The following are urls taken from the first page of the Google search for the World War II raid on Los Banos Internment Camp in the Philippines. . It was the most successful raid during WWII and is almost entirely forgotten. No prisoners’ lives were lost. My own story is here: https://www.amazon.com/Only-Grace-God-Pamela-Brink/dp/148084070X/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 Raid on Los...
Category: Prisoners of War
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A Biographical Sketch of Edith Stein
Edith Stein was a German Jew who converted to Roman Catholicism, entered a Discalced Carmelite order of nuns, was gassed at Auschwitz in 1942, and was canonized a saint in 1998. Edith Stein (Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross OC), born in 1891, was the youngest child in a large Jewish family living in Breslau,...
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Little Known WWII Facts: Death rates among Civilian POWs in the Philippines
The following statistics were provided by Angus Lorenzen bacepow@earthlink.net and Martin Meadows mmmeadows2@verizon.net (1) The number of internees fluctuated [at the Santo Tomas Internment Camp or STIC], but usually was around 4,000; people were constantly entering and leaving (e.g., missionaries for a time, the sick, and the elderly), and it has been estimated that, altogether,...
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Illustrations that Never Made it into the Book
There was no way any of these pictures could have been included in the book, although I wish they could have been. When we went to Montalongon, we took the Mullaney’s with us. This picture of the four of us children was sent to me by Dorothy Mulaney in 2017. Left to right: Bill, Dorothy,...
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How I Decided on the Title for my Book
Someone asked me the other day, “How do you decide on the titles for your books?” For a moment, I was speechless. How did I decide? “It just came to me,” I said. And that was that. But then someone else asked and then someone else. Then, I realized, the title “just came to me”...
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Deciding Which Illustrations to Include in “Only by the Grace of God”
One of the most difficult decisions I had to make in producing this book was which pictures and documents to include and which to leave out. Since every illustration increased the cost of the project, I needed to keep the number of illustrations down. Some family pictures came from my cousin, Bill Mattas, and some...
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Why I Wrote “Only by the Grace of God”
My brother Bob died in December, 2013. Three months later my brother Bill died. As I was the executor of Bill’s estate, I had the job of going through all his papers. I found some typed and handwritten pages about our experiences as prisoners of war in the Philippines during World War II. I have...