It must have been really hard. I kept silent as he hesitated. Maybe he would get the message. I was not ready for more of what he had to say. No more details please. If I showed him that I was not curious for more, he would stop. He did. I was relieved.
While soldiers worked in their offices, we camped in the conference room. When the room was needed for meetings, they ordered us to sit on the floor of the lobby until they were finished. They restricted us to that small space, told not to make any noise and not to talk to anyone who visited the building. Sometimes, they called someone to another room. We knew then that another interrogation was taking place.
Over the course of the day, I discovered that we were allowed minimal reading materials except for weeks old newspapers, a single Timemagazine, and a couple of Pilipino vernacular magazines called Tagumpay. These were passed around so frequently among us that most of them were now in tatters. If we wanted to have a book of our own brought in, we had to give it to the guards for inspection. But few books passed muster and so we read and re-read what we had in the room. Radios were not allowed and so news from the outside never reached us, except the stories whispered by relatives on their visits. I wished I had my school bag. I could at least do my schoolwork.
There were between fifteen and twenty detainees at any given time in the conference room. Every few days someone from the group disappeared. A fatigue-wearing guard with an automatic weapon (then called an Armalite) at his side would come in the room, and soon after whomever was sent for would gather his belongings and leave with the guard. Everyone knew he would not be coming back. Was he sent home? Was he taken to another camp? Who knew? No one dared talk about it. Whatever we had known about the prisoner who departed and never returned was left to the world of forgetting. It was better that way. The following morning, a new detainee or two would join the group.
