Last Monday my favorite FM station, dwBR, to which I’m tuned in from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m (every day!) featured on the “Twin Blast” portion (the same song rendered by two different artists) of the afternoon program “Musical Souvenirs” my favorite choral groups, the Norman Luboff Choir and the Cascading Voices, singing one of the most romantic and beautifully poignant songs ever composed for popular music, “I’ll Be Seeing You.”
I guess much of the appeal of “I’ll Be Seeing You” aside from its lovely, easy-to-sing melody and its charming lyrics comes from the fact that it has for its backdrop the most tragic upheaval of the 20th century, where millions lost their lives and where massive destruction actually reconfigured some countries.
For me it marked the end of nobility in war, the kind where bitterly opposing forces could come together on Christmas Eve, shake hands, put together what scant provision they had and sing the same Christmas carols in two different languages—a true story told and retold in magazine articles and movies.
It also marked the end of epical heroism, the kind that without hesitation gave all for God, country and countrymen like the five country boys, brothers all, who insisted on being together in combat operations, and perished all together in the same battle on the same day.
Because as in any war, the most painful and lasting consequences of World War II were inflicted not on the structures bombed into a hull, not even on priceless art works and irreplaceable recorded history burned to ashes, but on the men, women and children who went through untold suffering and endured unbearable sacrifices just to live another day in a war not of their own making.
Thousands of families were torn apart, never to be together again; there were heart-rending separations, as fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters accepted as a matter of course never-before-seen humiliation and indignities just to save a loved one.
And through all these, “I’ll Be Seeing You” became, as my son describes it, “the iconic song.”
This son, the one who is always asking questions about the most unexpected things suddenly asked me whether I had written down and recorded my mother’s accounts of her experiences during the War, this after I had told him for the thousandth time that up to now I still couldn’t comprehend what made her such an amazing woman, so gentle yet so brave, how somebody like her with both brain hemispheres working in perfect harmony could produce a three-time Math flunker like me, how so intelligent yet childlike in what I thought was her “innocence,” how at the height of the Jolo war of 1974 she so casually let in two battle-weary and trigger-happy soldiers who almost destroyed our kitchen door with their rifle butts while I was trembling with fear from head to toe, how she was so terrified of rats she would scream at the top of her voice and jump up the nearest chair at the sight of one, so that I became the official rat-killer of the household, but one day while cleaning her garden when I threw a litter of newborn mice into the bonfire she went to me and with pain in her eyes demanded, “Why on earth did you do that? Those were just babies. Murderer!”; how she was so involved with even the most petty things about her students and her neighbors, yet to me she seemed all the while to be living in her own happy world, just observing everyone with amusement, as though she was somebody just passing by.
“That’s why she survived World War II,” my son said, with a smile, “but you have never told us any of her war experiences. Didn’t she talk about it?”
Oh yes, Khalil. She did. And that is why to this day, “I’ll Be Seeing You” still brings tears to my eyes.
She told me about her favorite nephew, Frank Schuck, only son of the half-German Julius Schuck with her eldest sister who together with his ROTC classmate joined the guerrillas while studying agriculture at UP Los Baños and was never seen again. He does not have a grave.
She told me about her favorite sister, a nurse, who healed guerrillas and American soldiers on the island of Basilan with medicine she concocted from herbs and spices, until one day the Japanese raided her house, found an American flag, arrested her and her young son Muhammad who held on to her and refused to let go, and both of them were dragged away never to be seen again. They don’t have any graves.
She also told me about her sister, Saphia, another nurse, married to one of the first graduates of the Philippine Constabulary School who fought in the Cordilleras, while she attended to both Filipino and American soldiers and civilians while taking care of her four children aged one to eight, helped only by her 12-year-old adopted Ilocano son while her husband, captured and incarcerated in Fort Santiago, reportedly drowned with his fellow prisoners when their dungeon was flooded. He does not have a grave, either.
She told me about her dearly loved adopted brother, a Tausug, that her Arab father found crying among the corpses of the battle of Bud Dahu, brought to Zamboanga and raised as her brother. He returned to Jolo at the outbreak of the war, joined the signal unit of the local guerrilla forces and was never seen again. Neither does he have a grave.
Yes, she did survive, but she always cried whenever she sang “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Just as I do now, because of her stories.
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