Bravery in Bits and Pieces: Recollections of Santo Tomas (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781643436494)

On December 7, 1941, Bonnie Byde and her husband Eric woke to explosions. Their children slept in the next room. They had heard the news of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, but assured themselves that they would be safe in the Philippines. If trouble did come, the Americans would take care of it.

Bravery in Bits and Pieces is Bonnie Byde's account of her family's day-to-day life in the Santo Tomas Japanese internment camp. Bonnie risked her life to journal her family's story. Written on scraps of paper and hidden in the bottom of the children's mattresses, Bonnie kept a record so that her family back in Australia would know her fate.

Bonnie's daughter, Ann, preserved her mother's memoir for over 45 years. Bravery in Bits and Pieces is a chronicle of frustrations and horrors of the prison camp. It is also a rare first-person account of a mother and wife's wartime experience.