Weihsien Compound – A Prison Camp for Expats

by Ernie Diaz

Everything’s such a nuisance: supermarket lines, slow traffic, nothing good to watch. You know what would help a lot? A few years in an internment camp. Not one of those horrific ones from history we see so much of in movies, or the ones today that we hear so little of. Those dehumanize, if not kill, all but the strongest spirits.

The Japanese ran such camps. But in 1942, they rounded up enemy nationals in northern China and sent them to a different kind of camp, in Shandong’s Weifang. Although under guard and reduced to mean circumstances, the prisoners were not brutalized. They were simply left to their own devices to make what they could of their drastically reduced options. Some two thousand captives, from all parts and all professions, had no choice but to build a functioning community without a handbook. They were forced to reevaluate everything they thought they knew about themselves and the way life worked, and to treasure civilization, even with its many discontents.

By late February, 1943, Russians, Brits and Yanks, teachers, preachers and executives had all gotten word they were to be transported to a Civilian Internment Center, that they could bring eating utensils, a trunk, and whatever else they could carry by hand. Grim rumor made up for what the letter left out.

Marching from their embassies to the train station, optimists with golf club sets and heirlooms offered the biggest spectacle to the Chinese crowds lining the streets, rounded up by soldiers to witness the foreigners’ humiliation. Had they known the relatively stable environment awaiting the ‘degraded’ enemy nationals, many in the crowd would doubtless have offered to trade places.

When they got to the camp, a former Presbyterian mission, many of the interns had seen worse accommodations, especially among the missionaries. It was the type of depressing institutional structure so common to north China – big gate, six-foot walls, western roofs, even a few trees. But housing is all about what goes on in the empty space. And nothing was going unless the prisoners did it, including excrement down the non-flush toilets. It took days before a few of the bravest slopped out the latrines and started a bucket collection for flushing.

One cold-water hand pump had to do for the entire city block compound, to clog up the works. And after a few days of soup, the Japanese left their captives to cook for themselves. This was no frat-house affair of who’s turn to pop the mac n’ cheese into the microwave; wood to chop, fires and cauldrons to tend, and bread to bake soon sorted mice from men in the new social order.

Per choice, all plunged into chore-time, anything to distract from the despair of a world suddenly shrunk to two hundred square yards of curtailed drudgery. The best workers and problem-solvers quickly rose to the top of this desperate pecking order, and tapped new reserves every day. Plugging leaks in the squalid bachelors’ basement dorm, washing and drying clothes with any regularity or effect, mundane comforts like staying clean, dry, and fed became the object s of much effort.

For those who didn’t sicken, the physical results were salutary. Overfed executives found their jowls disappearing, while sallow academics grew hale and hearty. Interestingly, the biggest threats to camp peace came from the women. One of the few brawls started in the single women’s dorm, over the female missionaries’ devotion to vocal late-night praying and dawn light hymn-singing.

In spite of human nature, or more accurately because of it, routine eventually replaced chaos, as this new micropolis of Dutch, Parsee, Cubans, Indians, Italians and a dozen other nationalities all adapted to the barbed wire, guard towers, and day-to-day struggle against privation. They set up a modest clinic, and managed to finagle medicine otherwise denied by their captors. There were even weekend baseball games in fine weather, and weekend choral singing and skits for entertainment. One guard, a former Tokyo conservatory student, would sneak in to the one room whose occupant had managed to haul along a phonograph and some Mozart records. He offered baby formula as the price of admission.

Food, always food topmost in the prisoners’ thoughts, especially as Japan’s attrition grew severe, and even the fly-blown meat-scraps rationed out became insufficient to flavor a cauldron of soup. The inevitable black market grew silently and flourished, brave and desperate Chinese farmers from surrounding villages supplying the forbidden goods. A Catholic priest dug a hole under a wall, at which he would kneel to pray, while farmers on the other side would push through eggs and other precious foodstuff. Eventually, his ruse was uncovered. He got a month in solitary confinement, a vacation for the former Trappist monk. The culpable farmers were summarily executed. They and other Chinese heroes, the ones who smuggled news in, or helped escapees hide, have little to commemorate them other than former inmate Mary Previte’s speech at the 60^th anniversary of the liberation of the camp.

That liberation came from the sky on August 17^th, 1945, a massive bomber that attracted the whole camp’s attention, inducing pandemonium as it belched a long stream of parachutes out the hatch. A young major and his paratroopers marched into the camp, meeting little resistance, and receiving the warden’s sword and gun without protest. But for the liberated, as for so many other survivors of WWII, there was no normal life to return to, much as they had dreamed of it. Only a fraction stayed on in China, and it would be close to fifty years before so many foreigners, and so diverse, once again called the Middle Kingdom home.

Related posts:

1. The Summer Camp Phenomenon
2. Lhasa to Everest Base Camp
3. All Expats in China are Crazy
4. All Expats in China are Crazy II
5. Earthquake Preparedness for Expats

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