The Leper Spy (18 page)

He appealed to his friend, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who cabled from Tokyo, “I heartily endorse your desire to be with your wife.” He appealed to the US Public Health Service, which suggested he get a job at Carville to ensure he could at least visit her every day.

“I've done a lot of things in my life,” Hans told reporters. “I've written stories; I've been a mine superintendent; I've been an
explorer and a department head; and I've served in the army and the Marine Corps; I've been a forester and a chief of police—and I see no reason why I shouldn't be damned good at kitchen police or even a missionary.”

They'd married in Guam in 1913, and the war years were the only three they'd been apart.

“He says he's had his fling in life and that he wants to be with me,” Gertrude said from her hospital room, which was filled with roses. “I want him to come with me.”

“I just want one thing in my life: to be with my wife,” the major said. “It's not unselfish of me.”

When Gertrude was transferred to Carville, her husband followed her and followed the rules without a fuss. He bought her a little cottage on the hospital campus and found himself a place not too far away, and he visited every day from 7:00
AM
to 7:00
PM
. Thousands of letters and telegrams poured in for Gertrude, and she answered each of them, enlightening her correspondents on Hansen's disease. She also began writing a column in the patient newsletter, which was circulated coast to coast by subscription. In her column, called As I See It, she challenged the hospital administration's policies. In one, she quoted the Hippocratic Oath: “Whatever, in connection with my professional practice, or not in connection with it, I may see or hear in the lives of men which ought not to be spoken abroad, I will not divulge, as reckoning that such should be kept secret.” Then she asked:

Are doctors connected with the Public Health Service exempt from the above? Or perhaps I should say: Is the patient who is committed to this hospital beyond the pale protection which the Hippocratic Oath gives, because this is a federal institution? Should a patient's private affairs, feelings, and personal symptoms become public property, to be bandied about the grounds of this institution and in the country's press?

In the first place … we have no private consultation room in this hospital for monthly check-ups. When the patient wants to tell the doctor something that should be told in private, he (or she) cannot do so because … he is separated from the doctor's office by a chain, with the whole room behind him full of other patients who can listen in. This becomes at times embarrassing, with the result that some patients keep putting off their troubles until it is too late.

Secondly, I consider it unethical to bring press representatives to clinics without the specific consent of the patients to be interviewed, as was done in the case of the AP story of Jimmie and his family. These patients were under the impression that the man taking notes was just another doctor.

While many patients simply accepted their lot as a voiceless victim-inmate, the Hornbostels stood up for themselves as well as the others, fighting the system when the time was right.

Hans accepted invitations to speaking engagements, fought to get the Louisiana legislature to give voting rights to the disenfranchised Carville patients, and railed against the rules under which his wife now lived, especially the loss of freedom.

“My wife lived in a Jap prison camp behind a barbed wire fence for three years,” he said hotly. “And now she has a fence around her for a couple more years. There's no reason for that fence around the colony. These people aren't criminals. It's the most damnable thing I ever heard of. The state of Louisiana is treating these intelligent, good American people like so many criminals or insane.”

He penned a bylined story, which ran in newspapers across the country, for the Associated Press, pointing out that “ignorance and prejudice cause infinitely more suffering than the disease itself.” He pledged to dedicate the rest of his life to “trying to correct the wrong that is done lepers.”

Indirectly, the unprecedented media attention generated by the Hornbostel case showed millions of Americans that leprosy was still an issue and that there was a place called Carville where human beings who happened to have a disease were being treated as prisoners.

M
anila was still in rubble, and the stench of death still filled the nostrils of the living. Its residents still walked down bomb-blasted streets and stood on wrecked corners and told stories about stolen watches and stolen wives, about seeing guts on guava trees and the layers of burning tires and bodies. The victors counted 1,000 American dead, along with some 16,665 Japanese and more than 100,000 residents of Manila. By May 1946, Irene Murphy, head of the Private Philippine War Relief Mission, had tallied that 10,000 Filipinos had died of starvation since the war's end, mostly in the northern Luzon mountains. She predicted another 50,000 would die unless relief came.

War had refused to subside long after Gen. Douglas MacArthur had declared victory. So, too, had the debate about whether MacArthur should have been so insistent on taking the Philippines at such a high human cost. “Those who had survived Japanese hate did not survive American love,” wrote Carmen Guerrero, whose husband had been shot and who saw her aunt beheaded. “Both were equally deadly, the latter more so because [it was] sought and longed for.”

But on July 4, 1946, the criticism was hard to find. Sirens screamed and church bells rang and Filipinos hustled down Dewey Boulevard. Dignitaries from fifty nations and more than two hundred thousand Filipinos gathered in their best clothes at the Queen
City's broad green Luneta, overlooking the bay, crowded with bobbing ships representing the world's commerce.

MacArthur would take the ship-shaped stage, in front of a statue of hero and revolutionary Jose Rizal, followed by Manuel Roxas, fifty-four, the first president of the first official Republic of the Philippines. The American flag would come down in a sweltering wave of emotion over the field not far from Intramuros, replaced by the Philippine national emblem, a sun with three stars. New soldiers would march in new boots.

Through rolling rain showers, the masses would witness the culmination of Manifest Destiny, the end of a disappointing forty-eight-year adventure in American colonialism seven thousand miles from the West Coast. Or at least the pretense of the end.

Magellan discovered the Philippines for Spain and the white man in 1521, and now, four hundred years later, after teaching missionary priests, after the gold, pearl, and hemp trade, after wars between the Spanish and the Dutch and the Spanish and the British, after revolution and assassination and American occupation, the Philippines were finally being granted independence, the first time in history an imperial nation relinquished a possession. American influence had left a little jazz, a love of fast cars, decent schools and American industry, and some impervious infrastructure. But gone were the docks and airfields and country clubs. Gone was the Manila Hotel and the sugar-cake houses of the wealthy. Gone was the national economy, the export trade, and half the carabao population, on which farmers staked their livelihoods. Next to Warsaw, Manila was the world's most destroyed city. Now the newest and poorest nation on earth needed help to survive its very first month.

