 Thanks for joining us here to recognize Women's History Month and Dr. Mary Rom. Well, good afternoon, everyone. Got you out of the rain for a little while, I hope. Here to talk to you today about a very interesting subject that I came across and became very interested in in developing a course here that I teach as an elective. It's called Women in War and Combat. And one evening I was reading a book by Frank Anton on the POWs in Vietnam. And there was one sentence in there about a nurse named Monica Schwinn. And I thought, who is this woman? She's in a prisoner of war camp. I never had heard of a woman in a POW camp, and that's not something I ever thought about. So that led to looking up many other women. And I found over 200, and I'm writing a book right now, and I've chosen 10 of these women to talk to you about today. I hope that you enjoy the subject. I do have to do this, the disclaimer part. The opinions expressed are implied in this presentation are those of the presenter alone and do not reflect the views of the Naval War College Department of Defense, United States Navy, or any other branch or agency of the United States government. Also, the opinions and vocabularies expressed are implied in the first person quotes are those of the prisoners alone and do not reflect my views, the Naval War College Department of Defense, United States Navy, or any other branch or agency of the United States government. Use of the videos and photography and background resources are undertaking consistent with the Fair Use Act and for educational purposes only. Some of the images may be considered disturbing. I want to thank Dr. Donna Connolly, Lieutenant Colonel Kathy Graff, Lieutenant Eugenia Genji Gilmorton, Ms. Amy Homan from the University of Rhode Island, Dr. Kathleen McDonald, and Commander Valerie Riege for doing the voiceovers for this talk, and also Commander Andreas Moege of Deutsch Marine for his assistance in the Monica Schwinn story. He did a lot of translations for me and allowed me to go meet Monica this past year in Germany. So Maya Angelou says, there is no agony like burying an untold story inside you. Once you tell her, here's a story you're hungry for more and you never weary of this experience. Stories take us to the center of oneself and to the unexplored areas of our lives, and this can inspire transformation in ourselves and others. The stories that I've chosen for you today come from some of the works for a book I am writing on a female prisoner's award called From Eight Hours to Four Years. They represent only a small portion of those women who have been captured during war and conflict, and it was difficult to select from these many heroines. Today, with the exception of one of the women, all described served as officers in the military. Those chosen represent several nations, Russia, America, Germany, Great Britain, and Australia. The first story is that of Monica Schwinn, a Malteseer international nurse. I met Ms. Schwinn in November of 2012, and she has not given an interview since around the time of a release from the Hanoi Hilton in Vietnam in 1973. Monica's story will be followed by that of Maria Batch Kareva, a Russian and World War I Army Combat Veteran. This will be followed by illustrations from World War II. There's Anna Igarova, a Russian Army pilot. Reba Whittle, an American Army flight nurse. Nor Aniyat Khan, a WAF, an agent of the Special Operations Executive of Great Britain. The group of U.S. Army and Navy nurses known as the Angels of Batan. Marion Olds, a chief Navy nurse in the United States Navy. Brigadier Margot Turner of Queen Alexandra's Nursing Corps. Great Britain and Lieutenant Colonel Vivian Bullwinkle of the Australian Army Nursing Corps. The stories are gonna vary in scope. Sometimes I'll talk about their capture, others about the actual internments, and you will hear in their own words their impressions of the situations they were found themselves in. Kami, you ready? Thank you. Monica Schwinn's story is very unique and that is about an NGO that was captured in an interned in American military POW camps. In the history of women in war and combat, the occurrence of being in military camps during captivity is absolutely extraordinary. Most women internees, whether military or civilian, were normally placed in civilian intern camps with other women. Also of interest from the Vietnam War era, just for your information, are two reporters that were captured. In 1967, Michelle Ray, this is a fascinating tell in itself, a former Coco Chanel dress model turned reporter, was taken when she was out on a photographic expedition. There is a book that she wrote about her internment. And the second is Kate Webb, who was taken into custody in April of 1971. These two women's stories expressed vastly opposing thoughts about internment and are definitely worth a look if you have an interest in this timeframe of war. There were also 300 Vietnamese female military and political dissidents incarcerated in the notorious tiger cages of Can San Island off the southeastern coast of the country. Women were beaten on the head with truncheons or locked between two steel bars. Water was forced down their throats and some were suspended above the ground on meat hooks and other suffered severe debilitations from lime that was thrown on them for misbehavior. Now back to the