Three Came Home

      More Letters From Paradise
          Three Came Home
Sometime after World War II, I recall seeing a motion picture titled "Three Came Home." The film told the true story of Agnes, Harry Keith, and their two year-old son George who spent over three years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. I was recently given a copy of the book published in 1947, from which the movie was made.

The author Agnes Newton Keith was from Hollywood California, and married Harry Keith, a British civil servant Conservator of Forests and Director of Agriculture of North Borneo. Borneo is the 3rd largest island in the world, and is located southeast of the Malay Archipelago in the Pacific Ocean. The island rich in timber,palm oil,rubber and minerals.

The Japanese captives included civil servants,civilians, priests, nuns, doctors, and others. They were soon taught to bow correctly to their captors. Feet together, bowing at a 15 degrees from the waist, and not rising until a count of five.

Mrs. Keith was well-known to her captors as the author of "The Land Below the Wind," in a Japanese translation, very much admired.  During her captivity she took notes on scraps of paper and hid them in tin cans under the barrack, in the latrine, stuffed inside her son's teddy bear, a false bottom of her son's chair.

The men and women were kept apart in separate barracks behind barbed wire. Their diet consisted of five tablespoons of rice,a cup of rice gruel, greens, and salt per day. The need for some protein was acute. Smuggling food obtained by bartering from those outside the camp was widely practiced. An egg was better than gold, rotting fish a luxury,and a banana a treasure. When the camp was liberated in 1945, she weighed only 80 pounds.

In addition to starvation,Mrs. Keith fought off a Japanese soldier who tried to rape her. When she reported the event, she refused to sign a confession that the event never took place. She was beaten, her arm pulled out of its socket and ribs broken.

The Japanese also made some of the prisoners to dress their best and appear in propaganda films.

In spite of starvation, dysentery, malaria,  and torture, Mrs.Keith went to great lengths to see that her son remained alive.

When the camp was liberated September 11,1945, the family was at last reunited. She wrote at the end of the book "I believe that:
While we have more than we need on the continent, and others die for want of it, there can be no lasting peace.
When we work as hard in peacetime to make this world decent to live in, as in wartime we work to kill, the world will be decent, and the causes for which men fight will be gone. "

     Aloha
     Grant