Humanoid Profiles
Story by Gary Greenberg
Photo by Mike Price
Lou Goldbrum: Jap POW
Lou Goldbrum was an Army Signal Corps photographer
in the Phillippines
when war was declared on December 7, 1941. Within weeks, the Brooklyn
native
was reassigned and suddenly found himself the leader of a guerilla
troop.
“We ambushed Japanese columns trying to get to the
interior of the island,
blew up bridges and sabotaged what we could,” he says. “In thirteen
months, we
only lost one man and had one injury. That was me. I was shot in the
left knee and
hit with shrapnel in the right arm.”
Despite his wounds, Goldbrum led nearly two hundred
Filipinos on a series
of successful missions on the island of Luzon. But his luck ran out
after they killed
a Japanese colonel who happened to be a member of the royal family.
“The Japanese sent hundreds of troops to find us,”
Goldbrum says. “So at
that point I disbanded the unit and sent them home.”
He hooked up with a couple other displaced soldiers
and set off to join the
American forces on the other side of the island.
“On the third morning, I was awakened by a bayonet
poking me,” he
recalls. “We said our prayers because it was well known that the Japanese
always
killed guerillas on the spot. But their commander was American-born
and ordered
his men to treat us honorably.”
What followed was hardly honorable. On July 24,
1943, four days after his
twenty-second birthday, Goldbrum was put on a ship with five hundred
other
American prisoners and sent to Omuta, a brutally dehumanizing slave
labor camp
on the Japanese island of Kyusha.
“One moment you’re a free human being, the next
you’re being told what
to do and your very existence depends on an enemy who doesn’t care
if you live or
die,” Goldbrum says. “POWs fight in two wars: one with guns and weapons
and
the other against starvation, cold and brutality.”
He worked fourteen hours a day in a coal mine, even
after his left hand was
crushed in a cave-in. At times, it was too much to bear.
“When I heard planes overhead, I used to pray they’d
drop a bomb on us
just to end our misery,” he says. “Hunger was one of the worst things.
You never
saw anything alive at the camp. If it moved, we ate it.”
Goldbrum endured for nearly two and a half years,
until August 1945 when
the A-bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, which lay just across a bay.
“We didn’t see it because we were underground,”
he says of the historic
blast. “But the Japanese all left. We broke into a warehouse
and found it stacked
floor-to-ceiling with Red Cross packages. They didn’t give it to us
because they
didn’t want us eating better than their own troops.”
Goldbrum was soon shipped home and spent eighteen
months in hospitals
recuperating from the physical and psychological abuse. But even fifty-six
years
later, the wounds remain.
“I still have nightmares,” he says. “And I’ll carry
these thoughts to my
grave.”
Although the scars of war would never fully heal,
Goldbrum managed to
marry, raise and support a family and retire in paradisaical South
Florida. When he
discovered that today’s youth knew little about the World War II, he
founded the
Former American Prisoners of War Speakers Bureau, a program in which
ex-
POWs talk to kids at schools, clubs and other organizations.
Despite his ordeals, Goldbrum, 81, still manages
to see a silver lining in his
tarnished memories.
“My experience hardened me for adversity, made me
religious and humble,
and gave me a love of life,” he says. “Also, I’m very complacent now.
Nothing
bothers me. It comes from the Japanese prison guards goading you into
taking a
swing at them so they’d have a good excuse to beat you. I learned to
just grit my
teeth and take whatever punishment they dished out.
“But I’m lucky. I’m here, and a lot of my buddies
aren’t.”