story of Monica Schwinn. Monica grew up on the beautiful SAR region of Germany in a small village called Le Boc. Her association with the incomparable situation that is captivity really began in 1942 when her father was sent to Siberia as a German prisoner of war and he never returned home. Her mother sat at the kitchen window every evening for hours mending and sewing so she could see the train station in hopes that her husband would appear. When I met Monica in November of 2012, she said that her mother made her and her brother Neil for hours in Catholic meditation and prayer for her father. She really disliked those hours. She still, at 70 years old, she remembered the pain on her knees. She really didn't like that. Certainly an innocent as she was only three or four years old, she would ask her mother, why won't they let Papa come home? How could they take a good man and make him a prisoner? And why doesn't father go and pick potatoes if he is so darn hungry? And the final one was why doesn't he just run away? Her mother died in 1956 and she and her brother, a future architect, were raised by aunts and uncles. Monica studied to be a pediatric psychiatric nurse and in 1969, she answered an ad in a multi-seer international newsletter that asked for nurses to volunteer to travel to distressed areas of the world. Years later, she reflected that the first sign she should not have posted to Vietnam was when several members of the service were murdered in the African continent. She was given a direct phone call by the head of the multi-seer international organization and said, you know, you really don't have to go to Vietnam now if you don't want to. She went ahead. The sovereign military hospital is the world's oldest surviving order of chivalry. Its traditions are of a military and noble nature and the nurses wore official uniforms of the order when they were working. Her story begins one Saturday evening when she and Marie-Louise Kerber, a dental assistant and three other German nurses who were with the multi-aid service, Bernhard Diehl, Hendrika Korpman and George Bartsch were sitting together in a canteen and decided to take a Sunday outing the next morning. Monica had been working very consistently with napalm-burned children and she said she wanted some pretty pictures on this trip, not of these horrible sites that she was seeing, but all the ox in the area and the beautiful rice fields and so on. In uniform, because when they returned they would be reporting for work. They stepped from their dreep to take photos of the rice paddies and an old farmer standing knee high in the green stalks moved toward them in his rubber sandals and ported in the direction of a building exclaiming the word ohm, ohm, ohm, which means sick. Now the nurses didn't feel that that was that odd because a lot of people in the community knew who they were and they knew what this word sick meant so they started to follow him and she said we never doubted that we should help them so we did follow. But then a man rose up out of the grass with a gun and within seconds 12 to 15 guerrillas had surrounded them with machine guns. She said as they marched them off no one spoke Vietnamese at that point. By the end of the internment both she and Bernhard did speak a little Vietnamese but these folks were having this really horrible argument between themselves and she guessed later when I talked to her last November that they were arguing whether or not to keep them. And let me show you, here's a timeframe or captivity just so you can see this woman was interned for almost four years in a row and you can see very briefly I'm gonna go through her story very quickly and from each of these areas. And if you notice one of the worst times that she had was that 529 days in Camp K77. She was in solitary confinement if you can believe that. Okay and then the other thing I wanted to show you is the proximity of their movements. You can see the blue line is where they were force marched on foot and put in several different camps and then the red lines where they were picked up by vehicles. They wound up up in the North Vietnamese area in three different camps. Now the Southern camps if you've read anything about POWs are much more open space in the jungles. You have for lack of a better word more of a sense of freedom than you do in what she called the facility prisons in the North. So she experienced seven different POW camps in her time. In the first 11 days, the five nurses were walked under guard only at night and at 3 a.m. in the morning they would stop for their portion of rice. And the groups that they were with at the time were Chebos which is a group of three guerrillas that surrounded the five nurses. The terrain became more impossible and Monica Sandals fell apart the first night. She didn't have shoes for the next four years. During this time they stopped at a jungle hotel where they were allowed to wash and eat what would be one of the last real meals they would have for a year. If you're talking to her as a prisoner of war she definitely remembered the foods and she could tell you the menu. She said it was banana blossoms with onions, salt and oil, watermelon and peanuts. It's the last real meal I ate for the next four years. She surprised her the most was when she was in the jungle she had had this kind of thought in her head