Young girl detained at own former school

By: 9 years ago

HAKODATE, Hokkaido — Saeko Buninai vividly remembers the days she spent with little food at a repatriation camp that used to be her school in Maoka, South Sakhalin.

“Those who died just before being able to leave [the camp] must have been filled with despair,” Buninai said, her eyes cast down. She now lives in Hokuto, Hokkaido.

Buninai, 84, was born the eldest daughter of a fishing family with eight children in Maoka. In 1943, she entered the Maoka girls’ middle/high school, which was turned into a repatriation camp after the war.

On the morning of Aug. 20, 1945, immediately after the end of the war, Soviet forces landed in the city after a fierce naval bombardment. Soviet soldiers took over the second floor of her house, forcing her family to live with them for more than two years, Buninai said.

Soviet authorities allowed Buninai to go back to Japan but before that, she spent about 10 days in the school building in October 1947. As she entered the camp, a Soviet soldier armed with an automatic rifle stole a watch and a fountain pen from her.

She stayed in the classroom on the first floor where she had studied as a first-year student. There were no desks or chairs left in the classroom. Instead, there were plain bunk beds lined up, and several dozen people slept there with blankets.

She also remembers that the plates and pots were all gone from the room where she had learned how to cook with friends.

She was given a small amount of brown bread and coarse cereals such as wheat and kaoling sorghum. “The food was so unpalatable that I found it really hard to swallow it,” Buninai said.

There were not enough bathrooms inside the school building. There were more outside, but the extra ones were simply holes dug on the school grounds with two wooden boards placed as footholds. They were filled with excrement, giving off a terrible foul smell, she said.

Buninai never saw anyone die during her days in the camp. However, records kept by Russia reveal that a number of people died in the school-turned-camp.

“The sanitation in the camp was so bad that sick people probably just got sicker,” Buninai said. “We were under constant surveillance by soldiers carrying guns. So I guess many people couldn’t say anything even when they were very sick.”