George Boris Sidline

Interviewer: And your full name is?
SIDLINE: George Boris Sidline. 

Interviewer: And your last name is spelled?
SIDLINE: Sidline [spells out].

Interviewer: We talked earlier about the category of your experience around the Holocaust, and I think we decided primarily as a witness. We may touch on some other things too. And you are Jewish. Have you ever been interviewed on camera about your experiences during the Holocaust?
SIDLINE: I have with the Metro Media East, out of Gresham, community cable television [MetroEast Community Media]. Essentially in connection with the book that I wrote.

Interviewer: OK. Let’s just digress for a second to talk about the book. This is a book that you finished this year, I take it?
SIDLINE: Yes.

Interviewer: And the name of the book is?
SIDLINE: Somehow We’ll Survive.

Interviewer: We’ll talk more about that as we go along. I’d like to get a shot of the book later, too.
SIDLINE: All right.

Interviewer: If I could ask you, George, your date and place of birth?
SIDLINE: Born October 22, 1934 in Kobe, Japan.

Interviewer: Was your name at birth different than it is now?
SIDLINE: No, it was not.

Interviewer: Did you have any occasion to use any other names between 1933 and 1945?
SIDLINE: No. 

Interviewer: So the question is, where did you grow up?
SIDLINE: I grew up in Japan and lived in Japan from my date of birth, 1934, through the Second World War, and left Japan in 1954.

Interviewer: ’54?
SIDLINE: Yes.

Interviewer: So your story of how you got to Japan has much to do with your father’s story, doesn’t it?
SIDLINE: My father’s and my mother’s story. Yes. 

Interviewer: Could we start with your father’s story?
SIDLINE: Sure.

Interviewer: Let me get this right. His name, please.
SIDLINE: Boris Sidline.

Interviewer: Boris [spells out]?
SIDLINE: Boris [spells out].

Interviewer: Do you happen to know his birthdate?
SIDLINE: January 28, 1885.

Interviewer: And your mother’s name?
SIDLINE: Fania Sidline. Her maiden name was Tunkel [spells out].

Interviewer: And how was her first name spelled?
SIDLINE Fania [spells out].

Interviewer: And her date and place of birth?
SIDLINE: She was born in Vilna, or Vilnius, Lithuania, on January 7, 1903. My father was born in Latvia in a town then known as Kreutzberg but now known as Krustpils.

Interviewer: Thank you. I forgot to ask you that. Then the story of how all this began to occur starts with your father. Is that correct?
SIDLINE: Yes.

Interviewer: Can you tell us about him?
SIDLINE: My father was most likely a revolutionary in his young, idyllic life. Supposedly he was arrested by the tsarist army. Of course, Russia had occupied Latvia and Lithuania in those days, and from what he told me, he was arrested for revolutionary activity and was sentenced to death.

Interviewer: Do you know how old he was at that time?
SIDLINE: 20 years old. Obviously the execution didn’t take place. He escaped and moved to Germany, and from there he moved to Switzerland. Latvia was not bilingual in those days. They spoke Latvian, Russian, and German. My father was fluent in Russian and German, and Yiddish as well, so he could pass himself off as a German in Germany because of his knowledge of the language. Then he moved to Switzerland and learned to speak French, and he lived there until the start of the First World War. Sometime later on, during the war, he moved to France. The story is a bit hazy, but he married a woman whose father was Russian-Jewish and whose mother was not. They lived in the far reaches of Siberia at that time.

Interviewer: So he had traveled apparently to her . . .?
SIDLINE: He met her in Paris. Her name was Paula, maiden name of Madeski [sp?]. For whatever reason, I’m not exactly sure, but good for me, they got divorced. My father married another woman who was my mother.

Interviewer: Did the marriage last very long?
SIDLINE: Not very long. Officially it lasted until the 1920s. He was already in Japan when he filed for divorce. I suspect he met my mother at that time and decided it was time to get rid of the first one [laughter].

Interviewer: Back in Paris then, I wonder what year that might have been, when he met her?
SIDLINE: I would imagine it was sometime during the First World War. Both my brother and I have often asked my father throughout his biography because we were both very interested. The only thing he wrote about was his life in Switzerland. He loved Switzerland. He loved the country, he loved the people, he loved the scenery, the Alps, and the neatness of the Swiss people. He became quite an expert skier as a result of that as well.

Interviewer: Did you mention that he at one point joined the tsar’s army?
SIDLINE: Yes, he left Paris. He told us the story of how he moved: from Paris to Siberia through England; through Aberdeen, Scotland; through Narvik in Norway; through Haparanda, which is right on the northern tip of the Gulf of Bothnia; through Finland; and then to St. Petersburg, to Moscow, from Moscow to the Trans-Siberia Railway, and wound up in Vladivostok. In Khabarovsk, which is where his in-laws lived. While in Khabarovsk, I suspect he was conscripted into the tsarist army.

Interviewer: Conscripted.
SIDLINE: Yes, I don’t think he volunteered. Because he was literate (he could read and write) he attained the rank of corporal. The only memento I have is a cigarette case that has his military insignias in miniature on it.

Interviewer: Did anything of note happen to him while he was a soldier?
SIDLINE: He was instrumental, from what I understand, in saving the city of Vladivostok from the Bolsheviks. He was in the field artillery, and he heard a rumor that somehow the tsarist army troops were about to mutiny against the field artillery regiment. The idea was that when the Bolsheviks attacked Vladivostok, they would use the field artillery pieces and aim them at the city itself, and therefore destroy the city and allow it to be captured by the Bolsheviks. My father and some of his cronies, having heard about this rumor, went up to the field pieces, and because my father was in the field artillery, he knew how to operate the guns. He and his cronies removed the firing mechanism from each one of the field pieces, and so when the Bolsheviks attacked, they turned the guns unto the city and, of course, they were inoperable. So the story goes. It’s a good story. I like it.

Interviewer: That would have been in 1915, ’16, ’17?
SIDLINE: Probably 1918, 1919.

Interviewer: How did his service end?
SIDLINE: When the revolution essentially succeeded, he hopped on the last ship out of Vladivostok, across the Sea of Japan, and wound up in Japan. It turns out that he knew some people in Japan. They helped him set up a business. My father was always a businessman. When he was living in Switzerland, he was involved in the import-export business, primarily sporting goods, because that was one of the things to do in Switzerland. He told a story about going to Italy during the war, where he was almost conscripted into the Italian army, so he beat his way out of there as fast as possible. But anyway, he started the import-export business in Japan in the city of Kobe. He used to import things from France and England and the United States. In fact, his store reflected the products of those countries. My father was not necessarily a good businessman; his business was based on importing and selling not necessarily what made good sense, but what he liked. He liked French wine, so his store was filled with French wine [laughter].

Interviewer: Where in Japan was he?
SIDLINE: In the city of Kobe. Kobe is the port city next to Osaka, which is one of the major cities. It’s a port city on the inland sea across from the island of Shikoku.

