VICTIM OF JAPS.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 52, Issue 32345, 11 October 1943, Page 3

VICTIM OF JAPS.

INFANT CHINESE GIRL

HORRIFYING ATROCITIES LITTLE ORPHAN’S SUFFERINGS (By Robin Miller.) GUADALCANAR. I saw her first as she lay between cool white sheets on a sailor’s cot on Guadalcanal’. Her almond eyes* were closed in the placid, silent sleep of any child. Looking at, her, you would have found it hard to believe that she had known more horror in a few weeks of her five short years than you or I might know in a lifetime. Hard to believe, that is, if you disregarded the bandages swathed around her neck and her upper arms, and if you did not know about the

ugly bruise and the vicious slashes that lay beneath the dressings. The wounds which this five-year-old Chinese girl bore in tight-lipped silence had been made by the butt and bayonet. of a Japanese soldier's rifle. Friendly natives brought, the little girl into the American lines from the island of Malaita. north of Guadalcanal’. where a small Chinese colony had lived in traditionally peaceful pursuits, before the war. The thin, fearful, but still heantiful child was placed in the care of a navy chaplain, who took me to see her and whispered above her sleeping form as much of her tragic story as he had been able to piece together. The Japanese, it seemed, had killed

her father summarily, and then attacked both the child and her mother, finally leaving them to renegade natives, at whose hands the mother had died. This was easy to believe both of the Japanese and of Malaita itself —an island notorious in the Pacific for its history of murder and cannibalism and for the untamed “bad boys” who still exist among its native population. Nicknamed Patsy Lee Big, battle-hardened American sailors who lived in the coconut grove camp where' the Chinese 'girl was brought nicknamed her Patsy Lee. They looked at her with wonder and pity in their eyes, and swore softly when they heard her story. A lot of them had little children themselves. Patsy Lee was bad propaganda for Japan.

All the horror of her experience may never be known to any one but Patsy Lee. We could only guess at it in the wall of fearful silence she built around herself. The navy chaplain, who had done mission work in China and knew a handful of Chinese dialects, could draw no response from her.

Finally he took her down to Espiritu Santo, in the New Hebrides group, to a French convent there. For a long

time she gave no sign of trust in the tender and loving care with which she was surrounded. Day after day she remained drawn into herself in a kind of suppressed, brooding panic. Encouraged to play with intriguing mechanical tops, she would cross her hands in her lap and “stare through” the playthings. •

But to-day, at last. Patsy Lee is learning to smile again. She has opened her heart to her new friends, and

she can even say “Bonjour, monsieur ’ to the French priest. Ultimately she may forget Malaita and all that happened there.

It is only the Japanese who deserve to be reminded of such things now.