Latest news with #Japanese-occupied
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
West Loch Disaster remembrance planned
The Obama Hawaiian Africana Museum and the Defense POW /MIA Accounting Agency will host a remembrance ceremony Wednesday at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl honoring the anniversary of the deadly 1944 West Loch Disaster. On May 21, 1944, service members were working on several vessels docked at West Loch loading weapons and supplies to support Operation Forager, the invasion of the Japanese-occupied Mariana Islands. At 3 :08 p.m. something caused an explosion aboard LST-353 near its bow. The blast killed serv icemen on board and rained burning debris on nearby vessels. The debris ignited fuel and munitions stored on their decks, setting off an explosive chain reaction. By the time the smoke cleared, explosions and debris had destroyed six LSTs, killing at least 163 people and injuring 396—though some historians suspect shoddy record-keeping by Army officials in a rush to keep Operation Forager on track could have as many as 100 more uncounted. More than half of the soldiers were Black troops from the 29th Chemical Decontamination Unit. The handling of the West Loch disaster and its aftermath would in time contribute to calls for the desegregation of the U.S. military after World War II. Many of the dead were buried at Punchbowl as unknowns, where they rested for decades. But in 2024 the DPAA exhumed the remains of the unknowns in an effort to identify them based on a mix of DNA testing and historical research. According to a media release by the Obama Hawaiian Africana Museum, speakers at the event will talk about an emerging DPAA partnership with the Obama Hawaiian Africana Museum to engage with people who may be related to the West Loch dead to collect additional DNA to support efforts to identify the remains. The ceremony will be at 2-3 p.m. Wednesday at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl, 2177 Puowaina Drive.
New York Times
27-02-2025
- General
- New York Times
Rose Girone, Oldest Holocaust Survivor, Dies at 113
Rose Girone was eight months pregnant and living in Breslau, Germany, in 1938 when her husband was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. She secured passage to Shanghai, only to be forced to live in a bathroom in a Jewish ghetto for seven years. Once settled in the United States, she rented whatever she could find while supporting her daughter with knitting. Despite the hardships, including two pandemics, Ms. Girone embraced life with urgent positivity and common sense. 'Aren't we lucky?' she would often say. Ms. Girone was believed to be the oldest survivor of the Holocaust. She died at a nursing home on Long Island on Monday, her daughter and fellow survivor, Reha Bennicasa, said. She was 113. Her secret to longevity was simple, she would say: dark chocolate and good children. There are about 245,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors alive around the world, according to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which supports survivors. 'This passing reminds us of the urgency of sharing the lessons of the Holocaust while we still have firsthand witnesses with us,' said Greg Schneider, the organization's executive vice president. 'The Holocaust is slipping from memory to history, and its lessons are too important, especially in today's world, to be forgotten.' 'Rose was an example of fortitude, but now we are obligated to carry on in her memory,' he said. Rose Raubvogel was born on Jan. 13, 1912, in Janow, Poland, to Klara Aschkenase and Jacob Raubvogel. The family later settled in Hamburg, Germany, and started a costume business. She married Julius Mannheim in 1938 in an arranged marriage. The couple moved to Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) that year, not long before Mr. Mannheim and his father were arrested and sent to Buchenwald. A year later, now with an infant, Ms. Girone received a document written in Chinese from family members who had escaped to England. It appeared to be a visa for safe passage to Shanghai, but 'it could have been anything,' Ms. Bennicasa said, explaining that the family later learned it could have been a fake document. Mr. Mannheim's father agreed to hand over his shipping business plus a payment to the Nazis in exchange for their release from the concentration camp. With the visa, Ms. Girone, her husband and 6-month-old Reha set sail for Japanese-occupied Shanghai along with 20,000 other refugees. Mr. Mannheim had a small taxi business at first, while Ms. Girone made money by knitting clothes. But once Japan declared war in 1941, Jews were rounded up into a ghetto. Ms. Girone had to beg the ghetto's overseer for a place for her family to live, and the only arrangement they could manage was an unfinished, rat-infested bathroom in a house. The family of three would live there for seven years. Mr. Mannheim had to abandon his taxi business and turned to hunting and fishing, while Ms. Girone continued to sell her knitwear. She eventually made friends with other refugees, including a Viennese Jewish businessman who helped her turn her knitting into a business. It would be a lifeline for decades to come. By 1947, Ms. Girone's mother and grandmother had already made it to the United States, and they sponsored the family to join them. Ms. Girone secretly stashed $80, and the family set off that year for San Francisco, where they lived for about a month before taking a train to New York. Within a few years, Ms. Girone had divorced Mr. Mannheim, and she and Reha bounced from furnished room to furnished room around Manhattan, where she 'scrimped and saved' while working at knitting stores, Ms. Bennicasa said. Ms. Girone eventually saved enough to open a knitting store with a partner in Rego Park, Queens, and she opened a second store in Forest Hills, where 'we actually had a real apartment, not just a furnished room,' Ms. Bennicasa recalled. Ms. Girone would continue to work and teach knitting until she was 102. In 1968, Ms. Girone married Jack Girone, who died in 1989. In addition to Ms. Bennicasa, she is survived by her granddaughter, Gina Bennicasa. Gina Bennicasa remembered her grandmother's frequent sayings, including 'Growing old is fun, but being old is not fun.' One stood out among the rest: 'You have to wake up and have a purpose.'
