Note: This Chapter contains visual description of the war's aftermath. 

The war is all over now and the next problem would be the restoration of Manila and the rest of the country. Manila received the most damage since the Japs burned down the city when they were losing Battle of Manila during February to March 1945. They massacred and raped Filipino civilians who lived in the city. No one was spared. They committed this atrocity aside from the hotels where they kept Filipina sex slaves that were young girls in their teens. One of which was the Bayview Hotel in Dewey Boulevard.

They left the hotel and left no evidence of this activity by burning it. One of the victims was Patricia's classmate, Rebecca, she was a daughter of a German businessman and a Filipina actress. She was kidnapped by the Japs in late 1944 when she was sixteen and was taken to this hotel. Her father was killed in Manila Hotel where the Japs made them line up and then doused them with gasoline and burned them alive as the Japs watched the men suffered to death. I don't want to hear the rest of what happened to Rebecca but Camila kept on talking about it. She was really mad on what happened.

In March 1945, Rebecca made it. She was found outside Bayview Hotel unconscious and bleeding by a Filipino soldier. Camila was her nurse when she got transferred to her hospital for better care. Camila said that Rebecca was lucky to make it compared to the other girls who were raped then murdered, most had unrecognizable  faces. They all looked like girls from comfortable backgrounds basing on the clothes that they're wearing when they were found. Bayview Hotel was just a kilometer or two away from Ermita that housed Manila's richest families, I wonder what happened to our house there.

When Rebecca was conscious and started to regain her strength she told everyone that she was abused by more than ten men in a single night. Almost every day was the same to her. She was tied down on a flat surface with both her arms and legs restrained so she couldn't resist whatever they do to her. She even told Camila that after being abused by some men she wasn't able to feel anything at all.

 One night, after they took turns on abusing Rebecca, the Japs got one of the girls and decided to cut her breasts just for their entertainment. She was left on the floor bleeding to death. Rebecca and the girls were barely fed and drank water that came from the toilet tanks. Then when the Allies were winning, the girls were all gathered in a room where they were stabbed multiple times and piled up their bodies before burning them. However, when Rebecca's about to be stabbed, the Allies reached the Japs and gunned them down, one of the Japs dragged her outside the back exit where he thought no one could see them but fortunately one Filipino saw them and immediately killed Rebecca's captor.

That was just one of the stories of the more than one hundred thousand civilians, Filipinos, mixed race people, Spaniards, Germans, Americans, Chinese, and Indian business people who saw a lot of economic opportunity before the war broke out. They were all gone and most of their bodies weren't found or laid to rest in mass graves.

I had a new mission, which was to survey Manila's damages. The boys I served with in Davao and I were assigned in this area of Manila. We were grateful because this wasn't as damaged compared to the others. I don't know how to feel if I was assigned in Escolta Street and Intramuros which used to be a huge part of my childhood.

We visited an area along Taft Avenue near the hospital where I was kept in and I couldn't believe my eyes. I took my camera from my bag and got as much photos as possible. It was a school run by Irish-French brothers called the De La Salle brothers and they built this school in 1911. The school was housing civilians and students but when the Japs reached them all of them were massacred. Stains of these people's blood were present on the wall.

"It looked like they gathered everyone here before killing them all in cold blood." Tom told me as I was taking the picture of the room.

"It seems like it." I replied as we explored the room hoping to look for living survivors too traumatized to get out.

We were only relying on natural light and we cannot see everything clearly. Until we reached one corner hidden by the shelves and the tables of this room that used to be a school teacher's office, what I saw never left my head. Tom and I followed a stench, we think we knew what we were smelling and it lead us to a pile of partially decayed corpses. Some had unrecognizable faces. They looked like priests, some looked like civilians and some young women were undressed with their faces burned and left bleeding to death with stab wounds on their bellies. Tom went outside immediately and threw up when he saw this.

We contacted O'Hara and the bodies were taken away to be given a proper burial and were offered prayers.  The bodies we found had handkerchiefs tied on their legs with their names written on it. These people knew what was going to happen to them. We saw more of these scenarios but I think I developed what Andres had with his memory and chose not to remember all of it. I want to acknowledge that it happened but I don't want to remember most of the things that I saw.

The other University beside it almost suffered the same fate. It was the Medical school of the hospital I was taken to in Manila. I remember this State University to be one of the most advanced medical schools in the country that was established in 1908. During the liberation of Manila, the civilians and Americans reached this area and were surrounded by the Japs. We reached the basement and talked to some Filipino and American soldiers, and civilians. They're still looking bad even months after the attack. Some volunteers are handing them bowls of chicken porridge and some chocolates to make them consume extra sugar to help them regain energy.