Interviewer: So you said that in 1920, that’s when he met your mother?
SIDLINE: I suspect 1928. He used to travel quite frequently to Shanghai. On one of his trips to Shanghai he met this young lady, Fania Tunkel, who had moved from [Harben?] to Shanghai, because as a graduate school teacher it was thought that there would be more and better opportunities for her in Shanghai. She was introduced to my father by a mutual friend. The courtship didn’t last very long because shortly after his return from Shanghai back to Japan, he sort of imported her from Shanghai into Kobe. That was in September of 1928. They got married the following day. My brother came along three years later, and I came three years and a half after that.

Interviewer: Your older brother’s name is?
SIDLINE: Alex. Alexander.

Interviewer: You were born in …?
SIDLINE: In Kobe, Japan.

Interviewer: What date?
SIDLINE: October 22, 1934.

Interviewer: I think your father still had the store when you were born?
SIDLINE: Yes.

Interviewer: And did he keep the store during all this time?
SIDLINE: When war broke out, obviously the products were no longer available. He couldn’t import things from the United States, or from France or England, because after all, they were enemy nations. So he closed the store, reorganized the whole store into handling local merchandise, and reopened it. He called it the Sidline Sample Store, which meant that he had one of everything. It was the most fascinating store; it had the most amazing collection of stuff.

Interviewer: At what point do your memories start taking hold? Was there anything else to tell between that time you were born and the time that you start remembering?
SIDLINE: I remember things that people told me, not necessarily personal memories. One event that took place was a cataclysmic event that my parents underwent, the tidal wave of September, 1934. My mother was eight months pregnant with me and they lived on the shore. To make a long story short, the tidal wave came and destroyed the house. It washed the whole house into the beach. I had heard the story quite often, so I decided to do some research and found out that yes, indeed, there was such a thing. It claimed 5,000 lives, this particular tidal wave. 

Then I was born a month later at the Kobe International Hospital. There are other events that I remember, like getting my tonsils taken out when I was three or four years old at the same Kobe International Hospital. Other mundane things growing up — the start of going to school. I remember going to the Canadian Academy, known originally as the Canadian Methodist Academy, which was a missionary school. My brother and I and most of the kids of foreign population went to that school and a few other schools as well, all English language missionary schools.

Interviewer: There was not a Jewish school available?
SIDLINE: There were no Jewish schools, and they were all English language. There was a Canadian Academy, there was the English Mission School, there was St. Johns Institute, there was the American School in Japan, and then there was St. Marie’s, which was run by nuns. It was English and French.

Interviewer: How old were you when you started school?
SIDLINE: I probably started school when I was five years old. One reason was that my older brother was already a pupil at the Canadian Academy. My parents and I learned to speak English from him. Our first language was not English, but because I already spoke English I could get into the first grade of Canadian Academy without any difficulty.

Interviewer: I see. So here you are and you’re going to school, and this would put us about 1940?
SIDLINE: Yes, about that.

Interviewer: Do you remember when you first started having any impressions of political unrest or political anything?
SIDLINE: Prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, I heard my parents talking about war, because apparently the atmosphere for war already existed in Japan. There was all this talk among the adults, and I would listen to their conversation. I didn’t fully understand what the heck war was. Then when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, it became exciting because you had parades and soldiers marching, being taken to the front line in trucks, and the air force flew airplanes overhead. That was great fun for a kid like me, but I didn’t fully realize the impact until sometime later.

Interviewer: Let me digress for a second and ask you this question: had the Nazis not risen to power, had Germany remained a hospitable country to Jews — well, not Germany, let’s just say Europe — would your father have returned there instead of staying in Japan at any time, do you think, or did he want to be in Japan?
SIDLINE: We liked living in Japan. That’s why it took us so long after the war to leave. We left in ’54, nine years after the war ended. The reason for leaving Japan was that my parents didn’t think there was much of a future for my brother and me in Japan. My brother was sent earlier to Montreal, Canada, where he enrolled at McGill University. We followed him a year later in 1954. My parents thought that we had a better chance for a personal future living outside of Japan. In Japan at that time, most of the foreign population was involved in commerce, be it import-export or retail business, and both my brother and I were more technically oriented, engineering oriented, even in our younger days, than business oriented. So they thought that leaving Japan would give us better opportunity, and of course, they were right.

Interviewer: So your brother shared your interest or ability with technical, engineering matters?
SIDLINE: Yes, my brother is very technically minded, a very intelligent engineer. More so than I am. But I’m the better looking one [laughter].

Interviewer: I would rather be the better looking one. So to go back to your early years. There you are in school, you hear your parents talking about war and that sort of thing. Let’s just talk a little bit about your life as a young boy there. Did you have Japanese friends? Did you play with them? Were you separated from them?
SIDLINE: Most of the foreigners living in Japan, at least in Kobe — I don’t know about Yokohama or Tokyo, where other foreigners lived — but most of the foreign population kids stayed in social contact with other foreign population kids. None of them went to Japanese schools, and no Japanese, at least at that time, went to the English-speaking schools. We were socially and academically separated. But there was interaction between the Jewish population and the non-Jewish population. There was interaction between the Ashkenazi Jews and the Sephardic Jews. The parents would visit each other. And there were some non-Jewish friends as well that we had. But the only known Japanese contact, socially, that I’m aware of, was we had a friend who was married to a Japanese woman, and that was, indeed, a rarity. Of course, she was always welcome in our house as well. We did not discriminate in that respect.

Interviewer: Do you recall, as a young person — because you were Jewish, were you affected in any way? Were there any attitudes against you?
SIDLINE: In a way, yes, because being the minority that the Jews were in the foreign population, we went to Christian schools. Antisemitism was not prevalent, but neither was it discouraged. There were antisemitic remarks made at me by kids my own age. They called me “a dirty Jew.” They had no idea what the heck they were talking about, but their parents talked about Jews in this defamatory fashion, so they followed suit. Unfortunately, the missionary teachers did not really discourage that, at least not that I perceived.

Interviewer: The population of kids there must have been a pretty multinational, multicultural group.
SIDLINE: Yes. Most of them, during the war, of course, were from neutral or allied nations, except for the Germans, who had their own school as it turns out. There were those from Central America that I remember, the Lopez family, the Gutierrez family. Then there were children of mixed marriages, where the father may have been an enemy alien for that matter and the mother Japanese. Or vice versa. It was very rare for a Japanese man to marry a foreign woman, but occasionally it happened. When it came to these mixed marriages, from what I recall, most of them were foreign men marrying a local Japanese woman. Their children, by and large, went to these English-language schools. Those that were enemy aliens were not repatriated back to their country, but were interned instead because their wives were Japanese and their kids were local.

Interviewer: During these early years in school, was that a happy time for you and your family?
SIDLINE: Essentially, yes. I was never very fond of school. That continued all the way through high school. I really didn’t like school. I started liking school only after I went to college. Then it was something else. But school was never my favorite activity.

Interviewer: So the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1942?
SIDLINE: ’41.

Interviewer: ’41. Sorry. Do you recall that, you personally?
SIDLINE: The only things that I recall are the headlines in the newspaper that I saw, the change in radio broadcast — a lot of military music being played on the radio broadcast, news items, and of course the worried tone of my parents’ voices.

