Roger Schade is 85 years old, a man with a remarkable early life, who speaks of it now with the wonderment of a teenager.
He had just turned 17 when the Japanese arrived in Manila, having pushed the Americans out. Before the year was over, Schade and his parents would be interned in the Santo Tomas prisoner-of-war camp, where they would spend the next 36 months.
There were some 3,000 of them, mostly civilians and noncombatants, including doctors, nurses and missionaries, crowded onto the grounds of what had been a university. Today, he speaks in soft, near-imperceptible tones of the deaths there.
At other times, he speaks excitedly of working with 800 men to build a new camp at the Los Banos university site, of kitchen duty, of being treated with unexpected kindness by other workers and his Japanese captors.
He doesn’t know why they let him return to Santo Tomas and his parents once the new camp was finished. It was, he said, a trip few made. But there he was in 1945 when the tanks of the 1st Cavalry Division liberated Santo Tomas.
His parents had lost everything they’d accumulated since his father, Roger, a School of Mines graduate and a mining engineer, moved the family in 1932 to the Philippines for a job in the Balatoc mines.
A year after the Army delivered him and his parents back to Denver, a crate containing some of the family’s belongings and Schade’s childhood footlocker arrived. The family does not know who sent it.
And then last February, an invitation arrived at Roger Schade’s Highlands Ranch home, inviting him and his family to return to Manila.
From his footlocker he fetched that old copy of “The Philippines and the Filipinos of Yesteryear,” a 1934 book he had checked out from the library to learn of the indigenous people he had encountered on Boy Scout outings in the Sierra Madre those many years ago.
With his wife, Dorothy, and daughter, Heather, he walked into the Rizal Library of the Ateneo de Manila University and returned the long-overdue book.
“It was the right thing to do,” he explained. “I went because I wanted to see the city of my childhood, to see it after it had a chance to rebuild itself.
“And I was really impressed by what the Philippines and its friends had done. I had left it in flames from one end to the other. It was a city that had been raped.”
So much had changed.
“I could find none of the evidence of hardship from those days,” he said. “It had all been cleaned up.”
He never found the homes where his family lived and at one point hid, but was astounded to see his old high school still standing.
And, of course, he visited the sites of the camps, both universities once again. He stood at both, he said, and remembered.
He was greeted warmly, he said, by members of the American Historical Collection at the library, which added his book to 13,000 books, 18,000 photographs and assorted other materials related to the United States’ experience in the Philippines.
Still, I had to ask the one question I figure anyone would about a library book some 68 years overdue.
“Oh, no,” Roger Schade said. “I got out of there before they had a chance to start talking about fines.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