Boston Globe
18-02-2025
- General
- Boston Globe
Gil Won-ok, memory keeper of wartime sex slavery by Japan, dies at 96
Advertisement Japan and South Korea signed an agreement in 2015 that included an apology by Japan and restitution for the sexual enslavement of Korean women, but the historical trauma remains a lingering wound for many South Koreans and a sensitive diplomatic point of tension between the two nations. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Ms. Gil and other survivors believed that Japan had not done enough to take full responsibility for the abuses against civilian women. She joined weekly protests outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, where a bronze statue of a seated young women next to an empty chair represents the ordeal faced by Ms. Gil and others. 'We were born human but haven't been able to live like humans,' Ms. Gil said during a 2010 demonstration in Tokyo, filmed as part of the documentary 'The Apology' (2016) by filmmaker Tiffany Hsiung. 'I will keep on talking until the day I die.' Nearby, a group of Japanese protesters jeered Ms. Gil and others, calling them 'prostitutes.' The collective memory of the 'comfort women' stayed mostly buried until the early 1990s, when the first survivors came forward with their stories of being trapped in brothels for Japanese soldiers in areas such as China's northern Manchuria, where Japanese forces invaded in 1931. Ms. Gil first spoke publicly in 1998 about her experiences after seeing television coverage of the Seoul protests outside the Japanese Embassy, which began six years earlier. 'I had never even heard of the term 'comfort woman' before,' she said in an oral history in 2004 recorded by history students at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul. 'I only described my experiences as subhuman treatment.' Advertisement Her account began in 1940 when she was 12 in Pyongyang, now the capital of North Korea. Her father, who owned a scrap yard, was arrested on charges of selling stolen items, she said. Ms. Gil left school and briefly attended classes in the Korean tradition of gisaeng, women trained in singing and arts who entertained at upper-crust events. A friend, Ms. Gil recalled, suggested they try to find jobs in Manchuria. 'I was too immature to realize what the repercussions would be,' she said in the oral history. 'I just wanted to earn the [money] to release my father from jail.' Ms. Gil thought she might find work as a singer or bar hostess. She was almost immediately coerced into a brothel, where she said she was raped by Japanese soldiers hour after hour. Months later, she was diagnosed with syphilis. Japanese doctors, she said, tied her fallopian tubes, leaving her unable to get pregnant. 'I was crippled by the age of 14,' she said. She was sent back to Korea to recover, she recalled. Jobs were scarce, and she said her family lived on small amounts of millet and scrounged firewood to keep warm. In desperation, Ms. Gil decided in 1942 to try again in Japanese-occupied China, hoping this time to avoid the brothel operators. Her mother, she said, gave her a traditional Korea outfit with a long green skirt to impress prospective bosses. 'I was a fool,' Ms. Gil recalled. Like before, she was soon forced into a brothel and given a Japanese name. Advertisement 'There was no freedom,' he recalled in the oral history. 'No one was allowed to go anywhere. There was nothing I could do when the men came in.' When she resisted, she said, she was beaten. One soldier slashed the top of her head with a knife, she said. After Japan's surrender to end World War II, Ms. Gil boarded a ship that docked in Incheon, near what is now South Korea's capital, Seoul. When communist North Korea invaded the South in 1950, touching off the Korean War, Ms. Gil was still in the Seoul area and became cut off from her family on the other side of the border. Ms. Gil's activism included co-founding the Butterfly Fund with another survivor of the WWII brothels, Kim Bok-dong, to aid victims of sexual abuse during wars around the world. 