Interviewer: Do you specifically remember what they were worried about?
SIDLINE: They knew that war is not a good thing. My father, having been in the military, knew that it’s not a good thing, so they were worried about that. They also realized, in retrospect I guess, that Japan, being a relatively small country in contrast to the United States, the long-term proposition was that Japan couldn’t win.

Interviewer: But the Japanese people who started this war must have known that, too. What do you think the plan was, that they wanted to sue for peace at some point? What was their aim?
SIDLINE: That’s a hard one for me to answer.

Interviewer: Yes, it’s an impossible question.
SIDLINE: But they thought a surprise attack to eliminate the American naval fleet in Pearl Harbor would essentially deal the best blow to the American military. The Japanese did have some legitimate grievances against the United States and other countries that had established oil embargos against Japan. Of course, there was justification for the embargo because of what Japan was doing in China. There was a rationale on both sides, but without delving too deep into history, the anti-American view on the part of the Japanese started long before the Japanese invasion of China. They always felt that they were treated as second-class citizens, particularly after World War I when they were not given equal room at the table, shall we say, because Japan was, in fact, allied with America and England during World War I. But that’s for the historians, not for me.

Interviewer: True. I know. I’m just curious what the point of view might have been. I’m getting the impression that living there, you culturally were not intermixing very much with the Japanese. Really, your culture was staying European in a sense.
SIDLINE: That is correct.

Interviewer: So you were not intermixing much, although you must have had some sort of an oriental viewpoint somewhere along the line?
SIDLINE: From my perspective, I didn’t really differentiate at that time. I only know that I spoke Japanese. In fact, Japanese was my first language.

Interviewer: With your parents, did they speak it? Did they speak it at home?
SIDLINE: We spoke Russian at home, but like most foreign families, we had a Japanese maid. She was the one who would take care of us, and we learned to speak Japanese from the Japanese maid. We learned to speak Russian because my parents, when they wanted to say something that we didn’t understand, spoke Russian, so we understood. English was my third language.

Interviewer: So the war has broken out. What occurs from that point on? One question, let me digress. In your family there were the two children, yourself and your brother?
SIDLINE: That’s correct.

Interviewer: What went on from there?
SIDLINE: Initially, there was very little change in life other than trying to keep up with the war news. Then there was this influx of Jewish refugees. No, the Jewish refugees came to Japan before the war, before 1941.

Interviewer: That’s right.
SIDLINE: So during the war, the Jewish refugees were given a temporary permit to stay, sort of a transit visa. These transit visas kept being renewed, and most of them eventually wound up in Shanghai. There was a whole yeshiva that came from Latvia to Japan and eventually moved to Shanghai. From my perspective and from my brother’s perspective — needless to say, my brother is three and a half years older than me; his memory is different from mine. Even though we had the same experiences, what we recall is different. From my perspective, life didn’t change very much until the air raids started. Of course, there was also a change in food availability, even before the air raids started. A lot of staples were rationed. Rice was rationed. Bread was rationed. Sugar was unavailable. The black market flourished. Just about anything you wanted was available on the black market, which, of course, was illegal, but some families survived exclusively on dealing in the black market. That was their livelihood.

Interviewer: Was your family involved with the Jewish refugees in any way, shape, or form, earlier on when they began? You would have been very young, of course.
SIDLINE: Yes, they were. In fact, I have a photocopy of a telegram sent to someone with names of the board of directors of Jewcom. Jewcom was the Jewish community for the refugees. There was an ad hoc committee that was formed to aid the refugees in Kobe. My father’s name was listed as one of the members of the board of directors of Jewcom.

Interviewer: So they helped them get settled, or just helped them …?
SIDLINE: They helped them financially. They helped them find housing, helped them in every way possible until they left. One thing I do remember, not this particular group of the yeshiva, but there were other refugees that came with quite a bit of material goods. Some came with china, like Rosenthal China. Some came with paintings of Italian masters. I remember that because I know that there were auctions of these items so that the refugees could get some financial help, which is obviously the main reason they traveled with this stuff in the first place. A lot of people denied that this ever happened, but I do recall that this happened because my parents bought items in these auctions and had this Rosenthal China vase, for example, in a display case. Or there was an Italian painting by an Italian master, called the Lute Player, I think, hanging in our house that we had purchased. Different groups of refugees that came across, most of them were desperate and destitute, but there were some that were the other way around.

Interviewer: These folks had escaped. I think you said they came on the Trans-Siberian Railroad?
SIDLINE: Across Russia, on the Trans-Siberian Railway, yes.

Interviewer: That must have been quite a journey in those days.
SIDLINE: I think it was something like a ten-day trip, and I think they had to do their own cooking on the train. I don’t think they had dining cars. I’m not sure.

Interviewer: So the Russians didn’t hold them up. They let them pass.
SIDLINE: That’s right.

Interviewer: And the Japanese did not accept them but gave them transit visas, wanting them to move on to someplace else at some point.
SIDLINE: Yes, many of them had visas to Curaçao, which was a Dutch colony at that time.

Interviewer: Could have been.
SIDLINE: I think so. But many of them eventually wound up in Shanghai. Most of them that did survive the Shanghai ghetto wound up in Israel after that.

Interviewer: Interesting. So after that influx in the early ’40s —’39, ’40, ’41 — of Jews coming in, then after that it would have basically stopped? Did your family have any further involvement in helping any refugees? 
SIDLINE: I think the need for that disappeared because they were either settled or gone.

Interviewer: Do you remember when Germany and Japan became allied?
SIDLINE: No.

Interviewer: It doesn’t stand out?
SIDLINE: No.

Interviewer: Were there Germans going to the schools that you were going to?
SIDLINE: Not that I recall. I mentioned that there were English-language missionary schools, except for the Germans. The Germans did their own thing. The Germans had their own schools, their own bakery, their own social clubs. One social club, I remember, I would pass on the way to school, and what fascinated me was the bowling alley. I could see it though the window. I liked the ramp of the returning ball. Dumb thing to remember.

Interviewer: That’s what kids do.
SIDLINE: That was on my way to school. But the Germans had it relatively easy. They had special — they didn’t want for anything. They weren’t starving. They had their own bakeries that nobody else had. There’s a story about that in my book. They did not mix with the other population. Most of the Germans there were Nazis in any case.

Interviewer: We kind of digressed. I got you off on another track there, but we were up to the point of the air raids beginning. Didn’t you say that’s when the food rationing became more severe?
SIDLINE: After every air raid it became more severe. Kobe had several air raids, but three major ones. One in February, one in March, and one on June 5, 1945. That was the last major air raid. It virtually destroyed what was left from the previous two raids. That’s when our house got hit as well.

Interviewer: Do you remember what year the air raids began?
SIDLINE: They probably began in the latter part of ’44, except for the Doolittle raid, which was April, 1942. Nothing happened for a couple years after that.