Paul McNutt, the retiring US high commissioner and the first US ambassador to the Philippine Republic, read a statement from President Truman: “The United States of America hereby withdraws and surrenders all rights, possession, supervision, jurisdiction, and control of sovereignty now existing and exercised by the United States of America in and over the territory and people of the Philippines
and on behalf of the United States I do hereby recognize the independence of the Philippines as a separate self-governing nation and acknowledge the authority and control over the same by the Government instituted by the people thereof under the Constitution now in force.

“A nation is born,” he said. “Long live the Republic of the Philippines! May God bless and prosper the Filipino people and keep them safe and free.”

MacArthur, greeted by a standing ovation as he took the stage, said, “Let history record this event in the sweep of democracy through the earth as foretelling the end of the mastery of peoples by the power of force alone—the end of empire as a political chain which binds the unwilling weak to the unyielding strong.”

Roxas called American friendship “the greatest ornament of our independence.”

“Any doubts which may still linger in some quarters of the earth as to the benign intentions of America should be resolved by what she so nobly and unselfishly accomplished here,” he said. “Subtract the influence of the United States from the rest of the world and the answer is chaos.”

The
Philippines Free Press
echoed the sentiments of the loyal and fiercely jealous islanders: “There are great days in the lives of all peoples—red-letter days, epoch-making days immortalized in verse and story and figured bronze and sculptured marble—days enshrined in the human heart and commemorated in joyous celebration or solemn observance,” read the lead editorial. “Such a day has come to the Filipino people, bearing on its wings that idolized and cherished word—INDEPENDENCE.”

T
he headline ran above the fold in the broadsheet
Manila Times
on January 18, 1947, a full eighteen months after Joey's letter found its way to Miss Marie Dachauer in Sacramento. The exposé was written by A. H. Lacson, a former Ateneo student and guerrilla scout.

A
TROCIOUS
C
ONDITIONS IN
L
EPER
C
AMP

Filth, misery, starvation, and inhuman conditions in general exist in the government leprosarium at Novaliches, Rizal, about 15 miles northeast of Manila, according to persons who joined a group headed by Miss Aurora Quezon that visited the place yesterday. Among those in the group were a United States Army chaplain and a nurse.

There are 650 lepers living in unspeakable conditions in that “graveyard of the living dead,” according to one of the visitors, and this, he said, is due to official neglect and public indifference.

It was disclosed that there are only four nurses, three female and one male, attending to 650 lepers who are in dire need of medical attention. There not being enough beds, the majority of the patients sleep on the dirty floors. There is shortage of medicine as well as food, it was revealed.

The ration of one patient per week, it was pointed out, consists of a chupas of rice, 1 kilo of meat, 6 pieces of fish, and 3 tablespoons of sugar. The lepers have to cook their own food, usually in discarded tin cans. They have to walk a distance to get their rations, and when it rains, they slosh through mud.

The patients have to wash their own clothes and provide themselves with soap if they can. The toilets and other facilities are in lamentable state, completely unsanitary, according to the visitors.

As a result of malnutrition, it is said, six or seven patients die every month, although deaths from leprosy are low.

The story was followed the next day by another exposé in the same prominent position on the front page, headlined L
EPERS
I
LL-FED
, L
ACK
M
EDICINE
, S
URVEY
S
HOWS
.

Food, clothes, bedding, and other articles that mean comfort to a normal individual are sadly undersupplied, the patients of this central Luzon leprosarium at Tala, Novaliches, Rizal, disclosed yesterday to a
Manila Times
representative.

And another followed on January 22: L
EPERS'
R
ICE
R
ATIONS
H
IKED;
C
ONDITIONS
U
NIMPROVED
, C
LAIM
.

And another on January 26: H
OPE FOR THE
A
LMOST
H
OPELESS
.

Hope came to the almost hopeless inmates of the Central Luzon leprosarium in Tala, Novaliches when Miss Aurora Quezon and a group of social welfare workers dropped in recently and found the place filthy, and living conditions not conducive to the well-being of lepers.

A colony of only ten strong-material buildings with a normal capacity of 300, it is now housing over 600. There are only four nurses (three female and one male) to take care of all the inmates. There is a dearth of cots and most of the patients sleep on the floor.

Food, according to one patient, is meager; according to another, it is not fit for human beings. The diet is lacking in nutritious foods needed for repair of the worn-out tissues.

According to Dr. Marciano Carreon, chief of the leprosaria section of the bureau of health, a colony of 600 inmates should have at least 40 strong-material buildings. The overcrowding in that leprosarium has been partly eased with the construction of about 60 shacks in the neighborhood of the main colony. The government supplied most of the materials; the stronger-bodied lepers built the shacks. The only problem still remaining is the installation of water pipes to furnish the shack inhabitants with water so that they may be saved the strenuous task of securing their water supply from the main buildings.

Isolated as they are from the rest of the world, these lepers have not altogether lost faith in human kindness. There is one among them who has shown thoughtfulness for her fellow-sufferers and has consistently maintained the last frail link to faith in humanity, that they could not help holding on to it like drowning persons.

This “ministering angel” is Mrs. Joey Guerrero of Manila, who, finding life suddenly unkind to her, still clings to the idea that she is not entirely unwanted. There, with her, are people who need charity and she never lets a chance to alleviate their sufferings go past her. The children, in particular, look up to her; she has become more of a mother than a mere co-patient.