Trivia on heroes

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DID you know that Jose Rizal was already in the Middle East on his way to serve as physician to the Spanish troops in Cuba when he was recalled and shot at Bagumbayan. The authorities could not stand the influence of his two novels as inciting to revolution. He also had hidden a poem in his shoes as he had hidden the “Ultimo Adios” in the kerosene holder of his lamp.

The second hero is Justice Jose Abad Santos, whom President Quezon left to be in charge of the country as he left for exile. Justice Abad Santos and his son Pepito were captured in Cebu. The Japanese colonel remonstrated with Manila that Abad Santos seemed to be an honorable man and no danger for the Japanese Imperial Forces. But the general in Manila insisted that he was being used as standard for resistance. So he was finally executed, but up to this time no one knows where they buried him. When Pepito started to cry, he consoled him that it was an honor to die for your country. The Japanese colonel then shipped Pepito to Japan and it was only when he was shipped back that his family knew of Justice Abad Santos’ execution. Pepito’s son Martin is now a Jesuit missionary in East Timor. After he finished medicine in UP and passed the Medical Board, he joined the Jesuits and volunteered for work for the poor in Timor Este.

Then there is Dr. Domingo, a dentist who was being interrogated for guerrilla activity. He told them he had silver coins in his office in Pako Building. They brought him there and after he opened his safe, he spilled the coins and while the captors were busy gathering the coins, with steel will, he grabbed the revolver with which his captors were threatening him and shot the three Japanese soldiers. He escaped in the night down old Isaac Peral and, seeing a house with lights on and people playing majong, he entered and calmed them but only asked for a weapon They gave him a kitchen knife. Sirens blared as the Japanese Kempetai looked for him. It was the only time that I remember posters plastered everywhere in south Manila with his picture as wanted. He was able to get to the river in Pandacan and he cut some reeds through which he breathed while staying under water. He reached Sta.Mesa, and the open fields behind, where he encountered guerrilla units. He stayed a couple of years in the hinterlands of Bulacan. While there, he recounted, he found his wife but Dr. Domingo, who was formerly portly, had lost a lot of weight so that she did not recognize him in his emaciated condition. The Kempetai did all they could to get him. But he was able to survive till the end of the war.

My nannie as a child, Eduveges Baluyot, had a brother who was in San Jose Seminary, then entered the Jesuits. For some reason people always considered him holy. Just before he war broke out he was sent to Rome for his theological studies but the harsh weather of Rome acerbated his tuberculosis. At that time they still had no way to cure this disease. (Pres. Quezon suffered and died from it.) His superiors sent him to Barcelona where he died in 1943. When Fr. Bernad visited in South America his former classmates remembered him as an exemplary theology student. He was a sort of a St. John Barchans for Filipinos. I had met him once when he was a scholastic in the Ateneo de Manila and visited his grave in the outskirts of Barcelona.

Then there was a brother of Fr. Fred Parpan who was caught in Sta Mesa and killed by the Kempetai. They were the children of a retired captain in the Constabulary. There were many others who were interrogated and tortured in Fort Santiago and in the photo building just outside Divisoria which was a torture house for suspected guerrillas. <emeterio_barcelon@yahoo. com>