[excerpts] ...

[...]

However, some stoves were found, and each house had at least one fitted up. Many a time we were down to the last bucket of coal, but there was always enough to keep one room warm. Coal dust and clay mixed into coal balls saw us through the winter, but we often suffered the misery of chilblains and chapped hands and legs.

Every one of us in camp had our regular chores, from sweeping floors to peeling potatoes. Literally jammed in between all this we pursued our lessons on trunks and boxes round the walls of our all-in-one classroom-living room - dining room - bedroom.

[excepts] ...

At one end of our room, in due course, we had a little mud-brick stove built. The nuns had kindly given us a kerosene tin for an oven, making ours the most modern stove in the place! In this little stove, we burned whatever twigs and wood we could gather and also our handmade coal balls of coal dust and clay pressed together. Some of the more sophisticated in camp with entrepreneurial talent developed coal-ball making equipment out of an empty can with a stick attached to it.

The deluxe model had two cans attached to the one stick. These little coal bricks could often be seen drying in the sun in the few square feet of private space people could call their own backyards. We heard a story of one family who “scrounged” bricks and a few other materials and achieved what every room aspired to—a little stove to keep out the winter cold. Evelyn Davey describes the following incident:
One day the word got around that the guards were coming to look for stolen bricks and unofficial fires. One family hastily took down their stovepipe, flung a blanket over the stove and sat on it. When the guard entered the room, smoke was billowing gently from under the blanket and it was getting HOT. The Japanese, either kindhearted or blind, glanced around perfunctorily and passed on down the block.

[excerpt] ...

As people realized that internment could go on for a long time and that the quality of camp life depended on their own efforts, they got down to work. The Japanese limited their own involvement in the internal work of the camp, stating that their two responsibilities were to see that none escaped and to supply coal and wood for cooking and heating and “adequate” food. Adequate was an overstatement, as their basis for calculation was quantities for two meals a day.

Weihsien was really a world in microcosm with at least fifteen nationalities represented. The majority were families associated with foreign business enterprises, but the largest occupational group were missionaries, belonging to various Protestant mission boards or denominations. There were 400 Roman Catholic priests and nuns, although all but 30 of the priests were transferred to Peking not long after our arrival. Their going was a great loss to the camp workforce as our school was a poor substitute in terms of manpower. Other people who carried the work load realized that with our coming, the ratio of children to the total camp population had risen to about one child to two adults, entailing heavier duties for older people. But since we were all civilians, we fared better than the military POWs.

We were even given freedom to organize our own activities, being for all practical purposes a self-governing community, with committees elected by internees.

[excerpt] ...

Every able-bodied person was given regular work to do. In the kitchen most people worked a twelve-hour day shift and then had two days off. Many of the older boys took turns at pumping water up into the water tower for the camp supply. We younger children did things such as transporting water from one side of camp to the other and carrying the washing, which our teachers had tried to scrub clean, often without soap or brushes. We also sifted through the ash heaps to try and find pieces of coke or unburned coal, and gathered sticks and anything else that would burn, to try to keep warm through the winter. Undetected by the teachers or Japanese soldiers, we sometimes sneaked into the Japanese part of the compound and climbed the tall trees looking for dead twigs or branches.

[excerpt] ...

It snowed today. There was no coal.”

[excerpt] ...

Not long after, death touched us more personally. A young Greek with a powerful physique, admired by all of us boys as we watched him do his exercises, was caught stealing on one occasion and brought before the Discipline Committee.

His punishment was to collect wood for the stoves for a week.

One afternoon a small group of us were watching him at work on the upper branches of one of the tall trees, as suitable branches for burning had long since gone from the lower levels.

He was swinging from a strong-looking bough as he jumped up and down on a dead-looking one below him, trying to break it off. All of a sudden, the top branch snapped instead, and he fell to the ground not far from us.

People ran to help him straightaway, but the fall had injured him critically despite his great strength.

He died the next day.

The boy’s family was very bitter, cursing God in their tragic loss.

[further reading]
http://www.weihsien-paintings.org/books/aBoysWar/p_FrontCover.htm

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