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About Albert E. Holland

Albert E. Holland, from the Trinity College Digital Repository.
Albert E. Holland, from the Trinity College Digital Repository.

About the author: Albert E. Holland (July 28, 1912 — August 17, 1984), Trinity College (Hartford, CT) Class of 1934, was interned by the Japanese in the Santo Tomas Internment Camp, Manila, from 1942 to 1945.

A profile in the Trinity College, Hartford, CT website says:

In early 1941, Albert became assistant to the vice president of the Ossorio Companies in the Philippines and served as a junior executive with the North Negros Sugar Company in Manila. He and his family were caught up in the Japanese conquest of the Philippines in 1942 and were incarcerated for 37 months until February 1945. Albert joined the camp’s executive committee, and served in a variety of capacities working for the benefit of the internees. Upon liberation, he coordinated the repatriation of all the internees. Holland received a letter of commendation from the U.S. military for his efforts.

His obituary in The New York Times contains the following information:

A graduate of Trinity and earned a master’s degree in history from the college in 1958. Before starting his career in education, Mr. Holland worked for several businesses in New York and abroad. At Trinity College in Hartford, he was a teacher and an administrator from 1946 to 1966 and vice president from 1956 to 1966. In 1966, he was named president of Hobart, an all- male college in Geneva, N.Y., and William Smith, its female affiliate. He resigned two years later to become vice president of Wellesley College, where he remained until his retirement in 1977. He lived in Wellesley, MA; died at the age of 72 in Boston, MA, in 1984.

About the diary: The Santo Tomas Internment Camp Diary of Albert E. Holland, 1944-1945 was written by Holland for his sister, Hope.

The introduction by Mrs. Eva J. Engel Holland follows:

The diary that follows was kept by Albert Holland who served as the head of the Release Department (the prisoners’ executive committee) of the Santo Tomas Internment Camp. It describes the plight of prisoners of this Japanese camp for enemy aliens in the Philippines from November 1944 to February 1945. The diary was written in the spirit of Captain Robert F. Scott: “Where ultimate survival is unlikely, at least there should be an account of how the challenge was met.” Or, as Albert Holland wrote in early December 1944,“They [the Japanese] may break my health, but they cannot break my morale.”

At first diary entries were written down in a record book. Later, when greater care had to be taken to keep accounts of prevailing conditions secret from the Japanese officials, entries were made on the reverse of sheets of paper previously used. These sheets, once completed, could be hidden by slipping them under the prisoner’s sleeping mat.

The original diary is reproduced (including abbreviations and punctuation marks). At the end of the diary transcript a letter dated April 14, 1945 from the commanding U.S. general Frayne Baker honoring the services rendered by A. E. Holland has been added. Also added is a list of explanatory footnotes.

The version here in the Philippine Diary Project omits the Baker letter and Mrs. Holland’s footnotes. For the original, please see Holland, Albert E., “The Santo Tomas Internment Camp Diary of Albert E. Holland, 1944-1945” (1945). Trinity College Digital Repository, Hartford, CT.. The previous link includes an embedded facsimile copy of the original diary. Transcript is here, including the footnotes of Mrs. Holland and other material.

3 thoughts on “About Albert E. Holland”

  1. It’s amazing how events get past down. They never seem to parallel what comes out later

    His grandson J.D. Holland

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