Dedicated to the Church Bells in Ukraine Tonight

I was deeply moved by the response to the tribute I wrote about my mother on Facebook today on International Women’s Day.  Some of my friends said they’d like more of the story of my mother’s time in Shanghai after Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941, so I looked up some notes I had written about her for my cousin, who was compiling some family records a few years ago.

I edited my notes, added some more details, and am posting here for anyone who would appreciate a little personal insight into this bit of history from 80 years ago. 

 

Mary Smiley sailed from Seattle to China in August in 1940. She taught English to Chinese children in Shanghai for a little over a year with a small mission organization called The Faith Fellowship.

In December, 1941 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and soon afterwards moved into China. The Japanese occupied Shanghai and ex-pat missionaries were cut off from their sponsors in the States.  For many months contact was lost.  Mary spent most of her time, with her colleagues, trying to find food from various sources including the Red Cross.

Though food was scarce, and they suffered from malnutrition, there was relative freedom to move around the city, no sign of conflict, and little contact with the Japanese. She said they were relieved in many ways when, On February 25th, 1943, they were arrested and placed in a concentration camp near Shanghai. The scarcity of food had become a serious problem. 

The prison camp she was in was one of the better ones. It was probably full of ex-pats, not soldiers, so there was no overt mistreatment. Psychological torture was a problem. They would be told to pack their things because they were going home the next day, and then the order would be rescinded.  And, though the food was more plentiful, it wasn’t a total solution to their problems. In the camp, prisoners were given chores. The older people, who were not fit for hard manual labor, were given the chore of picking the bugs and worms out of the rice they would all eat for supper. But these seniors also had poor eyesight. So the prisoners got a little extra protein with their carbs. When she eventually returned to the States Mary brought home one very long tapeworm as a souvenir.

Ten months after her imprisonment she was released.  She was exchanged for a Japanese prisoner-of-war and returned to the U.S. on the second repatriation voyage of the Swedish ship, The Gripsholm.

The exchange was made somewhere in the South China Sea. The Gripsholm, a luxury oceanliner that had been seconded for prisoner transfers during the war, pulled up alongside the Japanese ship, fore to aft. Mary and her colleagues walked across a gangplank onto the ship at one end, while the exchanged Japanese prisoners walked across to their ship at the other end

While researching for this blog post I found the attached newspaper articles, some of the many my mother’s parents clipped and saved during the time she was in China. I couldn’t help but think about the similarities between what was happening in China at that time—at the very beginning of WWII in the Pacific—and what is happening in Ukraine right now: the same dangers to civilians, and the same determination of strong-minded people to remain and carry on in the midst of it all.

 

I hope and pray that history is not repeating itself now in 2022. But if it is, there is still hope. We human beings have survived many attempts to annihilate ourselves.

We have survived. Not by ourselves. I’m pretty sure we’ve had a little help from above. And today the Christian church in China is thriving. Underground. Persecuted. Martyred. But stronger than ever. It’s surviving in Ukraine too. And God is at work, making sure that the humans He loves are not successful at yet another attempt at self-destruction.

We can be sure that the words of this old Christmas carol still ring true. The bells in the steeples of churches in Ukraine are a testimony to that truth. They peal along with the air raid sirens:

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail, the Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men."

One day.