The Waterbury Democrat., 1945-03-31
Tots Escape Slow Deaths
(From NEA Telephoto)
By FRANK HEWLETT Limited Press Staff Correspondent

(UMlteu FreSS StAM COrreSpOn0eMt)
 San Francisco, March 31.-(UF)- Sixty-six small children took 2 long, hungry look today at Amer ica.
 They were among the 365 Amer jeans liberated in the Philippines who were brought here aboard the converted freighter Jean Lafitte They were the most priceless DOT tion of that cargo.
 The 351 civilians aboard the ship were the first to leave the Santo Tomas and Bilibid internment camps in Manila.
 Some of these children have yet to taste fresh cows milk. Some of them have never owned any but wooden shoes. They ate their first oranges when our ship stopped near the battleship Washington and the generous personnel of that battle wagon sent the fruit as gift.
 Among these 66 children, all be- low teen age, were tikes who had hovered around garbage cans in quest of such food as wasn't good enough for their Jap guards to eat.
 Some of the children ate snails, cat meat and considered themselves lucky when their paltry ration was augmented by boiled weeds or roots.
 They grew up to the humiliation of being forced to bow daily to Jap sentries. Some of them, until their liberation eight weeks ago, had never seen the outside of the walls of Santo Tomas University's 50 acre campus.
 The children were a constant source of irritation to the Jap com mandant of Santo Tomas. His last order over the internment camps loud speaker - less than an hour before the First Cavalry dashed into the compound - was that parents would be held ansWerable If their children disobeyed his order that they stop lettering around the spe- cial kitchen which prepared food for the Jap guards.
 There were cases of guards sneak ing sweets to the children.
 The children were not miStreated bodily. Some of the soldiers-never the officers sometimes held youngsters on their knee.
 Throughout the 38 months of their internment at Santo Tomas, the children below teen-age were fed from special kitchen. But dur ing the final months there was mo- thing extra for the kiddies. All were hungry.
 The games played by the children within the walls of Santo Tomas weren't like those normally played by American youngsters. They imi- tated the camp duties of their par ents, including the garbage collec- tion, sweeping and cleaning details. They even played "chow line" with one youngster carefully dishing out exact portions of mud into tin buckets. Another game was roll call" wherein one of their group acted as the Japanese guard and others as room monitors who re- ported on attendance and then properly bowed to the guard.
 As children grew up in the camp they didn't talk of becoming fire men, policemen, teachers or nurses. Instead their ambitions were to be- come "a muSh cook like my daddy or "a room monitor like mama"
 Doctors say htat a few of the Santo Tomas children may never regain the growth lost by their ex- tended semi-starvation diet. But most of them, fed well on the 1000 mile boat trip, were recovering faster than their elders.
 It was generally agreed that the children had developed mentally faster than normal as a result of
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