after meeting many American military personnel at the small hospital she was working in. They talked about how this war was so uncontrolled and people just kind of wandering all over the place and one surprise here, one surprise there. And she said within that first week she discovered that it absolutely wasn't as haphazard as American soldiers had described her. She said everything was so well planned a military order was strictly followed and there was an obvious effort to maintain discipline among the guerrillas. It was definitely a shock to her and it was just she changed her mind right then about the war. She'd come kind of thinking as a neutral individual and yet she saw democracy. She actually told me this that I actually saw for the first time that democracy was being pushed out in this war and I had not known that before I got there. So she spends one year down in the jungle camps and she and Marie Louise were in this camp they just called it camp one for two weeks. The other three nurses, Bernhard, Rika and George were shipped to out of the Danang hospital were shipped to a smaller camp south and that's the Frank Antons camp. He wound up being a chief warrant officer at the end of the war and his book describes what the internment was like there. The nurses' legs and feet became infected on the first day of captivity from scratches and leeches and each began to exhibit the first signs of jungle fever. They soon learned medical assistance was given by a gorilla called an EC. The help was wholly inadequate and these supposed medics never had formal training. They used and reused their needles and had no real medications for treatment and instead used vials of unidentified oils and other quack remedies. When I asked Monica how she dealt with this medical nightmare with her knowledge of nursing, she said, I just forced myself to not pay attention to it. Otherwise I would have gone absolutely mad. It was in this camp that Monica said she understood the real meaning of hunger for the first time and she stated the word hunger conveys nothing to the horror of slowly starving to death. Now food dreams would become common during her internment and two in particular were recurring for her. A friend of her mother is Frau Gut and she laughed at this. She said, Mary, do you know what that translates into English as Mrs. Good? She said to have a dream about Mrs. Good and all this horror. She looks back and she says it's one of the more humorous things that I could think about. She said she laughed at the absurdity of the name, the situation, but Frau Gut would appear with her to her at night at the foot of the bed and Frau Gut would come with a package, a nice package of brown paper with strings on it and then she'd go through this elaborate thing and unwrap this package and there would be this beautiful cake. And the other dream she consistently had over the four years was that she would be in a long hallway being an interrogation hall and just one room after another of interrogators and she'd walk into every single room she walked into there'd be this interrogator sitting behind the desk. But on the desk in front of him wouldn't be papers, it would be a bowl with the most beautiful apricots she'd ever seen and the guy would always tell her no, you can't touch those. Over time though, she said, I stole anything I could lay my hands on because I refused to beg for food. And one night evoking certain death if she was caught she spent three hours on her belly inching toward a couple of hens she'd spied the day before that were laying outside eggs outside the coop where they were supposed to be. She stole two, two, there were six there and she figured I'll take two but not all six and she went back to the hut and Bernhard and her ate them raw shells and all they just ate the whole thing, they were that hungry. At camp one Marie Louise stopped eating and by the fourth day she was unable to stand. Monica was in rough shape herself trying to tolerate the excruciating pain in her pus filled legs and toes. She demanded a doctor for Marie Louise but it took too long before one was allowed to look at her and it was an easy anyway. Marie Louise died not long after a hallucination about Mrs. Ben the woman who was representing the national liberation front in the ongoing Paris peace talks. She was buried there in an unmarked grave. It was also in camp one that Monica changed her viewpoint about God. Each day she said the Lord's Prayer but after Marie Louise died she began thinking that of all that praying for her father to not bring him home what in the world good was it doing for me? Eventually she refused to repeat the lines of the Lord's Prayer forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. She said after she came home in 1973 it took her almost a decade before she would complete the prayer and it's an entirety. Now I asked her about Marie Louise and our meeting in November of 2012. Of all the subjects we discussed this was the only time that she cried. It was a soft cry and you could see the deep hurt in her eyes as she told me. When she and Bernhard returned to Germany in 1973 the first thing they both did was meet with the families of George Rika and Marie Louise. Marie Louise's family had hired a soothsayer in 1969 shortly after they learned of their daughter's disappearance and the soothsayer