Southern Appalachian Digital Collections

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Aboard ship on way to States by Carr Hooper

items 16 of 28 items
  • wcu_ww2-485.jp2
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Item’s are ‘child’ level descriptions to ‘parent’ objects, (e.g. one page of a whole book).

  • cats in camp. This had been encouraged because of enormous filthy rats and certain tetanus fever outbreaks, and these cats one by one began to disappear into pots of mothers who fed starving children meat for the first time in months. Dogs from outside had found refuge in the camp and these begin to disappear rapidly. By the end of January 1945 not a cat of dog could be found except a few pets carefully watched by owners who had an ever growing gleam in their eye. People died from eating hibiscus leaves and canna bulbs. People ate the pulpy trunk of banana trees which filled the stomach but did not stop the growing hunger. Small children caught and ate filthy snails that were found in decaying vegetation, and scraped garbage pails for something to eat, anything to eat. The rottenest of vegetable discards were hoarded. Kitchen workers were watched over by angry and suspicious men and women who were watching for scraps of corn meal to fall to the cement floor. Men stole food for children, were caught and jailed for stealing food. Every portion was carefully served, not one grain more or less. Men and women would have, and did in a few cases, exchange reputation and honor for a handful of rice, a spoonful of corn. We did not think of meat anymore, we had nothing but rotten fish, utterly rotten fish, for a year, we thought only of a little more corn meal and a little more rice. Every grain was food, every speck was used. The Japs took and killed our cows which had been kept as a last resort against a day when we’d have no food and feasted drunkily on meat while little children begged for the hooves, the skin, anything, and old men passed quietly away to be carted outside in a ramshackle cart to a ditch or river perhaps as we never knew how burials were made the last few weeks, and this death cart came more frequently. We never asked anymore who had died. It didn’t matter. Men and women of middle age and almost all the old moved about slowly on legs swollen as large as a gallon bucket, faces puffed with the deadly fluid of broken down tissue, the last stages of beri-beri which kills. The hospital was filled, there were no
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Object’s are ‘parent’ level descriptions to ‘children’ items, (e.g. a book with pages).