Curiosity, Adventure, and Love: A Snapshot of A Life Well-Lived

Jessie and WWII

My grandparents survived four years of Japanese occupation in Manila during World War II, all of which is chronicled in my grandfather's publishes war-diary "Dear Mother Putnam." Jessie escaped certain death in an internment camp at the University of Santo Tomas (where she and her husband had married in the school's chapel nearly a decade earlier) where Americans were sent because she was able to hide in plain sight. Married to a Filipino, fluent in Spanish and now Tagalog, the Japanese did not know she was American. Despite moving eight times during the war and suffering the ills of war-time occupation as any other civilian (disease, hunger, fear), she helped the children of interned friends find safe passage out of the country and tended to the hungry and wounded when her home, nearly at the cross-hairs of fighting between the Japanese and the Allies in the Battle for Manila (1945), became a makeshift hospital and "safehouse" for those fleeing the streets. Whenever I visited her in the summers, she often pointed out to me where the anti-aircraft guns used to be mounted a block away from her home. Little of Manila remained after the war, but the Philippines did finally gain independence as a nation in the post-war period. Its first president, Manuel Roxas, was my grandfather's law partner of many years and a dear family friend.

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