told them that they could feel two women together and that one of these women and this two women was for sure dead. The dead woman they told Marie Louise's family was Monica Schwinn. Marie Louise's family had believed until March of 1973 their daughter was alive and when Monica came into the room to talk to Marie Louise's family they shockingly exclaimed to her you aren't the one that's supposed to be here. No letters from any of the prisoners ever made it out of the camps and no one of the nurses' families were ever aware of their fates until they showed up. In Monica's case her relatives tried to persuade her brother to close her apartment and pack her belongings. Her brother stoutly refused the families and treaties believing that if anyone was coming home it was gonna be Monica. He paid the rent and cleaned the apartment until her return. She was forced March now by herself at gunpoint to the second camp now alone they placed her in the lead position and she wondered if she was being marched to living people or dead was she the last one left. The captors laughed as the jungle vegetation took its toll on her body and she did not realize at the time that she was shoved first as the bomb squad for hidden trap lines. She wrote at this period they placed me forward because after all I was only a woman. A woman was nothing. A woman was even less than a prisoner. A woman and a prisoner to boot possessed no rights whatsoever. We had the worst clothing and the worst lodging and to have touched me was to touch a creature without rights or honor so they never sexually abused me. There were two advantages though that she noted about being a woman. She said since I was a non entity I was assigned the most thick-witted interrogators you could imagine. And I was so insignificant on my release that the Vietnamese did not bother to search me thoroughly and the allied officials did not have me undergo a decompression interview. But later in her captivity in Hanoi she was left in her cell to die during allied bombings while all other prisoners were collected and removed. And during a typhoon she was left to drown in her cell. By the time she reached camp two exhaustion the death of the young nurse and malaria had overtaken her. And camp two was one of the Vietnamese moving camps in the southern portion of the country where American military personnel were placed. When she was put in a hut she lay down on the wood slats made for a bed curled up and stared at the wall. The American POWs watched knowing that when a man would stop eating and start sleeping constantly he was doomed to die within days. They all figured she was going next. Monica Delarius did not recall much about the next six or seven weeks where the other two nurses George and Rika dying. But after George and Rika died the American POWs built bamboo coffins for the two nurses and dug their burial trenches. Her eventual revival at this critical point was due to Bernhard Diels' efforts. He became obsessed with getting her to walk. One day he forced her to take two steps two inches long. Then three yards. Then three yards three times in the morning and two times in the afternoon. In two weeks he had her doing three deep knee bends and she walked 20 yards to the privy on her own. Dr. Harold Kushner an Army Medical Corps flight surgeon who was captured after his UH-1D helicopter crashed told Bernhard, don't be so tough on her man you might kill her. In the Hanoi Hilton Kushner is believed to have exhibited ambivalence toward the war when he made propaganda tapes. And Camp Two held some of the members of what became known as a peace committee at the Hanoi Hilton. As I spoke to Monica at her dining table in Germany I asked her about the American POWs and she replied, the Americans always treated us decently and kindly and when I and George and Rika were ill they washed our clothing and swept our hut and brought us food. They allowed me to bathe undisturbed and stood guard when I was at the river. Even under prison conditions they remained very thoughtful and considerate. After reading Frank Anton's book I realized that one man that she met in this camp was Bobby Garwood, the marine that became a collaborator with the North Vietnamese. He seemed Caucasian to Monica in many ways but acted like their captors and Garwood showed up at the camp immediately after Bernhard, George and Rika arrived and then came back again when Monica showed up. She remembered how she took an instant dislike to him but she couldn't tell why there was just something about him and she just couldn't figure out who this guy was in this savvy kind of jungle dress and he had the ability to squat like the Vietnamese which most Caucasians can't and he spoke Vietnamese fluently and then she said the second night he showed up in camp he was walking around with propaganda flyers and a bullhorn and he would like bullhorn messages to the prisoners. He attempted to exchange information between the Americans and their captors and then he tried to indoctrinate Monica she said she was really insulted. We continued the conversation about the Americans. She was a great cook too when I was there. This woman fed me German food for three days, the real thing. So now we're sitting there talking over her beer and her really good homemade bread and ham and at this point was the only time I really saw her