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“I spat on the very first American soldier I saw that unspeakable day in February 1945”, Carmen Guerrero Nakpil writes ''“Damn you, I thought. There’s nobody here but us Filipino civilians, and you did your best to kill us.”''

Mrs. Nakpil was scurrying down Taft Avenue on the Malate section turned into battlegrounds that “unspeakable day”, a survivor of the holocaust. She was heavy with child, and in her arms she carred a sick baby girl. From behind a leafless tree an American soldier had shouted at her, ''“Hey, you! Wanna get yourself killed?”''

"I had not eaten or slept for more than a week,” Carmen Guerrero Nakpil writes. “My husband had been tortured by Japanese soldiers in my presence, and then led out to be shot. Our home had been ransacked, put to the torch, its ruins shelled again and again. I had seen the head of the aunt who taught me to read and write roll under the kitchen stove, the face of a friend who had been crawling to me on the pavement as we tried to reach the shelter of under the Ermita chuch obliterated by a bullet, a legless cousin dragging himself out of a shallow trench in the churchyard and a young mother carrying a baby, plucking at my father’s sleeve – ‘Doctor can you help me? I think I’m wounded,’ and the shreds of her ribs and her lungs as she turned around.

''“I had heard the screams of the girls I had grown up with as they were dragged by Japaneses soldiers towards the Baywiew Hotel (to be raped, as we later found out) and the mindless groans of the men, tied together by elbows and machinegunned by stonyfaced Japanese. I had seen all the unforgettable, indescribable carnage caused by the detonation of bombs and landmines on the barricaded streets of Ermita and carpet-shelling by the Americans which went relentlessly on, long after the last Japanese sniper was a carcass on the rubble. I had nothing in all the world except the dress on my back, an unborn child in my belly and in my arms, a little daughter, burning with fever and whimpering with the fever of starvation. ( Yes, the redoubtable Gemma).  "And this American, waited desperately for the last three years, pink-cheeked and overfed, tall and mighty, wanted to know, his dear Americanese idioms rising over the crashing of the bullets and the shells, whether I wanted to die.”''

“I spat,” Carmen Guerrero Nakpil writes, “but I was dry-throated and he was not aware of my scorn.”

Can't put this. Unverified date of Newspaper Article .

Not this format