Interviewer: What were those years like?
SIDLINE: Life seemed to be fairly ordinary. The Canadian Academy was closed because it was an enemy country. The English Mission School was closed. St. John’s Institute was a Catholic school run by the brothers of the Society of Mary, which had its headquarters in Dayton, Ohio, but all the American teachers were repatriated back to the United States, and the school continued to be run by teachers of either allied or neutral countries. We had Swiss and teachers of other nationalities that taught us in English. It wasn’t until probably the early part of 1945 that the Japanese insisted that they teach us Japanese as well. There was a half-hearted attempt to do that.

Interviewer: In those years, did you know of or mix with, socially or otherwise, Jewish refugees who were coming through or had come through earlier? In any way? I know your father was involved in helping them, but did you meet them or know them?
SIDLINE: I probably met some, but I don’t think that I, as a child, socialized with any children of that particular age group, and I don’t think my brother did either. We have no record of that.

Interviewer: Did they come and live or stay in the area that you were in?
SIDLINE: Yes.

Interviewer: And physically, where you lived, it was pretty much Europeans, I take it?
SIDLINE: Pretty much, yes. The houses were western-style houses, and the people all around — there were Russians, the Polish people. The Polish family lived across the street from me. The Gutierrez family was next door to us. The Lopezes. And there was Antonio Jorge, he lived not far from the school. So a lot of Latin American people as well.

Interviewer: Now at some point, as you were mentioning before, there was a prisoner of war camp right next door to you. When did that come into being?
SIDLINE: Shortly after the beginning of the war. It is interesting to note that, according to our calendar, Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941. According to the Japanese, it was December 8, 1941, because Japan is on the other side of the dateline. Now Guam was attacked according to our calendar on December 8, 1941, a day later, but in actual fact it was just several hours later after Pearl Harbor that Guam was attacked. Guam was defended by a relatively small detachment of Marines, and the Chamorros, which are native Guamanians, lived there. And there was a group of American civilians who worked there, for Pan American Airways, which was a stop for the China Clipper, and other construction workers. 

These were all captured and transported to Japan after the start of the war. They were dispersed in several different camps, and one camp was next door to us. The camp was a mansion that had belonged to an American named Marx, and this became known as the Marx Camp. There were about 40 prisoners who were placed into this camp. Now the only thing that separated us from the camp was this concrete wall that was maybe seven feet tall. My brother and I could see into the camp from our upstairs window, so my brother and I got to know the Americans quite well. We spoke English, and these guys wanted to find somebody to speak English to — two pesky kids, my brother and me. 

But the other thing was that we also realized that there was a shortage of food for these American prisoners, so my parents, at some great risk to themselves, would toss food over the fence to the Americans at either predetermined times or predetermined signals. My father would put a stepladder against the wall and climb up and pass food over. If they were caught, it would have been quite disastrous for us. They put themselves at great risk in helping these Americans. And we weren’t the only ones to do that. There were others who did that as well. Not necessarily those who are next door, but there were some other members of the local population who befriended the Americans. 

It was relatively free for them; they could stand outside the gates. During a rare snowfall, they would go outside and have snowball fights in the street, the Japanese guard just watching. Every now and then I would see Japanese officers bring their families there, the wives and children. These are high-ranking naval officers. But toward the latter part of the war, in 1945, they were all moved out of there to a camp known as the Futtitabi [?] up in the mountains, where they rejoined other civilian internees from Guam.

Interviewer: These internees in the camp next to you were all civilians?
SIDLINE: All civilians.

Interviewer: They apparently didn’t really suffer that much at the hands of the Japanese other than the hunger that you were all going through?
SIDLINE: They did not, from what I saw and from what I learned from interviewing survivors of that camp many years later. They were not mistreated in the way that you hear of atrocities conducted by the Japanese outside of the islands and by the way they treated downed pilots, for example, or downed air crew, many of whom were executed, beheaded. The civilians were not treated in that way. There was no real torture as such. In fact, from what I read, when one of the prisoners got an acute case of appendicitis, they took him to the Kobe International Hospital for surgery.

Interviewer: So about 1945 your memory says that they were moved to this other camp up in the mountains.
SIDLINE: Yes.

Interviewer: In 1945, you were about 11 years old.
SIDLINE: Yes, I was ten.

Interviewer: What were your living conditions like then, at the age of ten?
SIDLINE: There was a food shortage, and that was obvious. There was a lack of certain staples. I developed certain medical conditions that were based upon improper nutrition. But as long as my father had his store, which was doing reasonably well as it turns out, because the Japanese felt the money’s not worth anything, so might as well stock up on things as opposed to money. Inflation, which was controlled by the black market, devalued the Japanese yen on almost a daily basis.

Interviewer: In 1945, were you aware of the attitude of the Japanese population towards the war? When did you start having any attitude about it or knowledge about it? 
SIDLINE: The Japanese English-language newspapers. I might add that there were two English-language newspapers printed during the war in Japan throughout the war, even under the most dire circumstances, a newspaper would come out.

Interviewer: Did they have freedom of the press though? Could they …?
SIDLINE: I doubt it because most of the articles from overseas came from their own press agencies, or from Berlin. The editorials were, of course, anti-American, so there was really no freedom of the press, but it became obvious to those who could read between the lines how things were going. They used euphemisms like “minor damage” or “considerable damage,” and we always knew that we had to increase that adjective n-fold times to really understand what the damage was. “Heroic resistance” meant virtual decimation of the armed forces. We also knew that there were gross exaggerations on the number of aircraft that were shot down. There were gross exaggeration on the heroics and victories. Even until the very last day of August, before the surrender of Japan, if you looked at a headline of a Japanese newspaper, you could see that, “Great victories are taking place all over the South Pacific,” when in fact, none of that was true.

Interviewer: I suppose then we move toward the ending days of the war. That would be the next thing to talk about.
SIDLINE: As I mentioned earlier, there were three major air raids in Japan, in February, March, and June 5, 1945. As I said, that last air raid destroyed whatever was left from the previous air raids. There were all sorts of minor air raids, single aircraft flying overhead, a single B-29, either reconnaissance or just some harassment. They would drop a few bombs and take off. Let me digress for a moment. It became almost customary for similar aircraft or two airplanes flying together to come over Japan, drop a few bombs, take a few pictures, and leave. The Japanese would then sound the precautionary alarm. There were two kinds of alarms. There was the precautionary alarm, and then there was the raid alarm. The raid alarm was eventually reserved only for major air raids. Precautionary alarms would be sounded only when there was a single or small air raid, and it was never raised to the raid alarm. 

That’s what happened in Hiroshima. Hiroshima had a single plane come over, and it was only a precautionary alarm that was sounded because, after all, it was only a single airplane. So when the atom bomb dropped, it was a major, major surprise to them. But anyway, getting back to June 5, 1945, we were in the house in a makeshift air raid shelter that my parents built in the house. When the bombs dropped, they landed — these were incendiary bombs; General Curtis LeMay decided to go from fragmentation ordnance to incendiary ordnance because the Japanese houses were all built out of wood. They made for good kindling. The bomb fell in front of my mother in the air raid shelter — it was a napalm bomb that exploded — but it shot the flames only in one direction. So we hopped out of the [over?] bomb, and my parents and my brother and I managed to escape.

