THE PHILIPPINES: The General and Rosalinda

At Manila’s Torres High School Refugee Camp one day last week, eleven-year-old Rosalinda Andoy washed her face and hands carefully, combed her straight black hair with a part on the side, put on her best pink dress. Then she was taken across the hot, wrecked city to the high-ceMnged ballroom where Japan’s General Tomoyuki Yamashita was on trial for war crimes committed by his troops. She sat gravely in the witness chair, tried to tilt her dangling feet to keep her sandals from falling off, and told why she was an orphan.

Rosalinda talked in Tagalog, and an interpreter explained what she was saying:

She had not been an orphan before the battle for Manila—she had lived in Intramuros (Manila’s old walled city) with her father and mother until Japanese soldiers began putting buildings to the torch. Then her terrified parents had hurried her along smoke-filled streets to a crowded cathedral.

But Japs came into the cathedral too; they took her father to Fort Santiago, and killed him. They herded Rosalinda and her mother and other women & children into a nearby church, lobbed grenades into their midst, then lunged in with their bayonets. Her mother was hit by a grenade, and the little girl was stabbed 38 times.

As she testified Rosalinda began to cry, and the tears ran down her cheeks and fell on the pink dress. She turned toward the five U.S. generals sitting as commissioners, and showed them her left arm. There were ten scars. There were four more on her right arm. She stood up and pulled her dress up above her brown bloomers, showing 18 scars on her chest and stomach, one on her back. The marks of five wounds showed on her legs.

With her homely little face twisted with weeping, Rosalinda said she had stayed close to her mother on the bloody church floor. Her mother had whispered, “I am dying.” Then, said the girl, she told me “always to be good.” Rosalinda had not left her mother’s body until dawn. Then she had crawled away—slowly, because her intestines were coming out of a wound —and had reached Santa Rosa College, where nuns took her in.

While Rosalinda testified, the Japanese general Yamashita stared coldly at the table before him. In the audience many people wept.