Another week and the war will be 19 months duration. How can it be that as much as been taken out of our lives? We’ve got to make it up somewhere, somehow. Some of the lines from [Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s] Sonnets from the Portuguese still haunt me, I should not allow myself to be so sentimental, and why not!… I hate this life more an more each day. I’m restless and no matter how or what I eat I can’t gain weight—I guess I never will until we regain some semblance of normality. I’m skeptical about the future of this camp and I hope and pray that things work out, it can certainly be one helluva mess if 7,000 are dumped here in a lump.
Charles Mock
(1908 – 1964) an American originally imprisoned together with other Allied civilians in the University of Santo Tomas, kept a journal of his time in the prisoner of war camp in Los Baños, Laguna.
All Posts