Interviewer: So it landed very close to you then.
SIDLINE: A matter of inches.

Interviewer: Really?
SIDLINE: One step and [unclear]. Had the bomb hit this way, we would have all been incinerated, but it fell that way. That was, of course, a major tragedy for us because we lost everything except for a couple of suitcases we managed to have planned for one of these just-in-case type of events.

Interviewer: What about your father’s store? Was it close by?
SIDLINE: It was not close by, but it went up as well, same day, so it was a disaster for my parents. We were taken in by friends. We went to Arima, where our friends had two rented rooms from a Japanese family, and we lived there for about a month before moving to Karuizawa, a resort town that was open to foreigners. At that time, to travel from any part of Japan to any other part of Japan, you had to get a special travel permit, and the only permits given out were for foreigners to move to Karuizawa, which was a hundred miles north of Tokyo. It had a very large foreign population, amongst which was a very large population of diplomats, including a whole bunch of Germans as well. So in July of ’45 we took the train from Kobe to Karuizawa, and we lived with friends for a while who had a house. The same friend who had initially helped our father move from Russia to Japan helped us again in 1945.

Interviewer: You must have been very frightened during these times. It must have been terrifying to have been bombed like that.
SIDLINE: It was no picnic. Yes.

Interviewer: As a child, at first war was exciting. Was it getting less exciting now?
SIDLINE: Until the bombs hit our house, I as a child, even though I was ten, almost 11 years old at that time, probably did not realize the full impact of what was going on. I had this inherent trust in my parents that whatever happened, my parents would be there to protect me and my brother. My father was an eternal optimist. He’d always say, “Whatever happens is for the best.” Though how bombing could be for the best is hard to say. Maybe in retrospect it was because our lives changed, and here I am. Maybe it was for the best. Who knows?

Interviewer: That’s right. Who knows? So now you’re here in this resort town in July of ’45.
SIDLINE: Yes. Of course, there’s no way of earning a living.

Interviewer: Yes, I was wondering about that.
SIDLINE: So my friends, from these two suitcases we had plus some other things, managed to sell certain things that we would barter with farmers for clothes. We would go on bicycles and see if we could barter some secondhand clothes for potatoes, tomatoes, or cucumbers, or maybe a chicken or two. That’s how we lived because the infrastructure had gone to hell at that point. The end of the war was almost there. Another month and the war would end.

TAPE TWO

Interviewer: We are almost into August 1945 now. You and your family are in the resort area.
SIDLINE: We were living in Karuizawa [spells out]. We were living at that time at our friend’s house. As I said earlier, the same woman who helped my father move from Russia to Japan now helped us move from our scene of destruction to this resort town, which of course, was free of destruction. We lived there for a few months until the war ended and the Americans came.

Interviewer: Do you have any remembrance of the bombs, or hearing about the atom bombs being dropped? Do you know what the Japanese knew, thought?
SIDLINE: The only thing that we knew about the atom bomb was what was printed in the newspaper. They talked about a “new type of bomb” and how it caused vast destruction. This time they didn’t mince any words. In contrast to these large headlines about the victories, the space devoted to the atomic bomb was about this big, on the bottom of the front page. What occupied more space was the declaration of war by the Soviet Union on Japan between the two bombs. That headline was two columns wide. Though it is felt by many, if not most people, that the atomic bomb ended the war, I strongly believe that the declaration of war by the Soviet Union on Japan had a material impact on the decision to surrender. 

There are some people, my brother for example, who agree with me. The reason is that even though Japan defeated the Russian Navy in the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese were still very fearful of the Soviet Union, of Russia. They would even print very recently the pictures of the surrender or the victory of the Japanese admirals. Why print pictures of 1904 in a newspaper of 1945? Because there was a relevance, that the Japanese were superior to the Russians, and they had to instill that into the local psyche. Of course, it’s well known that some of the best Japanese regiments never saw any combat until the Russians crossed the border into Manchuria, where the Japanese [track?] divisions were stationed to stop the Russians in case they did attack. The Japanese had a little doggerel that went, “Nippon [continues in Japanese], which means, “Japan won. Japan won. Russia lost the war.” This was in the ’40s, and they’re harking back to the early 20th century. I think that was one of the major fears the Japanese had, of Russia entering the war, and when it did, I think that was as we call it, the “tipping point.” Perhaps the Nagasaki bomb was unnecessary. I don’t know. That’s up to historians to decide, not me.

Interviewer: Did the Russians entering the war have any effect on your father or your parents in any way, shape, or form? Do you recall? 
SIDLINE: Well …

Interviewer: Tell me if you can about the attitudes at this time in your family’s life. Were you all just waiting for the end of the war? Did you know it was coming, or was that very uncertain?
SIDLINE: They would all hope for the end of the war. My mother would say at times, “When is this madness ever going to end?” My parents, being Russian speaking, felt an affinity towards Russians and hoped that the entry of Russia into the war would end it. I guess that’s about it.

Interviewer: As a young guy, your attitude, do you remember how you felt?
SIDLINE: The interesting thing is that even though I was born in Japan, my brother was born in China but grew up in Japan, and being English speaking, we were more sympathetic to the Americans than to the Japanese. We were not anti-Japanese, but we identified more with the western culture than the Japanese culture even though we lived our whole lives in Japan. We felt no enmity towards the Americans even though they destroyed our houses.

Interviewer: How did the war end for you and your family? How did you know what happened? Do you remember that day?
SIDLINE: My mother became hysterical when she found out the war ended. All that pent-up emotion just finally phhht [makes sound like air being released from a balloon]. And even though we were living in Karuizawa and we were no longer subject to bombings, we had the newspaper, and the newspaper kept talking about all these wonderful victories even to the last day of the war. It talked about how they were preparing for invasion and all that and talked about how the Americans will fail in their invasion because of their long supply chains, whereas the Japanese didn’t have long supply chains. They were all there. They had, I think — and it’s again up to historians to verify that — several million soldiers still under arms. Even though the navy and air force were destroyed, the army was not. 

Of course, they had a civil defense force armed with bamboo spears and what have you. But it wasn’t long before the Americans arrived in Karuizawa. The first Americans to arrive in Karuizawa were war correspondents. One of them was with Stars and Stripes and the other one was with Yank magazine, which is an army magazine. We were all kids, ten, 11, 12, 13, 14 years old, and somebody said, “The Americans are here!” The mode of transportation was bicycle then, so I hopped on my bicycle and went to where the Americans were standing around, looking at things. They were dumbfounded to see so many kids speaking English. We were all Anglophones, all spoke English better than we spoke Japanese because all of us had gone through the English-language school system.

