"It was the sort of thing I thought I’d only see in the movies," said Alfred Emmerich years later. He was recounting his first experience of the Philippines.
It turns out, the superhero-like figure was a Bagobo chieftain who welcomed him and his family when they landed in Mindanao from Germany. They were some of the 1,200 Jews who escaped to Manila during the holocaust.
"He was holding a rooster. He said he was coming as a friend," Emmerich added, completing the story, which he had a lot of. The complete account is chronicled in a book by his friend Frank Ephraim.
Like Emmerich, Ephraim and his family fled to the Philippines with his parents in 1939. He only stayed for seven years, migrating to the United States in 1946 after the Japanese took over the Philippine islands. But these seven years were enough for him to write a 248-paged story about the life of the Jews after their exodus to Manila.
Aside from his own story, Ephraim gathered the testimonies of 36 refugees, who described the difficult journey to Manila (three weeks aboard a ship from south of Berlin); the lives they built there upon their arrival; and the events surrounding the Japanese invasion.
"I was blown up by the Japanese bombs and it was a miracle that I survived. It missed my lungs but maybe an eighth of an inch. If it hit my lungs, I would have bled to death," recalled Emmerich.
Combining these accounts with historical and archival records, Manila newspapers, and US government documents, Ephraim was able to construct a detailed account of this little-known chapter of world history.
"For those who didn’t know, President Manuel L. Quezon helped," Ephraim revealed.
At that time, the immigration law of the Philippines was the same as the American laws now, which rules that in order to come and settle into the country, one must have a guarantor, a financial sponsor to ensure that one wouldn’t be a burden. Ephraim’s mother had a distant relative in Manila who escaped there before them and she helped the family move. But not many Jews had contact in the Philippines. To their aid, the Commonwealth President came.
"It is my hope and indeed my expectation that the people of the Philippines will have in the future every reason to be glad that when the time of need came, their country was willing to extend a hand of welcome," Quezon was quoted to have said in newspapers during that time.
In his research to refresh his memory for the book, Ephraim said he must’ve looked at 10,000 copies of different newspapers which he accessed on microfilm from the Library of Congress. He looked at maps and interviewed 36 survivors. It took him three years of research. And the writing proved to be even more difficult.
"There were times, depending on which part of the book I was writing, I caught myself thinking back and I got very sentimental, looking at past events – the deaths and the destruction, just landing in the Philippines and finally leaving which was also a downer because I had grown up there already," Ephraim said, adding that he remembered the mosquitoes and extreme heat, among others. "It was a real important change, a real emotional change."
Ephraim said he studied in De La Salle and used to walk together with Ninoy Aquino. His mother, who also sang for the Philippine Symphony Orchestra, got a job in Taft Avenue at an office run by Christian brothers.
"It’s a wonderful country to visit. I think it should become more of a tourist haven for American Jews than it has been. It’s a beautiful country, wonderful people with great amount of culture there to learn," Ephraim said.
After joining the US Maritime Administration in 1960, Ephraim started a career in architecture in San Francisco in which he served as director of program evaluation for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, US Department of Transportation. He retired in 1995 and since then he has volunteered at the United States Memorial Museum in Washington DC. But through all these years, he has never forgotten his life in the Philippines. And these memories haunted him all the more as he ventured to write Escape to Manila.
Linda Nietes of the Philippine Expressions Bookshop brought the book to the attention of the Philippine Consulate in Los Angeles. With the book launch hosted by the Philippine Consulate, Deputy Consul Hellen Barber said they were hoping to strengthen ties between the Filipino American and the American Jewish Communities.
"We know the significant role of the American Jewish community here in the United States of America. It’s important for the Filipino community in terms of also strengthening the process of empowerment for them – political empowerment, economic empowerment. And so we thought that by doing this, we are sort of paving the way to strengthen this kind of linkage," she said.
A representative from the Jewish Community Library said that the launch was one of the most important events in the Jewish community this year.
"The Filipinos, we never had a problem. They were always very wonderful, even the Moros, we never had any problem with them," Emmerich said. "My life in the Philippines, I loved it. I think it was the greatest 10 years experience I ever had."