get stern and then I thought more about it and I thought I wasn't really stern and that was what I'd call a wrathful calm and telling her stories she had up to this point held no anger for those who imprisoned her and she held no anger toward her interrogators but people like Garwood, she said you just don't do that what he did. It is unacceptable as a prisoner and then she recalled one other time of a Garwood-like situation. She was in the Hanoi Hilton and she was peeking out through the slacks in this door that was barring her way there. She said she saw a group of four or five men that seemed to dress better and they had an easier time of it at the camp and they looked fed, like normally fed and I told her she just described the Hanoi Khabis committee and she stopped and her eyes kind of went like this and she goes, man, you just don't do that. Just don't do it. She had her, that was one of her roles. So Bonnequin and Bernhard were told to pat quickly. They were being moved and then after two and a half days travel they arrived in what they called mountain camp and they remember little details like this because you had to hike up and down these steps all the time to collect wood. She said there were 87 steps in that camp and she said the other thing I remember is all the bamboo spikes that they had around. She said, Mary, I know how many bamboo spikes there were. There were 1,569 and the reason I know that is I was so bored and to exercise I would keep walking around and around and around in circles and she said, and then I thought for the heck of it she started to put a mark on every 10th, every 100th and every 500 spike just for something to do. This camp was a rest camp for a wounded Vietnamese and she told me that it seemed like they'd been forgotten by the world at this camp and it was cold. She said she'd never been that cold in her life and they didn't have clothing. One afternoon, near a water source she discovered a small shard of mirror and a piece of comb and decided to give them to Bernhard for a Christmas present. She hadn't seen her reflection at this point in about over a year and the temptation was too great and she decided to look into the mirror and she said, I saw an inhuman swollen face. I had two slits for eyes. The corners of my mouth were cut and sore. My eyebrows were almost non-existent. They were pale and sparse and she said, I thought I had some hair like I could feel hair on my head so I was thinking, well at least I still have some hair. She said the only thing that was there was a bunch of shiny skin and this little bit of fluff. She said, I took that mirror and just threw it away. She said, I was so horrified and she said it was the last time I saw my face until they repatriated me in 1973. And while she was there, she was able, she actually smuggled some things out and she brought out the camp regulations with her. She copied these while she was in the camp, Amy. And this is the actual facsimile. This is actually what she copied here and she said, there were a couple of things in her mind that she could do when she read this. There were incorrect grammatical English statements in it and she said, occasionally that would give her a little, like a little jolt of power because she realized these people weren't as smart. They didn't know English that well. So this is one of the things she brought out with her camp regulations there. They're the same regulations you see in the Hanoi Hilton that the American POWs were supposed to follow. The next phase of her captivity, she calls the Long March and when the two Germans were told they were being moved again to the North, Bernhard began to believe they were going to Hanoi to be released. And Monaco was extraordinarily skeptical of this. She was never that optimistic about them. She didn't, she said very, in the very first month of that captivity, she realized this wasn't a group of people you wanted to trust. You didn't want to be nice to them. You wanted to show strength. So she, Bernhard got very angry at her negativity, he called it. And so as their force marched up the Ho Chi Min trail, he stalked out at the front of the line ignoring her. And her physical weakness would often delay her by hours before reaching the camp at night. She was still surrounded by the three guards. And so every night they would come in and they'd wind up in these jungle flat jungle areas. And she said there'd be like 50 to 100 people in these camps and they would be everything from military personnel to just citizens heading north like this mass exodus north. She told me about Bernhard. He wasn't nice to me on that long walk and angry that I remain neutral on believing a potential release was going to occur. And her fever returned and she became much weaker again. She was vomiting constantly and began to exhibit signs of berry, berry. And literally translated berry, berry means week, week or I cannot, I cannot. And she said that is definitely how you feel. Says it's just unbelievably bad thing to have. So the EC, she said gave her some medicine. She said she found out later all it was was mentholated oil so it didn't do anything. Now during this part of internment she was put in a field hospital for a couple days. She had a fever of 104 and during her internment the highest fever she had was 107. She was barely able to stand on her own. And