'How could I not hold a grudge against those people who did this to me?' Ms. Gil said. Gil Won-ok was born in Huichon, now part of North Pyongan Province in late 1928, with some South Korean groups noting her birth date as Nov. 30. The family moved to Pyongyang when she was a child. Her mother had a street stall selling fish. After the war, Ms. Gil worked as a hostess and singer in bars in South Korea. She married a man and learned from her mother-in-law how to make homemade rice wine to sell. She said she left the man and underwent a hysterectomy to remove ovarian cysts she blamed on the operation done by the Japanese doctor when she was a teenager. Advertisement When Ms. Gil was nearly 30, she adopted a son and opened a food stand. 'I would just spin in circles around my room and say, 'Thank you, God, for giving a son to a wretch like me,'' she said. In 2017, Ms. Gil released a recording of songs, 'Gil Won-ok's Peace,' and her life story was adapted into a book, 'Have You Ever Wished for a Soldier to Become an Angel?' (2018), by South Korean author Kim Sum. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available. Ms. Gil often thanked other survivors of the Japanese military abuses for giving her to courage to share her story. 'I couldn't have survived for all these years,' she said, 'by carrying all those memories with me.'
South China Morning Post
31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Hong Kong's darkest days of Japanese invasion, cannibalism, POW camps and heroism
Discover some of Hong Kong's stories during WWII, from the city's surrender to Japan on Christmas Day 1941 to subsequent tales of survival and resilience under the occupation of the invading forces. Explore disturbing accounts of cannibalism during severe food shortages and learn how POWs used music and theatre to survive, and even escape, as PostMag writer Jason Wordie looks back at some of the stories from the city's darkest days. 1. Hong Kong's darkest December saw surrender to the invading Japanese on Christmas Day 1941 The capitulation to invading Japanese forces on December 25, 1941, means that day will forever also have a darker significance outside of the usual festivities attached to that date in the memories and history of Hong Kong. Numerous war memorials and remnants of conflict that still stand are reminders of 18 days of intense battles before the city fell on Christmas Day. 2. Cannibalism in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong: are the rumours true that food shortages drove people to that most desperate of measures? Harrowing accounts of cannibalism in Hong Kong during World War II are difficult to verify, but anecdotal evidence and oral histories suggest this horrific act was a grim reality for many. Read how Henry Ching, the South China Morning Post's long-serving Australian-Chinese editor, delved into this dark chapter of the city's history in his wartime diaries. 3. How POWs in Japanese prison camps kept their spirits up with music and theatre during the years of occupation Resilience and creativity flourished in the prisoner-of-war camps of Stanley and Sham Shui Po as internees used music and theatre to lift their spirits. Some performers, such as Ferdinand Maria 'Sonny' Castro with his high-camp imitations of 'Brazilian Bombshell' Carmen Miranda, became legendary, while others aided in daring escapes. 4. How Hong Kong lawyer Christopher D'Almada e Castro became a WWII hero whose bravery was stuff of legend Camp Lt Christopher D'Almada e Castro of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps in 1937. Photo: Courtesy of the D'Almada Barretto Collection D'Almada e Castro, a distinguished Hong Kong lawyer from the Portuguese community, bravely and at great personal risk assisted in intelligence-passing while a WWII prisoner of war. Read of his exploits while in internment and his later contributions to Hong Kong society after the conflict ended. 5. How a violinist's tunes helped guide soldiers breaking out of Sham Shui Po prisoner-of-war camp in 1942 During the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, four British POWs escaped with the help of violinist Lieutenant Solomon Bard who played musical signals to warn of approaching guards. Conflicting memories of the escape, particularly regarding the meaning of the tunes played, highlight challenges of relying on oral accounts in historical research. Part of this article was produced with the assistance of generative AI
