Grandpa’s Great Escape
Grandpa’s Great Escape
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Grandpa’s Great Escape
October 21, 1943
He was bound by his hands; now a prisoner of their army. This was a mistake, right? Certainly, after all of the soldiers’ previous visits on friendly terms, this attack had to have been a mistake…right?
It was on instinct that the people in the town fled. The entire town - evacuated. The people fled to an undisclosed safe-way across the river. No one would be able to find them there. Not even the soldiers, with their threatening bayonets, would be able to scare a word out of the neighboring townsmen regarding the location of the hideaway. No one knew when it would be safe to return back to Banga.
How would they receive word of the progress? What was going to happen to the 50 men who stayed behind to receive the soldiers? Why did all of them, lolas & lolos, women, men, and children alike, have to evacuate this time?
And yet, although no one could answer these questions, they all knew that they had to flee. This was, in fact, wartime. It was October 21, 1943. It was the middle of the second World War.
The townspeople all agreed that their hideaway was the only way to protect the people of their beloved town. Banga was not safe anymore, not at this awful time of war. With only the bare necessities, they ran. To the river they hurried, and after a tumultuous boat ride across the river, they made the best of their new, temporary home.
And she, with their four-month-old daughter, worried about him.
They had only been married for a few months, and she needed him.
But he needed to stay in the town.
He needed to protect their home.
He was her home, and so he stood amongst the other 49 men to wait for the soldiers. Now miles away from him, she would wait for him to return to her and their four-month-old daughter, Auntie Nene.
And she?
Her name was Clara Trompeta Retino.
And he?
Diogenes Retino. Or Gene, for short; he was named after a philosopher.
They are my grandparents.
This is his story.
Mary-Mary
“PONG!”
The word came from somewhere behind me, followed almost immediately by the familiar crash of Mahjong tiles being pushed back into the middle of the table.
Coins hit wood.
Someone had won.
Someone else was already complaining.
From another room, the karaoke machine was going.
My Way.
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.
There were songs that, growing up, I somehow assumed belonged exclusively to our family.
The house smelled like fresh lumpia and seafood salad and whatever else everyone had carried in that year in foil trays and casserole dishes. We were never much of a lechon family, although every now and then one would appear. Mostly there were the foods we knew. The ones that showed up at birthdays and Christmases and New Year’s and every other gathering important enough to require folding chairs.
And there were a lot of us.
Adults talking over adults. Kids running in and out of rooms. Somebody calling for somebody from the kitchen. A cousin getting yelled at. Another cousin pretending not to hear.
There was always laughter.
There was always noise.
There was always food.
But there was also order.
We were a Filipino family.
There was plenty of room for play. There was considerably less room for nonsense.
Respect for your elders wasn’t something anyone really needed to explain to us. You simply knew where everybody fell.
And when Grandpa or Grandma spoke, you listened.
They both had that kind of presence.
It wasn’t necessarily that they were louder than everyone else—although neither suffered from a shortage of bravado. It was something else.
When they spoke, you knew they had something to say.
So the room gave itself to them.
Eventually, someone would ask the question.
“Grandpa, what happened?”
And we knew exactly what they meant.
Gene
Grandpa was born in 1919.
Grandma was born in 1918.
We never let her forget this.
As far as we were concerned, Grandma had robbed the cradle.
Grandpa was the oldest of three children. When he was only seven years old, his father died in a shipwreck.
Seven.
From then on, he was the oldest boy in a house without a father.
Responsibility found him early.
Years later he became a teacher in Banga, Aklan, the town where he and Grandma grew up and eventually settled.
He was smart. He was handsome. He was charming.
And being a teacher meant something. People knew him. They respected him.
By then, however, being a teacher was only one reason people in Banga knew Gene Retino.
There was another.
Grandpa was one of the men who had been taken by the Japanese.
And Grandpa came back.
The Fifty Men
The Japanese had been to Banga before.
That was always an important part of the story.
They had come into town on previous occasions and had been received on friendly terms. Nothing like this had happened.
Then word came that something had changed.
Nobody seems to remember now exactly who warned them. Or how they knew. Maybe news of what was happening elsewhere had reached Banga. Maybe someone had seen something. Maybe someone knew someone.
