MANILA, Philippines—His Filipino playmates in Pasay City called him “mestizong bangus” for his pale skin. Some 70 years later, it still puts a smile on Max Weissler’s face.

Like Weissler, Ralph Preiss relishes childhood memories of the Philippines, including hacking away with a bolo for firewood on Mount Banahaw in Laguna—and clumsily nicking his own wrist.

Weissler still speaks “kanto boy” Tagalog; Preiss regards the scar on his left wrist as a souvenir from a great jungle adventure.

But between these episodes of play and mischief, they share harrowing stories of wartime survival in a country not their own.

Weissler and Preiss were two of the 1,200 European Jews who escaped death in the Holocaust by fleeing to the Philippines between 1939 and 1941.

They were special guests in Rishon LeZion, Israel, at last week’s inauguration of “Open Doors,” a monument recognizing President Manuel L. Quezon and his humanitarian assistance to persecuted Jews.

‘Invited’ physician

Preiss and his parents arrived in Manila in March 1939, though as early as July 1938 they had gotten word in their native Germany that they could come to the Philippines.

According to Preiss, his father was one of 20 Jewish physicians “invited” to Manila but was unable to practice his profession for not being fluent in Tagalog.

By 1940, the family had moved to Liliw, Laguna, but the Japanese invasion in 1941 forced them to relocate to San Pablo City.

Preiss managed to resume his high school studies in San Pablo, where he befriended a classmate, Octavio Reyes, who would become a lawyer.

“I still communicate with him. He found me on the Internet. He’s also retired now, like me,” Preiss told the Inquirer in Rishon LeZion.

Near war’s end, when the losing Japanese army began hunting down and killing “white people,” Filipino guerrillas helped the Preisses evacuate to Mount Banahaw. The family hid there for three months.

UP guy

After Liberation, Preiss enrolled in an engineering course at the University of the Philippines in Quezon City, and his parents put up a pharmaceutical company.

“I was there when they moved The Oblation (statue) from the Manila campus to Diliman. I got pictures of it,” he said, smiling.

A storm that “blew away the UP Engineering building” interrupted Preiss’ studies. In 1949 he moved to the United States, where he resumed and completed his course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

His parents stayed in the Philippines until 1968. Before leaving, his father helped the government rid sugarcane fields of a rat infestation.

“I guess that was the present he gave back [to Filipinos]: He saved the Philippines from rats,” Preiss said.

Arduous journey

Weissler still remembers how his father was tipped off about the impending crackdown on Jews in Germany shortly before the Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass).

(On Nov. 9, 1938, Nazi storm troopers smashed and burned Jewish shops and synagogues. Tens of thousands of Jewish men were arrested and sent to the concentration camp in Buchenwald. The glass shards littering the streets gave the dark event its name.)

Weissler’s father was the first in the family to escape to Denmark. He and his mother soon followed but were held by Danish police who learned that they were refugees and not tourists.

Mother and son had to return to Germany. The father was allowed to stay in Denmark, and this bought him time to get a Philippine visa.

The father thus managed to reach Manila months ahead. While waiting for his wife and son, he worked as a salesman, “going house to house.”

The family was reunited in February 1941, but only after Weissler and his mother had endured a two-month journey through Poland, Russia, Japan and China.

No money

With “only two suitcases [and] no money,” the family lived in Pasay City, Weissler recalled somberly.

Quickly shifting to a lively tone, he continued: “I got acquainted with the neighborhood kids, walking around barefoot. They first thought I was American, but I could not speak English or Spanish, and was classified by the local kids as a mestizo.”

Weissler easily learned Tagalog from the streets. During the Japanese occupation, he found himself catching up on his studies at St. Paul College on Herran, a Catholic school for girls.

Shortly after his bar mitzvah (a coming of age ceremony) at a synagogue on Taft Avenue, “things began to turn bad.”

Weissler witnessed how the Japanese burned Manila—“including our store, our apartment, our synagogue”—and killed civilians including “my best friend” with bayonets, dumping the bodies in Manila Bay.

‘Tagarito rin ako’

With Liberation, Weissler and his family were again “starting from scratch.”

When his mother died in an accident, she was buried in the Jewish section of Manila’s Chinese Cemetery.

In the 1950s, Weissler joined the US Army and saw action in the Korean War. He got married in Japan and went to the United States to complete his studies before settling in Israel.

Recalled Weissler: “We were in Manila three years ago, and when I walked around, people were asking, ‘Bakit marunong kang mag-Tagalog (Why do you speak the language)?’ I answered them, ‘Eh ano, tagarito rin ako, di ba (But I’m also from here, right)?’”

“Despite having lived in the Philippines for less than 10 percent of my life, I still feel very much attached to that place and its people,” he said.