My Father’s WW2 Soldier Picture
My father, Augusto Roa Realuyo, 1921-2003, Architect/Engineer by profession, survivor of the Death March and the Japanese Concentration Camps in the Philippines, circa 1942.
I look nothing like my own father, but I inherited something more, perhaps better: his survival instinct and resilient genes. I always thought of my father as someone who was extremely thoughtful and insightful, far beyond his time. A great mature writer. When he was in the U.S. and the rest of us were in Manila, I would learn English, correct English, from his letters. I don’t ever remember him writing us in our native language. It was always in his flawless written English. I was fathered by those letters, by the language he used to reassure all of us that if we believed, we could make anything happen.
He was always the first one to leave. He left us in the Philippines. And now he left my family again when he crossed over. Someday, we will join him, the way we did, when he brought all of us to America. Today, April 25th, is his death anniversary.
Album: Family
Date: March 5th, 2010
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.