the first lieutenant that had been guarding her on the March North showed up in her room and threw a broom at her and pointed at her and told her sweep the floor. She said instead of a bang, I threw it back at him. I've scolded him in German for his bad manners. And he had been beating her when she was weak and had tried to pause on this force march north. She described the scene, this time I managed to make him furious. He was so angry he didn't know what to do. He pulled out his pistol and held it to my head. His fury made him shake. And she said strangely enough as we stood face to face I did not feel afraid. I did not let my eyes drop during the entire confrontation and he put his pistol back in his holster and then he beat me wherever he could reach. And she said the beating went on for 20 or 30 minutes. When the scene was over Bernhard who was in the same space and watched the confrontation scolded her in German for not being nicer to the Vietnamese and accused her of hurting her chances for release. Monica now believed the Vietnamese had managed to drive us apart and it was exactly what they would have wanted. So they finally crossed the 17th parallel and she said she started to do a personal mantra to keep herself going. And she would repeat this over and over to herself. And she says even if you have to crawl home on all fours don't let anyone see how sick you feel. Every minute you use up and walking every hour you take the rest every day that you make them wait for you to get stronger is a minute or an hour or a day less of freedom. So when they crossed the 17th parallel Bernhard was again elated and he told her we made it and in just a few days we're gonna be free I can feel it. And she thought to herself are you quite sure? Their three guards had begun to act strangely again and somehow crossing into that snowman's land I had changed them and they began to make the prisoners travel again at night and the grilled doctor that was with him at that time told him absolutely do not speak any English. And eventually the group walked out of the jungle and the Germans were thrown into the back of a blacked out ambulance. And she picks up her story this way. I began to hear the noises of the city and there was a strong thunderstorm that at first I thought was bombing. And when the ambulance stopped and we were shoved out there were many men wearing raincoats and helmets and holding their guns at our backs they forced us to walk along a huge elongated prison building into a set of small square stone buildings. Someone pushed me from the rear and I staggered in a terrible sound the noise of iron grating on iron as the gate closed. Said I stood and stared at the walls of the box they had thrown me into. One step from the door serving as a cot were two slats of wood and this woman is only just to tell you how small the space was. She had to curl up to lay down in this box and she's only four feet eight inches tall. So she was in a sweat box. She didn't know that the categories of a lot of this stuff until I talked to her having read military stories about these areas so she was thrown into a sweat box. She said there was one light bulb hanging out of the thing. There was a bucket for waste and there was a loud speaker that every single day went on three or four times a day with some really mundane stuff about Marxism or being a good prisoner. So then she heard Bernhard cry out. She heard Bernhard's doors. He was I think two cells down from her or two boxes down but she could hear him cry out and she said I remembered thinking so it was all for nothing. They were deceiving you. So I asked her about Bernhard deal and she had me turn off the recorder looked me square in the eye and asked me what do you think of him? I paused because I did not want to upset her. I did not know if she viewed him as a savior and protector in their internment and did not want to ruin any emotional foundation she had drawn from being with him for three and a half years. So I decided to relate my opinion and I told her this. I must tell you in reading both your stories I came away not liking this man. It is not what he did. It was what he wasn't doing at the most critical times. I told her I thought he was arrogant and self-centered. I sensed that he supported some of the ideology of the Viet Cong in an effort to appease them so we would not be hurt. The two differed markedly in their view of their enemy and her view was that you needed to show the Vietnamese strength that she and Bernhard needed to be viewed as a team and that kindness or docility were only perceived as weakness and that he had other ideas and she looked at me and she says how did you figure that out? Cause she doesn't write it in the book. This was all off the record. I said, well it's what he's not doing. Not what he did, what he's not doing. So I also asked her about interrogations at this point because she went through, the longest interrogation she went through was seven days straight, but she was interrogated consistently throughout the internment from the very beginning. Even on that first night they were put in a room with a bunch of Vietnamese. She said that was the most absurd interrogation that she went through in the next four years. They never got past trying to pronounce their German names and she said the captors were like slapping