In a Jap Internment Camp

THE OPEN CITY--Shelley Smifh Mydans--Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

The Open City is a sensitive first novel born of bitter experience. It is a moving, convincing--and timely--account of life in a Jap internment camp, and of what happens to the characters of once easygoing civilians penned up in it. It is set in Manila's Santo Tomas camp, where almost 4,000 prisoners were freed by U.S. troops last fortnight. Author Mydans and her husband Carl, ace LIFE photographer, were imprisoned there for eight and a half months.

"This camp," observes Dr. Busch in the Mydans novel, "is no place for personal dignity. The humiliating lack of privacy was the worst: "Two hundred peoper having ten rooms," the Jap officer had shouted. "Radies having one room. . . ." The Jap commandant even banned hand-holding ("He said such displays of affection offend the morals of his guards"). Food was scarce and nauseating. "The cereal in the dishpans was brown and shimmering on top from the thick layer of crawling weevils that covered it. ..." Under the taut, enervating pressures of the camp, the internees' characters changed, warped, withered and, in some cases, held firm. Talkative, irrepressible Dodie Morrison was hospitalized with hemorrhages, but her almost childish faith in her soldier husband sustained her courage ("We can't lose. He is so strong and clean and brave"). Katharine Forbes, "frightened but calm," kept busy as a doctor's assistant, trying to hold on, but the pressures drained her ("I am just a shell . . . old and colorless . . ."). Blond, hysterical Vinny Whitney's slight strength soon crumbled. She flaunted herself lustfully at the men, finally took up with Lance Diamond, a husky degenerate who had wangled a private room with a cot and kept himself in pocket money by renting it to furtive couples. Mrs. Jenks, once an ordinary matron, in time grew nearly as obnoxious as Lance. A persistent troublemaker, she called the young women "bitch" and "whore" to their faces. Most of the other prisoners just grew thinner and more depressed.

After the Japs took all the men away to parts unknown, Katharine "stood doing nothing, for there was nothing to do. . . . She felt for something to stand on, but there was nothing. She was a prisoner. She cleared her throat and tried to smile. . . . 'I'm waiting,' she said. 'I guess I'll have to wait. I am waiting for the time when we are free to cry.' "

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.