Then later on, the Americans moved in the force: the First Cavalry Division, the 97th Infantry Division, the 8th Army. They came into this resort area and took over the operation of one of the top hotels for an R and R center for American soldiers. We lived just below that hotel, and we got to know the Americans quite well. My father meantime opened up a store catering to the Americans. He said, “What do Americans want? I don’t know. They are soldiers. Like any soldiers, they are looking for souvenirs.” So he went and managed to get lacquer boxes of various kinds with the insignias of the 1st Cavalry Division, 97th Infantry Division, and the 8th Army. The soldiers just loved his store because here was the only non-Japanese, English-speaking person who had a store. They would congregate around his store. They would ride bicycles and stick around. They would ride Jeeps. My father spoke English very well, but you could barely understand him because he had this horrible accent [laughter]. It was a horrible accent, and he had difficulty understanding a southern American.

Interviewer: Well, who doesn’t [laughter]? So he opened a store, that’s interesting.
SIDLINE: It was called Universal Store.

Interviewer: How long did you stay in this town?
SIDLINE: Two years, until 1947. In the meantime, my brother, who was 14 at that time, got a job at the 361st Station Hospital in Tokyo. There were a lot of teenage boys who decided that they would like to get a job with the Americans.

Interviewer: Teenage boys from your area?
SIDLINE: From our area, yes.

Interviewer: European kids?
SIDLINE; Yes. They were used to a large extent as interpreters because they spoke English and Japanese. The interesting thing, a change in perspective — when the Americans first came, they looked at these kids and said, “Do you speak English?” They said, “Yes.” After a while the question was, “Do you speak Japanese?” because they fully expected them to speak English. They used them as interpreters for daily things. For more complicated official business they had real, knowledgeable interpreters, not kids.

Interviewer: Were those two years from ’45 to ’47 marked by anything cataclysmic or otherwise? Was there anything of particular interest in there? Did life ease up?
SIDLINE: My father felt that I needed an education. There was a school in Yokohama by the name of St. Maur, a Catholic convent run by nuns. They were bombed out as well, so they opened up a school in Karuizawa. It was a girls’ school, but my father managed to get me private lessons in math, English, and French. I took lessons from the nuns up there. My father’s business apparently worked reasonably well. The Americans would come over, became friendly with our family, and they longed for a home-cooked meal. My mother was a magician in the kitchen. They would bring K-rations and C-rations, and my mother managed to make them palatable.

Interviewer: I bet she was popular.
SIDLINE: She was, yes. The soldiers came over, and my father would wear civilian clothes. [They would say] “Boy, I sure would like to get dressed like that one of these days!” We were particularly fond of the soldiers of the 97th Infantry Division.

Interviewer: That’s interesting. During those days, my father was there also. Not in that town. He was at an air base somewhere in Japan.
SIDLINE: Do you remember which one?

Interviewer: I can find out. He was an Australian. Right after the war he went to Japan almost immediately. He’s one of the few guys who fought in both theatres. He flew American B-51s there. This was after the war.
SIDLINE: So, he probably wound up in Atsugi Air Force Base.

Interviewer: Could very well be. That’s Sugi?
SIDLINE: Atsugi. Yes.

Interviewer: I’m going to look it up because he did write some memoirs. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to digress.
SIDLINE: That’s all right.

Interviewer: So you’re getting along really well with the Americans. Did you have curiosity at this point about America?
SIDLINE: Yes. My father in his early days would also travel to the United States on business, and he would talk about San Francisco. He loved San Francisco. He remembered staying at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel.

Interviewer: It’s still there.
SIDLINE: Yes, it is. He loved that. We heard so many things about America. Eventually, when we left Japan, we got visas to immigrate to Canada and Australia as well, but not the United States.

Interviewer: Why is that?
SIDLINE: I have no idea. 

Interviewer: Just so we know now, what caused this decision to be made to leave Japan?
SIDLINE: As I said earlier, my parents thought we would have better opportunities for my brother and me. I think it was unsaid that, “We need to find a good Jewish girl for …” [laughter]. And there aren’t that many Jewish girls in Japan. I think they wanted to make sure we married nice Jewish girls, which I did, who I met in Japan as it turns out. She lived across the street from me when she was five years old.

Interviewer: Isn’t that something!
SIDLINE: Yes.

Interviewer: That would have been back in Kobe.
SIDLINE: Yes. 

Interviewer: So you immigrated to Canada?
SIDLINE: And the reason why we chose Canada as opposed to Australia, even though Australia gave us a visa first before Canada, was because my mother had a large extended family in Montreal. In fact, right now I can count six generations of Canadians in my family, from my great-grandmother to my great aunt. My parents were naturalized citizens of Canada. I’m a naturalized citizen of Canada. My son and my grandchildren are all registered Canadians as well as being Americans.

Interviewer: I married a Canadian, but I’ve never held it against her [laughter]. That’s fascinating. So you went to Montreal, then? You started school immediately, I take it?
SIDLINE I was out of high school by then, and I had to work in my father’s store in Yokohama when we moved in 1947. I didn’t mention that. When we left Karuizawa, we moved to Yokohama. We didn’t move back to Kobe. I was really surprised because I fully expected we would go back to Kobe, but we went to Yokohama because it had a school that we could go to, St. Joseph, which was run by the same order, Society of Mary, out of Dayton, Ohio. This time they had American teachers there because the war was over. So I went and graduated from St. Joseph in 1952. My brother graduated in 1950. I helped my father open up a store in Yokohama. That was his job. Go to a place; open up a store. Again, his store was similar in many respects to the store in Kobe.  It was not according to good business sense, but according to things that he liked. It was the most eclectic collection of stuff you’ve ever seen. Most notable, of course, was one wall of French wine.

Interviewer: He sounds like a smart guy to me.
SIDLINE: He was quite a guy.

Interviewer: He would have to have been. His life story sounds fascinating. Look at the history that his life — I was watching [name of film?] about Churchill’s life, have always been fascinated by Churchill’s life [inaudible phrase]. My god, the events in time that Churchill’s life spanned and your father’s is the same. Almost a contemporary. He was a member of the Russian Army while the tsar was still in power. Are you kidding me? Wow!
SIDLINE: The comparison with Churchill is a little more apropos because they were both cigar smokers. In fact, he was known as the man who either had a pipe or a cigar in his mouth all the time. Never smoked cigarettes.

Interviewer: So he had the store in Yokohama.
SIDLINE: In 1954 he closed the store, hopped on a tramp steamer, in effect, and wound up in Vancouver. From Vancouver, he took a train across to Montreal.

Interviewer: That would have been a great time to make that trip.
SIDLINE Oh, it was great!

Interviewer: Yes, it would have been.
SIDLINE: I think it was five nights and four days crossing Canada.

Interviewer: I think they’re putting that line back together now.
SIDLINE: You can still go cross-country by train, but it takes a little less time.

Interviewer: Right. I thought there was a part that they were rebuilding because it fell out of popularity at one time and part of it went into disuse.
SIDLINE: Entirely possible, yes.

Interviewer: So you’re there. You’ve all survived all of this and now you’re in Canada. Your father has a store again. Did he open a store again?
SIDLINE: No, my father was almost 70 years old when we moved to Canada. It’s difficult for one who is 70 years old with a hearing problem and a language problem. Even though my father spoke French, it was not French-Canadian. I used to speak fairly decent French. I don’t anymore. But French-Canadian was something I had great difficulty understanding, the accent. He tried to open up an import business, importing pearls from Japan, but he was not very successful with that. Besides being old, he had a severe hearing problem as well, which was part of an injury he suffered at the hands of a teacher when he was a young boy. The rest is history, I suppose.