there, rolling on the ground and slapping their hips at the sounds of these German names. And she said that was the first interrogation she went through. But I asked her about the rest of them and she told me this. She said they were pretty ludicrous trying to convince a German psychiatric nurse that Marxism was a good thing. She said I decided a long time ago in studying psychology and my cars work at school and most of us have been to graduate school like she has of studied Marx at some point. And she said I thought even when I was a young woman that his theories made no practical sense that he was, she called him a psychotic and then he constantly contradicted himself. So she said no matter how often they would bring this stuff up to me I would just think about how psychotic this man was and there's no way I'm following this. So no matter how many times you say it I'm not gonna pick this up. So after the two Germans were prodded from the ambulance and put in their cells Bernhard screamed at the top of his lungs. She said it was for several hours before he quieted down and he kept banging on the door demanding to be let out. Monica sat in her cement box on the wooden cot and she curled up and faced the wall. She said I cried and cried and cried and cried and cried. I could not stop crying for four days but after that I was ready to carry on. I didn't cry again in the rest of my years of internment. She said I figured at that point I sat up and I said no matter how long I was here I refused to die and anything I can do physically and mentally to survive I will do it. So this is the time she's in solitary for 529 consecutive days. She was also interrogated here they brought they used to bring in occasionally individuals that spoke German and she said this was another strange interrogation because these two guys had Saxon accents and she said they walked in the room it was like a bad James Bond film carrying it was so bizarre in this environment she'd been in this box with their black briefcases and their skinny black ties in their black suits. And of course they tried to indoctrinate her too she said she thought they were probably East Germans that they had brought in there trying to tell her that she should kind of think more like a Marxist and so forth. She went on her first hunger strike here and demanded that she be able to see Bernhard occasionally. Now Bernhard never asked to see her again after this long march and what she got out of this hunger strike she did get a little bit of paper. She got a little better food and she got to see him twice that year otherwise she probably would have never seen him until they were let out later on. So most prisoners rely on their minds liberations from their situations of internment and her release was to build dream houses in her head and she would draw out the architectural plans remember her brother was an architect and she used to when she would write these plans she would think of like what her brother would tell her was right or wrong with them structurally and so she would go through all that and that would take her days and then she'd sit down and think in her head she'd build the edifices and then the finished work and she would spend hours concocting very elaborate buildings and she said her favorite ones to try to build in her head were hotels because there were so many rooms and then each room she would do mental shopping trips all around the world for the perfect vase or the perfect painting and she said it went on for over a year where she did that. Now also I call this slide humanity in hell because a lot of times when you read these stories at some point the internee will run across one of their captors that has slightly slightly modifies their approach to the prisoners so while she was at K-77 one guard she called Father Hundred and she said he was extremely old. Notice she was very adept when she was in the jungle camp she would actually make birds come to her she's got hours to kill and she would sit outside and she'd get birds to come to her so he captured a bird for her and put in a little bamboo cage and brought it to her hut and she said I looked at it for about three minutes and there was this bird flapping its wings and she said my God I'm looking at myself in jail and she let the bird go she just couldn't stand to watch it. She said one evening she was sitting on her bunk and she heard this cat and at first she thought did I hear him meow and there was this little she said this kitten was really undersized somehow it found its way like in under her bunk and she picked it up and some of her rice portions she started to hide it in her bed of course the kitten wouldn't go anywhere it was so little and she would chew up part of her rice portions she started to feed it now Father Hundred saw it one afternoon and he never reported the infraction to the other guards so the cat was with her there for a little while and later when she went on her second hunger strike for 20 days at Mountain Village the Vietnamese brought her the kitten to induce her to eat and she used him later in her imprisonment to transport cargoes she would tie little cargoes on him and he would go up out of the windows and walk along the walls and the Americans she would send cargoes to the Americans with this cat and then he was with her until her release at the Hanoi