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Gianficaro

Saved from hell by angels with parachutes

For 21/2 years during World War II, Beryl Buist and her family were
prisoners in the belly of hell.

One moment, 3-year-old Buist and her two siblings were tagging along
with their British parents, Salvation Army missionaries who were
performing God's work in Peking, China.

The next, they and about 2,000 others, including many from the
missionary movement, were being thrown into Weihsien Civilian Assembly
Center, an internment camp in central China, by the Japanese military that
was at war with the Chinese.

Inside their 200-by-150-yard prison compound framed with 10-foot-high
cement walls, an electric fence and armed guard towers at each corner,
they would subsist mostly on insufficient food and water and second
helpings of faith.

Weeks became months. Months became years. The prisoners huddled
together in their tiny stone huts to fight the cold and desperation. When
the sweltering summer heat arrived, they cooled themselves with a shower
they were afforded once a week. The Buist children — 5-year-old Kathleen,
3-year-old Beryl and 1-year-old Gordon — amused one other by playing with
tomato can labels in a garbage pile.

While the professionals among the missionaries organized makeshift
schools and hospitals, daily living was abysmal.

When would it end, they wondered?

How long must we endure such inhumane conditions?

When, dear Lord, will we be free?

“I'll never forget that glorious day — Aug. 17, 1945,” said Buist, now
Beryl Rogers, 68, who has lived in Warrington with her husband, Donald, a
former pastor in Doylestown, for the past 40 years. “I was standing in the
compound with my family and heard the roar of an airplane. We looked up
and saw it had a star on the side. It was an American plane. They were
finally coming to save us!”

Rogers fell quiet to collect her feelings and recollections from 63
years ago.

“My most cherished memory is of American soldiers floating out of the
sky in white parachutes like angels to set us free.”

Freedom's fuse had been lit. The prisoners stormed the gates and rushed
to meet the soldiers who had landed in a nearby field after leaping from a
B-24 bomber named “The Armored Angel.” The male prisoners, despite their
frail and weakened condition, carried on their shoulders their liberators,
who met no resistance from the Japanese jailers. The Salvation Army band
played triumphantly. Beryl Buist was given a swatch of a parachute that
she tied like a ribbon in her hair.

“We were free,” Rogers said.

They were also unaware of how much danger their lives were in near the
end. The war came to an end three days before the prisoners were freed,
news that had not reached them before they were saved. The U.S. military
had learned that the Japanese were planning to murder all of the prisoners
in the camps.

To Rogers and thousands of fellow liberated prisoners of the nine
internment camps throughout China, Veterans Day is not just another
holiday. When one's freedom has been stripped away for years, and is then
restored by military angels from above, the day takes on a significance
that few can truly comprehend.

“I appreciate the sacrifice young men — and today young women — make
for this country,” Rogers said. “Those men parachuted into an unknown land
to save strangers. It boggles my mind. I can never repay those men for
what they did for me, my family and all those others in that camp.

“When Veterans Day comes around on Tuesday, I will fondly remember
those men.”

Yes, those men. Army Maj. Stanley Staiger, Navy Ensign James W. Moore,
Army 1st Lt. James J. Hannon, Army Sgt. Tad Nagaki, Army Sgt. Raymond
Hanchulak and Army Cpl. Peter Orlich.

“They are true heroes, and I will never forget them,” Rogers said.

On Veterans Day, Rogers will no doubt also be reminded of the horrors
of the camp. Diets were so deficient that children's permanent teeth grew
in without enamel, young girls moved into adolescence without ever
menstruating, and beefy men lost as much as 100 pounds. Dysentery
abounded.

The rations that prisoners received proved less than adequate in
quality and quantity, so they were left to supplement their meals. Some
boiled animal grain for food. Some insured calcium intake by eating
ground-up egg shells obtained on the black market.

“The hardest part was not having enough food,” Rogers said. “Near the
end, Red Cross parcels were not coming.”

But nothing was in shorter supply than freedom.

The detainees, who included Olympic track and field gold medalist Eric
Liddell of Scotland, who was profiled in the 1981 Oscar-winning film
“Chariots of Fire,” existed in a vacuum, unaware of what was happening in
the outside world.

“Sometimes the Chinese coolies — they were hired by the Japanese to
clean the septic tanks — would smuggle notes to us to tell us what was
happening out there,” Rogers said.

“I don't remember a lot of what happened; I've talked to my older
sister about much of it. It was a horrible experience. I never talked to
my father about it, which I regret. Years later, my father suffered a
nervous breakdown that I believe was caused by being in the camp for so
long.”

Rogers married, raised three children — each of them Central Bucks East
graduates — and had a career at Haberern Insurance in Doylestown before
her retirement. Her brother and sister live abroad. All thanks to angels
who floated from the clouds.

“I really haven't spoken much about this through all these years,”
Rogers said. “What I think all of this taught me was that you can survive
in any situation when your parents protect you. I learned that it's not
how much you have, but it's who you're with.”
Phil Gianficaro
is a columnist for The Intelligencer. He can be reached at 215-345-3078 or
[email-masked].

November 9, 2008 6:47 AM

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