Family history is annoyingly imprecise that way.
But the warning was enough.
This time would be different.
The town fled.
Fifty men stayed.
They volunteered, as the story was always told to us, to receive the Japanese.
One of those fifty was a relative of ours who was still only a boy.
Years later, he would tell the family what happened when the soldiers arrived.
There was no friendly reception this time.
According to him, the Japanese brought out machine guns and machetes and began attacking without warning.
People fell around him.
So the boy fell too.
And stayed there.
Still.
He played dead.
The soldiers moved among the bodies, looking for survivors.
Poking.
Checking.
Anyone who showed signs of life was pulled up.
Those men were gathered together.
And then they were marched away.
The boy waited until they were gone.
Then he got up.
He ran from Banga to the place where everyone was hiding.
And he told them what had happened.
Clara
There are different kinds of waiting.
There is waiting for someone who is late.
Waiting for someone you know is coming.
Waiting when you are reasonably certain that eventually the door will open and the person you love will walk through it.
And then there is the kind of waiting Grandma did.
Her daughter, Auntie Nene, was four months old.
Newly married.
Displaced from her home.
Hidden with an entire town that was trying not to be found.
And then a boy arrived from Banga with news.
The men had been attacked.
Some were dead.
The survivors had been captured.
Grandpa was gone.
We don’t know exactly what Grandma was told about him.
We don’t know whether anyone knew if he had survived the initial attack.
We don’t know whether she believed him dead.
Maybe that is a question nobody ever thought to ask.
As children, we were much more interested in the escape.
But I think about her now.
A young wife with a four-month-old baby, trying to understand whether the man she had just begun building a life with was ever going to come back.
And there wasn’t even the luxury of falling apart.
They were hiding.
They had to stay quiet.
They had to go unnoticed.
Grandma waited.
“No, No. She Was Four Months Old.”
This was also how the story was told.
Never by one person.
That would have been far too simple.
“Grandma was pregnant, right?”
“No, no.”
Then someone would correct us.
“Auntie Nene was already born.”
“She was four months old.”
Someone else would interrupt.
Someone would object.
Eventually Grandpa or Grandma would say something.
“Four.”
And that was that.
Family history, verified.
Captured
The part after Grandpa was taken was always less clear.
How far were they marched?
Where were they taken?
How many days passed?
Weeks?
Longer?
No one seems to know.
The story simply carried us forward until one night when Grandpa and the other prisoners were tied up.
There were, according to Grandpa, several men to a post.
Four is the number I remember.
For most of my life I pictured him with his back against a wooden post, his arms reaching behind it, his wrists tied together as though he were reverse-hugging the thing.
Maybe that isn’t exactly how it happened.
Maybe they were tied to one another and then secured to the post.
I don’t know.
That is simply the picture the story made in my head.
But sometime during the night, Grandpa realized that he could work his hands free.
Maybe he rubbed the rope against the wood.
Maybe a knot loosened.
Maybe he pulled and twisted for hours.
He never really explained the mechanics of it.
That wasn’t the important part.
The important part was:
He got free.
Then he untied the men next to him.
And they ran.
The Roaring River
This was the part Grandpa told best.
They ran for their lives.
And somewhere in that flight, Grandpa came upon what he always called a roaring river.
Not just a river.
A roaring river.
There was no bridge.
There was no time.
There was no plan.
So Grandpa ran toward it.
And, in his words, by some act of God, he jumped.
A running start.
A leap.
A roaring river beneath him.
And somehow he reached the other side.
He made it.
And for most of my childhood, that was pretty much where the story ended.
Grandpa escaped.
Grandpa leapt over the roaring river by some act of God.
Grandpa survived.
Wow.
Then somebody would start clearing dishes.
The Mahjong game would resume.
Someone would pick up the karaoke microphone.
We went on with our day.
Somehow, He Was Home
I never thought much about what happened next.
In my mind, the story worked the same way movies did.
The hero escapes.
He survives the impossible thing.
Cut.
Next scene:
Home.
His wife sees him.
She runs toward him.
They throw their arms around one another.
Everyone cries.
The music swells.
The end.
I never wondered how Grandpa traveled back.
How far away he was.
How he knew where everyone had gone.
What he ate.
Where he slept.