Interviewer: How did you meet your wife? I know how you met your wife, but how did you get together? That sounds fascinating.
SIDLINE: That’s another story, but I’ll try to be as brief as possible, which is a very difficult thing for me to do. Across the street from our home in Kobe was a family known as the Ponaviski [sp?] family, who originated in Siberia in Irkutsk near Lake Baikal. They were a wealthy Russian-Jewish family, and her uncle, Anatol Ponaviski, was pretty much the leader of the Ashkenazi Jewish community. As I said, he was influential in helping the refugees. But when war started in Europe, my wife’s family lived in Belgium. Her father, Moise Moiseff, moved to Belgium with his new wife, new bride, to get a PhD at the University of Liege, a PhD in economics. 

When war started, all men of military age were prevented from leaving the country when the Germans invaded. He sent his wife and two children, my wife Simone and her older brother, Gregory, to Japan to be with their uncle Anatol, who lived across the street from me. When they moved in, we were already friendly with the Ponaviski family, and they introduced us to their cousins. Anatol’s sister was the mother of the two kids. About a year later, Moise Moiseff left Belgium and traveled essentially by foot to Portugal. The king of Belgium at that time said, “Everyone for himself. There’s no conscription. There’s no point in resisting the Germans. The Germans are here, so off you go.” So he managed to walk his way across France, Spain, and Portugal. He got a ship to New York, crossed from New York to San Francisco, and from San Francisco managed his way to Japan. This was before Pearl Harbor, obviously. 

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Moise Moiseff was arrested by the Japanese police as an enemy alien. He was a Belgian citizen at that point. He was put into the Canadian Academy, which had been converted into an internment camp. The wife and the kids were left alone, but he was in there. From what I understand, after the Doolittle raid they let him go on the basis of reciprocity. They said Belgium has no Japanese prisoners, so we do not need to have any Belgian prisoners. Of course, Belgium was under the control of the Germans at that time, so there would be no Japanese prisoners even if there were any Japanese living there. But they said under one condition: you have to move to Karuizawa.  In the meantime I got friendly with the little five-year-old girl who lived across the street, Simone.

After the war, in 1946, they left Japan and moved to San Francisco. Several years later I moved to Canada, and in 1962 I decided to take a vacation to visit her and her family after not seeing them for 16 years. Needless to say, this little kid with the blonde pigtails had grown up to be quite a woman. I won’t go into all the details, but we got together again. We got engaged in ’62 and got married in ’62.

Interviewer: Now in ’62 she was where?
SIDLINE: In San Francisco. She gave me an ultimatum. You want to marry me? Two conditions: one condition is that you shave off that silly moustache you have, and number two, we move to California.

Interviewer: Gee!
SIDLINE: I said OK! [Laughter.] That’s 45 years ago.

Interviewer: That’s hard to imagine, isn’t it?
SIDLINE: Yes.

Interviewer: Is there anything we’ve missed at all?
SIDLINE: I suppose there might be some details here and there, but …

Interviewer: Nothing of a major note?
SIDLINE: Turn that thing off. I’ll go and also … 

[Pause in taping]

Interviewer: So you were bar mitzvahed in Yokohama because you were not able to …?
SIDLINE: Because there was no one to teach me anything on how to read Hebrew and how to do the trope, and the haftorah and the bracha and all of these things. I did not know how to do that. My brother had a bar mitzvah in Kobe, but that was in 1944 when things were still possible. He was born in March ’31, so in March ’44 he had a bar mitzvah at the Kobe Ashkenazic synagogue.

Interviewer: Got you. Yes.
SIDLINE: So I had my bar mitzvah. I was a very short little runt. I think I was 4’-8”. I had to stand on a box next to my father in order to read the — I have pictures of that here.

Interviewer: For the pictures [inaudible words]. Is that a lighter? 
SIDLINE: That’s a cigarette case.

Interviewer: Why don’t you hold that on your knee. We might as well. I’d love to get a shot of that.
SIDLINE: The interesting thing is that on the inside there’s a date of January 26, 1916. It says in Russian, “From Mother.” On the front you see the different insignias.

Interviewer: Yes. Let me get real close on that. Got it.
SIDLINE: Here are his initials, “B.S.” Boris. This one is the insignia of the shoulder epaulets identifying his rank in the Russian military. This one here is his regimental insignia, this one here is his regimental hat, and this one here says “Pavlic,” which is the pet name of his first wife. What is peculiar about this thing is that the 26th of January is not his birthday; the 28th of January is his birthday. We suspect that this did not come from his mother because his mother was in Latvia. It probably came from his mother-in-law, who lived in that area, and that’s why “Pavlic,” which is the name of this first wife. I think that’s what it is. 

Interviewer: Interesting. That’s a cigarette case, yet he never smoked cigarettes, although maybe …?
SIDLINE: No, he never smoked cigarettes, at least not that I’m aware of.

Interviewer: Of course, he was a young man. He might have for a short while.
SIDLINE: This is a treasure.

Interviewer: Yes, it is.
SIDLINE: This is the original elastic from 1916.

Interviewer: 1916. Where was he stationed then?
SIDLINE: Vladivostok.

Interviewer: That’s fascinating.
SIDLINE: You may want to look through these photographs first before we — what would you rather do?

Interviewer: Well, what we can do …
SIDLINE: I think I have a CD-ROM of all these pictures. I can put them on a CD-ROM.

Interviewer: That would be terrific. The only thing is I wouldn’t know what they were unless you …
SIDLINE: I’ll caption them.

Interviewer: Would you? That would be terrific. Because what I’m going to do with the DVD is chapter it also.
SIDLINE: Sure, I understand that.

Interviewer: From year to year to year, so the researcher or yourself — you’ll get a copy of it, obviously — you can get through it quickly and move from one thing to another if you need to. That would be great.
SIDLINE: My last production was a ten-minute film of the Ford Trimotor out of Evergreen Aviation Museum.

Interviewer: I love that place. 
SIDLINE: We had an opportunity to fly in it.

Interviewer: You’re kidding me!
SIDLINE: I made a video. I took a series of wild shots and took it home and edited it. Inside shoots, outside shoots, put music to it.

Interviewer: You actually flew in it?
SIDLINE: Yes.

Interviewer: I didn’t know it flew.
SIDLINE: Yes, one of the five remaining flying Ford Trimotors.

Interviewer: I’ll be damned.
SIDLINE: They gave an opportunity to members to fly in it, and so when I found out about it, I brought my son and me to be some of the passengers on the flight.

Interviewer: I’d love to see that. It’s really interesting to me. When you were talking about the China Clipper, I met a fellow in Canada who had worked for British Airways and was an engineer. For years and years. He was involved with the original China Clipper and flew it on the route south from London down into Africa and so forth. He has a lot of mementos and books he showed me. Fascinating stuff.
SIDLINE: I’m sure. The prisoner of war I interviewed who lives in Dallas was a communications specialist for Pan American when he was captured.

