviews, and interviews with his mother and younger brother, are the basis for his new self-published book, We Survived War’s Crucible, about the harrowing experience of being a prisoner of the Japanese military at Los Baños.

Smith’s parents were missionaries who lived in the Philippines prior to World War II. During the conflict, civilians who were considered enemies of the country’s Japanese occupiers were put under house arrest. After a couple of years, though, the civilians were rounded up and sent to camps like Los Baños. The book details the nightmare of the camp, mostly from the perspective of Smith’s father and younger brother Paul.

A harrowing tale
“They were there for seven months; people were dying of starvation, and there was a lot of ill treatment of the people by the Japanese commander of the camp,” says Smith, who was born in the Philippines but was going to college in California at the time of the conflict.

In the dark
Because of his distance from his family, he had little word of what they were going through and had to build the accounts he writes about in his book via the stories told by his family. “During the war I had no communication from them except one letter that came through the Red Cross that said nothing except that they were alive at that point,” he says.