How long the trip took.
How you even begin finding your way home after escaping captivity in the middle of a war.
He jumped the river.
And then—somehow—Grandpa was home.
It wasn’t until years later that one of his cousins casually filled in a missing piece of the story.
Apparently, after his escape, Grandpa came across some kind of merchant ship.
He identified himself.
Explained where he needed to go.
And somehow got himself aboard.
Maybe he was technically a stowaway.
Maybe someone simply looked at this exhausted man trying to get back to his wife and four-month-old daughter and decided not to ask too many questions.
Whatever happened, the ship carried him part of the way.
He got off at the closest point he could to the secret place where the town was hiding.
Then he made the rest of the journey.
And one day—after everyone had heard about the shooting, after the men had disappeared, after his wife waited with their four-month-old daughter without knowing whether she would ever see him again—Gene Retino showed up.
Alive.
Grandpa had come home.
Mary-Mary
And that is why, every October 21, our family gathered.
The tradition began after Grandpa returned.
Eventually we called it the Mary-Mary.
It had rules.
Wherever the formal dining table was in whoever’s house was hosting, that became the center of the offering.
Six people sat around it in two sets of the Holy Family.
A Jesus.
A Mary.
A Joseph.
And then another Jesus, Mary and Joseph.
Someone began the prayers.
Someone carried around a bowl of hot water.
In order, each Jesus, Mary and Joseph dipped their fingers into it.
Another person followed with a towel.
The table was covered with food, laid out family-style, and the people sitting as the Holy Families took their portions.
Then everyone ate.
Later, we cleared the table and repeated the washing.
Then came the prayers.
An Our Father.
A Hail Mary.
A Glory Be.
And because our family had so many girl cousins, we had invented another role entirely.
The Prayer Marys.
That was us.
One girl led the Our Father.
Another the Hail Mary.
Another the Glory Be.
This was, technically, a solemn religious offering.
We children had another understanding of its economics.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph got money.
Usually a crisp five-dollar bill.
The Prayer Marys got money too, usually a dollar.
So every year there was some version of:
“She was Mary last year!”
“No, I want to be Mary!”
“You already did it!”
“Mom!”
Looking back, I have to admire the adults.
They had devised an extraordinarily effective method for getting a large group of Filipino children to sit quietly through a religious ceremony.
They paid us.
At the end, people went around in order.
Jesus.
Mary.
Joseph.
Then the Prayer Marys.
We would take the hand of the person in front of us and bring it to our forehead in the familiar Filipino gesture of respect.
Then came the crisp bill.
And just like that, something born out of war and fear and gratitude became part prayer, part family reunion, part children’s competition, part Mahjong game, part karaoke party.
And we did it again the next year.
And the next.
And the next.
October 21, 2026
When I first tried to write this story down in 2006, I sent it to my cousins.
I was worried about all the different versions we had heard from our parents over the years.
Already, the story seemed slippery.
One person remembered one thing.
Someone else remembered another.
Grandpa filled in one part.
An aunt filled in another.
Twenty years have passed since that email.
The family is bigger now.
There are children sitting at our gatherings who did not exist when I first tried to write this.
Some of the children from back then have children of their own.
There are more great-grandchildren.
More chairs.
More voices.
More people who need to know why October 21 matters.
And there are people missing.
Grandpa is one of them.
For more than eighty years, this family has repeated an offering that began because one young husband somehow escaped captivity and found his way back to his wife and their four-month-old daughter.
More than eighty years of hot water and towels.
Our Fathers and Hail Marys.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph.
Prayer Marys.
Fresh lumpia.
Mahjong tiles.
Coins hitting the table.
“PONG!”
Karaoke from the other room.
Children fighting over five dollars.
People interrupting.
People correcting one another.
People remembering.
The faces around the table change.
The story does not.
Or at least, we try not to let it.
Because someday one of the little ones will look around the table and ask the same question we asked.
“What happened to Grandpa?”
Only Grandpa won’t be there to tell them.
So now it is our turn.
Someone will probably interrupt.
Someone will correct the date.
Someone will insist they remember it differently.
A child will get distracted.
Somebody will yell at them to sit down.
And eventually, one of us will begin.
“Okay.
So it was World War II…”