Interviewer: Wow.
SIDLINE: He’s 90 years old now.

Interviewer: Is that right?
SIDLINE: Yes, I have him on tape. It was broadcast on cable television.

Interviewer: That’s good to get those stories. I’d like to ask you, what caused you to write the book?
SIDLINE: When people meet me for the first time they say, “You speak with an accent. Where are you from?” Usually they think I’m German or something like that. I say, “No, I’m not German.” Bypassing all the other questions, I say I was born in Japan, and I was raised in Japan. The first question they ask is, “Was your father in the service?” Which would make me significantly younger than I am right now.

Interviewer: Do they ever look at you to see if you’re part Japanese and they’ve missed it?
SIDLINE: They also ask if my mother was Japanese. But then I tell them that no, I was born in Japan way before the war and my parents came from Eastern Europe. The questions usually continue that way, and when I tell them that I lived through the war in Japan as a non-Japanese growing up during the war, they are usually quite surprised because they didn’t think there were any Caucasians or white people or foreigners living in Japan during the war. 

The next thing they say is, “You must write it down.” So having heard this so many, many times from various people, I decided maybe I should, and about 15 years ago I decided to sit down and write. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and what I wrote was pretty much awful stuff. But when I moved to the Portland area, I got the opportunity to sign up for a memoir-writing class out of PCC at the Tigard Senior Center. I thought, here’s an opportunity for me to rewrite all the stuff I had written before and thrown away. It’s a good thing I did throw it away because it was pretty bad stuff, as I said. 

So over the past three or four years I wrote this book, and people who read the manuscript liked it. Mostly friends and relatives looked at the book, and they liked it. Of course, their commentary was biased. They wouldn’t say anything unkind, other than, “It’s OK, but ….” I got some very complimentary reviews from these people, and I thought maybe, after all, it’s not such a bad book. So I sent a copy to Powell’s and they’re carrying it now, and Annie Bloom’s, Multnomah Village is carrying it now. I’m trying to get other bookstores. What I’m looking for really is for somebody with a big name like Oprah to look at a book and say, “Hey, it’s a good book.” I formed my own publishing company and published it, so I have a garage full of books now [laughter].

Interviewer: What you’re doing is you’ve had your first attempt at going out. What’s this called, an author’s party? That you did at the Senior Center, for instance.
SIDLINE: It was a reading.

Interviewer: A reading. That’s certainly one way.
SIDLINE: But I did the wrong thing. I first of all spoke the way I’m doing right now about the book and the rationale behind it, and then I started reading. After a while, you can see people’s eyes glaze over, and the audience gets diminished. So I decided that maybe it’s time for me to stop reading and do something else. Later on, I was given the advice to go to somebody else’s reading to see how that’s done.

Interviewer: That’s a good idea.
SIDLINE: I think I’ll do that. I thought the Senior Center would be a good place. After all, it’s a World War II book. It spans the time from 1940 roughly to 1947, and the people at the Senior Center remember World War II by and large. Some even served in the military and come to the Senior Center for lunch.

Interviewer: Look at the movies that have been out, Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List and so forth, about the Second World War. Letters from Iwo Jima, which was quite a movie. So many.
SIDLINE: You walk into Barnes and Noble or Borders, or any other bookstore, and the first thing you see is a whole shelf full of books on World War II. It’s very much in vogue. In fact, last month there was a four-article series written by the Oregonian on Doolittle’s raid over Tokyo. Obviously it would not have been there had there been no interest in World War II, and this is strictly a World War II memoir.

Interviewer: My theory is that to some of us it maybe represents a better time in this country — even though there was a war, a terrible thing — but we were united in our purpose. Now we live in such fragmented times, perhaps that seems attractive.
SIDLINE: I like to think of World War II as the last gentleman’s war. The reason I say that, there can’t be anything gentlemanly about a war, but because there was a defined enemy, a defined ally, there was a defined front line, defined uniforms, defined rules of engagement — though not always followed. There was the Geneva Convention. All of these things were part of the rules of the game, so to speak. Those rules have all gone out the door now. Right now it is whatever you want to get, wherever you want to get, whenever you want to get. It’s no longer a gentleman’s war.

Interviewer: There’s another way to put that, too. I’ve thought about it, but I can’t quite put it in words yet. I’ve thought about the ferocity or the harshness of what we see nowadays, but I can’t explain it. I won’t even try. I was thinking about that the other day. What seems to be allowed nowadays, like those bad things in the Middle East, the murders, the children being blown up, that kind of indiscriminate killing. There’s a phrase for it. I can’t come up with it.
SIDLINE: I don’t know. Diminution of the value of life.

Interviewer: That’s a good start right there. Yes, the absolute, utter disregard for human life to gain one’s own ends. So this has just been published?
SIDLINE: Just been published. What makes this book unique, I think, is that first of all, it does describe, maybe from a child’s perspective, but it does describe to a certain extent the life of a foreign population in Japan during the war and how the war affected this particular population. The other thing that’s interesting in here is the fact that we lived right next door to a prisoner of war camp. These prisoners of war were civilians from Guam who were captured in the first few days of the war. The other thing is that I witnessed the expulsion of German Nazis from Karuizawa where we lived, and as far as I know, I’m the only one who has recorded that photographically. I had my little Brownie camera, went down to the station and took pictures. The pictures are in the book here.

Interviewer: Were they sent back to Germany?
SIDLINE: They were sent back to Germany. I read some articles later on written by a historian from San Jose State University who sort of decried the manner in which these Germans were sent back to a destroyed country. My philosophy: too bloody bad. They were sent on a train, not in boxcars, on a passenger train. They were sent on a ship, and they were sent back to the country which started the whole thing, and they’re the ones who supported that whole thing. These were Nazis, and they deserved to go back and see what it was that they had wrought, the horrible …

Interviewer: Were you aware if any of the Germans that were in Kobe were Nazis?
SIDLINE: The only Germans that I knew were two doctors. One was Dr. Schmitt [sp?]. The other was Dr. Tern [sp?]. They had a medical clinic. Whether they were Nazis or not, I don’t know. I know one thing, though. When I had my appendix taken out, Dr. Schmitt performed the operation, and I guess he saved my life as a result. I don’t think he was a Nazi because I know that after the war he was engaged by the U.S. occupying forces to help them in various respects. On the way to an emergency, he would ride in a Jeep. The jeep was involved in an accident, and he was killed in the accident. So I don’t think he was a Nazi. There were Italian fascists there as well, particularly a whole bunch of Italian sailors that got stranded in Japan when Italy surrendered.

Interviewer: That sounds like a movie. It does. A bunch of Italians in Japan. Oh, my gosh.
SIDLINE: They were a fun bunch.

Interviewer: I bet they were.
SIDLINE: Yes. One of the doctors was il dottore Perrotti. 

Interviewer: That sounds like a comedy, I swear. I mean, it does, if you think of that. Was there anything else you’d like to say about the book?
SIDLINE: Buy it! [Laughter.]