Unbroken_ A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption - Laura Hillenbrand [99]
Louie had another, private act of rebellion. A fellow captive, a bookbinder in civilian life, gave him a tiny book that he’d made in camp with rice paste flattened into pages and sewn together. Louie either found or stole a pencil and began keeping a diary. In it, he recorded what had happened since his crash, then continued with life in the camp. On the book’s central pages, in bold print, he wrote hometown contact information for other captives, making it seem to be an innocuous address book. He wrote his diary entries in faint script upside down in the back of the book, where they might be overlooked. He pried up a board on his cell floor and hid the diary underneath. With daily room inspections, discovery was likely, and would probably bring a clubbing. But this small declaration of self mattered a great deal to Louie. He knew that he might well die here. He wanted to leave a testament to what he had endured, and who he had been.
After food, what every man wanted most was war news. The Japanese sealed their camps from outside information and went to some lengths to convince their captives of Allied annihilation, first by trumpeting Japanese victories, and later, when victories stopped coming, by inventing stories of Allied losses and ridiculously implausible Japanese feats. Once, they announced that their military had shot Abraham Lincoln and torpedoed Washington, D.C. “They couldn’t understand why we laughed,” said a prisoner. Ofuna officials had no idea that the captives had found ways to follow the war in spite of them.
New captives were fonts of information, and no sooner had they arrived than their minds were picked clean, the news tapping its way down the cell blocks in minutes. Newspapers rarely appeared, but when one did, stealing it became a campwide obsession. Rations were sometimes delivered to camp wrapped in newspapers, and the two kitchen laborers, Al Mead and Ernest Duva, would quietly pocket them. The boldest men even managed to pinch papers from the interrogation room as they were being questioned. Once stolen, the papers made elaborate secret journeys, passed hand to hand until they reached the translators, Harris, Fitzgerald, and Maher. As translations were done, lookouts stood by, pretending to tie their shoes or adjust their belts. When guards neared, warnings were issued, and the papers vanished, soon to be put to their final use. In a camp with a lot of dysentery and little toilet paper, newspapers were priceless.
In a secret place inside his cell, Harris stored the tools of his clandestine translating trade. Sometime during his stay at Ofuna, he had scavenged or stolen bits of wire and string, strips of cardboard, scraps of paper, and a pencil. The cardboard had been cut from a Canadian Red Cross POW relief package; because the Red Cross didn’t know of Ofuna’s existence, the package had probably been brought from another camp by the Japanese, who routinely purloined the contents of such parcels for their own consumption. Cutting or tearing the paper into small pages, Harris had used the wire and string to bind them into two books, sewing on the cardboard as covers.
In one book, Harris had recorded the addresses of his fellow captives, including Louie. In the other, he had begun creating an elaborate Japanese-English dictionary. Inside, he had written sentences in Japanese and English—“I feel like eating melon,” “Don’t you intend to buy a piano”—followed by notes on proper phrasing, verbs, and tenses. Other pages were devoted to a comprehensive list of translations of military terms, words like “torpedo plane,” “tank,” “bomber,” “antiaircraft