Message #366037

[franksolich]

From my mother, and aunts and uncles, I was told this great-aunt was liberated in Japan in late September 1945, some weeks after the war had ended, but before the existence of still-surviving western prisoners was known.  The last days of the war, about 200 of them had been kept in a cave, and discovery of them by inquisitive military authorities had been a random, by chance, thing.

None of them had been in any condition to advertise their presence; my great-aunt, for example, weighed 80 pounds when freed, and one reasonably assumes the conditions of others were scarcely better, as many of those found lived only a few days or weeks after liberation.

They were aware of these strange people, and saw the Stars-and-Stripes, but so insensate such sights meant nothing to them.  Kept for almost four years under Great Brutality and ignorance of what was going on, they actually believed that the United States of America, along with the mighty British Empire, had succumbed to victorious Japan, and so they themselves were as good as dead.

It was not until some days afterwards, when a GI orderly was changing something on my great-aunt in bed, mentioning that he was 19 years old and from Ohio, that my great-aunt finally grasped that these other people were Americans, and that she was going home.

In early 1946, she was sent to a military sanitarium, a "rest home," in Alabama.

She met a banker in Alabama, a middle-aged gentleman, a widower, and they soon thereafter married.  As both were middle-aged, there were no children.  After the banker retired, the couple moved to a large estate in North Carolina, where they lived some years, before he died.

A few years passed, and then my great-aunt suddenly felt the "need" to go "home," northeastern Pennsylvania.  Her older sister, the great-aunt who had been in the Army, was not doing well, and of course there was a great many family up there yet.

This happened a year or so before I met her in person, where I got confused about things.  She had moved back to the old family farm so as to take care of her older sister, but senility was showing, and her crippled older sister was actually taking care of things for her.