September 11 2020

Forbidden Diary: A Record of Wartime Internment, 1941-1945 (1980) by Natalie Crouter (ed by Lynn Z Bloom)

Natalie, a well-educated Boston woman met and married her businessman husband Jerry in the Philippines while on vacation.  Jerry hailed from Colorado, and the Crouters raised their two children, June and Frederick, in Baguio, where their many friends included not only American and Brit expats but also Filipinos and Chinese.  Jerry recruited workers for the sugar fields of Hawaii, as well as operating a gas station and insurance agency in the Philippines.  Natalie volunteered with the Red Cross.  But their pleasant circumstances started to deteriorate, especially with the bombing of Pearl Harbor and American declaration of war.  Along with the other Americans, the Crouters were moved to a concentration camp, albeit in a beautiful location and with a fairly benign director, but still facing shortages of food and privacy as the war dragged on.  She describes "the beauty of the pieces, blue sky, clouds and moutons...we do not notice the barbed wire, fence, or guards, bayonets or guns" (Feb 6, 1942), the thoughtful acts "stronger arms doing the personal washing for older or weaker people; sharing of food packages with those who got none..." (Feb 26, 1942) - but also of escalations of war, a funeral of a premature baby in the camp and of "using so many of the Red Cross garments ourselves" that they had made for the relief of others.  Of course conditions will deteriorate further as food becomes scarcer.  I didn't finish the 500+ pages diary (hope to borrow it again!), and note that the editor had condensed it from over 5000 pages of notes originally compiled by Natalie on bits of envelopes or margins of book ages and hidden among supplies (keeping a diary was forbidden).  Natalie's family's experience is yet another look at war from the civilian perspective.

I learned of this diary from my old friend Roy Katz, who was a student in Frederick Crouter's social studies class in Fair Lawn, NJ (before the publication of Mr Crouter's mother's diary).  I was glad the book was still available in a RI library.