"We were held trapped here and we're seeking for backup while trying to protect the civilians. It was the last civilian refuge that the Japs hasn't burned up yet. We stayed here and I think we were more than three hundred in this basement. No one can lie down and everyone was shoulder to shoulder." The Filipino soldier said, then I gave him a cigarette. He was eyeing the packet on my breast pocket.

He talked more about it as if it's happening. While Tom and the others kept on surveying the place, I stayed by this man's side and asked him what happened. I took a photo of their situation. The world has to see this. We must not forget this dark history.

"The backup of American and Filipino soldiers reached us on time, just maybe hours before the Japs kill us. If they did, all three hundred of us here will be killed or burned alive." He said. Taking in puffs of cigarettes as if he hasn't smoked for a hundred years.

"We survived by eating leaves of the trees, over whatever's been left from the rations and even our urine. I was praying to have a swift and fast death so I won't feel whatever's happening to us. Unfortunately, the Japs held us all up in the basement to not make any signals to the American planes to make the Americans think that there are no people in here and bomb the whole place down. Unfortunately, some women in the basement were captured then bayoneted after being raped." He shared.

"As you see in that corner, its where the Americans started to sing God Bless America when the Allies reached us and heard English and Tagalog. Everyone was so happy that we were safe now, most of us even cried out of happiness, some even fainted. After staying in this basement for weeks without enough food, water or proper sanitation. If we stayed here much longer, I think a typhus fever epidemic is not impossible." He said.

"What's your name, soldier?" He asked.

"I'm Pancho. How about you?" I replied. Then he extended his hand to greet me. 

"My name's Michael, or I used to be." He said. As he let out a deep sigh. He seemed to suffer the same trauma as Andres.

"I was almost a doctor when the war broke out in 1941, then they drafted me to join the front. Now, I don't know if I still want to be one." He replied. I smiled at him and told him that I agree with him.

"But we have to live on. We survived this fucking war, and I think we must not die with the people we lost during that time." He replied. I agreed with him again.

"You lost somebody Pancho? You look like you came from a comfortable family here don't you?" He asked. I don't know why he knew that I came from a comfortable family. He avoided the word rich to not to make me awkward. Maybe Michael's from a comfortable family too. I just don't know him.

"I did. I lost my sister to typhus while they flee from the war. Now we don't know if máma had it too. We lost contact with them when the attacks start to happen. Then my fiancée was murdered not long after the war started, sometime in 194. The Japs thought her family's housing guerillas." I replied.

"I hope my friend Mario was strong as you. He committed suicide when he learned that his whole family and his fiancée were murdered by the Japs." Michael replied.

"He put a bullet on his head while I was talking to him that we're going to make it. But he didn't listen. I saw how life escaped out of him. I always tell him that he can make it and he's not alone in his fight but he can't bear with the pain anymore." He said. His tears uncontrollably fell down his face.

"He may not die in the hands of the enemy but he killed himself for what happened. We don't know how many of us will end their lives after they know what happened to their loved ones." He added.

Tom and the boys were back and gestured that we must go now. I gave Michael a pack of cigarettes and a match before I left.

"Stay strong brother. We must stay strong." I said, before shaking his hand and joined my group again.

The war may be over now but the Filipino people have a new enemy which would be themselves and taking control of their emotions for the brutal things that happened to the people they love the most.

By the end of the surveying missions given to us, it turned out that Manila was the second most damaged city in the world after Stalingrad and Warsaw. The Pearl of the Orient was gone, Escolta Street's glorious buildings, plazas, and even Spanish colonial houses became ashes on the ground. The future generations will only witness Pearl of the Orient's glory in books, pictures, and stories that were passed on. It made me grieve that the city that I call home will only exist in my photographs and in my memory. Nothing will ever be the same.

The saddest outcome was that over one hundred thousand civilian Filipinos and Spanish mestizos suffered and killed in Manila alone among thousands more in the whole country during the almost five-year occupation, most of them were Spanish-speaking Filipinos. I knew many families who lost a lot of members but I will never forget how some of them were totally gone and had no living descendants. Their family names vanished and is left in the past.

There will be a time that Spanish would be a language of a bygone era because of this. English is much easier to learn and the Americans are teaching it to everybody. English was prevalent on almost all schools that were built when they came during the turn of the century. Most of which gave a chance to the average or poorer Filipinos to study compared to the classist education system that the country had before.