Memories of a grandfather I never knew

Rene Pastor

This is AI generated summarization, which may have errors. For context, always refer to the full article.

I never got to know my grandfather because he was tortured and killed by the Japanese secret police in 1944


Rene PastorMemorial Day in the United States is to honor those who died defending this country.

It is an ideal time for parades as the weather warms up. Unofficially, it is the start of summer and everyone heads for the beach.

Down with a bad cold, I fished out of my drawer an over 30-year old notebook. I looked up the name of my grandfather, a man who I never got to know because he was tortured and killed by the Japanese secret police in Manila in 1944.

His name is Alejandro Pastor y Barroga. I found his name while researching the family tree at the Spanish embassy when it was still located on Taft Avenue near La Salle University in the early 1980s around the time I graduated from Ateneo.

My great grandfather had registered his family and I began copying down the names of the children. There were 8, but the first and the third died a year after they were born.

My grandfather was the 4th kid.

His birthday was the feast day of the Immaculate Conception, the 8th of December 1906.

I was infinitely curious about the man since he died in 1944, nearly 17 years before I was born.

I managed to track down his sister, Consuelo, who passed along stories of what he did during World War Two.

My grandfather grew up to become a ship boat captain. The family thought he died off northern Mindanao during the early days of the war when their ship was caught by Japanese planes, bombed and sunk.

He and another ship officer were stranded in Mindanao and needed to get back to Manila to be with their families. They got into whatever small boats or bancas they could find and began paddling. Luckily, it was the dry season.

Stock graphic by Bobert Elyas

About four months later, they showed up in Manila.

Kala nila, wala na siya,” (They thought he died.) she told me, adding the family was getting ready for a funeral by then.

An experienced sea captain, he and other ship officers could tell when Japanese ships docking in Manila were about to sail.

His sister said her brother joined a guerrilla group. They would radio American subs out in Manila bay to ambush the Japanese ships. When the group was rounded up because one of the ship captains got drunk and blabbed about it to a bar girl, my grandfather refused to flee because he was afraid the Japanese may take revenge on his wife and six children.

My grandmother, Luisa, told me he was tortured for months in Fort Santiago in Intramuros and died on October 20, 1944 – the same day U.S. forces landed in Leyte.

She said the Japanese were in the habit of cremating bodies of guerrillas they captured. But she got tipped off, took my dad along and retrieved the badly beaten body.

They buried him hurriedly in North Cemetery. I accompanied my dad a few times over the years in visiting the grave during November 1. We finally transferred my grandfather’s remains to another cemetery in Mandaluyong. My grandmother was buried beside her late husband when she passed away a few years later.

My grandmother said that the day the war broke out, he was signed up by the U.S. Navy. But the records got lost and he was only recognized as a guerrilla after the conflict.

The other stories his sister passed on were that he was a bit of a raconteur. He loved to dance and was a bit of a ladies’ man. He was 6’3 tall at a time when many Filipino men barely broke above 5’6. He looked debonair in his captain’s uniform.

There are so many things I wanted to ask him. I would have wanted to know why he felt he had to join that fight.  Since getting to the United States, I seem to be asking that question a lot on Memorial Day.

When I saw a picture of him, he had that mischievous twinkle in his eye that seemed to hint of his naughty nature and that he had a lot of ‘war stories’ to tell. – Rappler.com


Rene Pastor is a freelance journalist who worked with the news agency Reuters for nearly 23 years. He graduated with a Masters degree in International Affairs from the New School in New York city and received a bachelor of arts in Communications from the Ateneo de Manila University. Rene is also a lecturer at Middlesex County College in Edison, New Jersey.

Add a comment

Sort by

There are no comments yet. Add your comment to start the conversation.

Summarize this article with AI

How does this make you feel?

Loading
Download the Rappler App!