Hilton and she wrote a note by the end of her internment she spoke fluent English and she wrote a note in English to the camp commandant requesting this cat go home with her well they laughed at her and said no way so he was around off and on for the last two years of her internment so while at Mountain Village and later at the Hanoi Hilton she asked for something to do and suggested that she could sew and she said the Vietnamese when I asked him that she said he literally snorted and he goes you Western women you don't know how to sew all you do is go to the beauty parlor and watch TV and she goes she's kind of going what? you know where did you get that from? she said so I kept pestering them and a few days later they finally threw some well worn enlisted army uniforms and a heap on the floor for repair and she goes you know what? I'm going to show you we Western women know a heck of a lot more than you let on that we do and so they'd given her green thread to fix these uniforms and she was wearing red prison pajamas and she took the hem out she ripped off the bottom of her pajamas and she actually separated if you look at most materials you can separate the threads out if you're very careful so she pulled out red threads and so she had double threads she had red thread and green thread and she said I got really fancy and I did a double blind stitch and there was a beautiful red pattern on the back that they couldn't see on the front where the green was she said they took those away and she said I know I impressed them though they never told me she said from that point on all I got were high ranking officers uniforms to men so sewing was one of the ways one of the things they let her do for periods of the day so she vividly remembers one of the American men in this camp she actually tossed this fellow banana and some food they put him on hunger strikes and this was Philip Manhard he was the highest ranking U.S. political official to be interned during the Vietnam War and she eventually was given time to go out in what they called the yard by herself she was never with anyone and she could kind of catch glimpses of this guy she said I had the most romantic visions of this guy because I heard him singing American show tunes and out of here in Whistlin and I was thinking handsome man she said of course I looked through and here it's this skeleton out there shavin' but anyway Manhard through cargoes knew who she was and he would actually through his cargoes statements that he heard in interrogations that the Vietnamese told him he could actually decide they were false and he would kind of figure out what was really going on on the outside world and he used to send cargoes around to the prisoners and Monica was one of them to let him know what the news was from the outside world from these interrogations so one time all the Americans knew birthdays she memorized just like most Vietnam POWs she memorized lists of men's names and dates and who they were when they were captive who was dead and so forth so she had all these mental lists and so this man knew who her birthday was and one afternoon a cargo came through through some food and he wrote this point for her on this day I send a bunch of rosers gathered from my garden of best wishes in the center there's a big carnation chosen by my heart's imagination never think you are alone and she still has this note with her it's one of the things she brought out now she still loves roses and her 40th remembrance of being out of captivity just occurred on March 5th and the translator and I sent her two dozen roses on that day she really loves flowers actually in her kitchen she sits and looks out she has a rose garden right out on her patio so the Hanoi Hilton's her last internment camp it was evident that something was going on because the internees began to receive more food and they were allowed to clean themselves in their clothing after they arrived here and a rumor was they were being fattened up for release so Monica was eager to take her notes and last set of pajamas out with her and she planned her last few minutes very carefully realizing she would go through interrogation checks before she went out so she said she had two sets of things she had a satchel with her and she kept thinking you know they're gonna confiscate this stuff from me so she put the most important thing she wanted to come with her in her satchel and she rolled up a series of those camp regulations she went around and tore some off the walls and she rolled them up and she said I held them like they were the most important thing I had and so when I went through the first interrogation of course that's what they were interested in she's like no, no I want to take these I want to take these so they took them from her and they didn't look in her satchel cause they were distracted and she said I thought I got away from I thought I was thinking all right I got away with this but as she's leaving a second set of guards appear for a second interrogation and review of materials that these prisoners are holding and she goes what am I gonna do now and she said one of the Americans yelled one of the American internees they're all out in the yard at this time yells hey the Germans are coming like this and she goes I don't know what made me do it but I just took off headed out the door and ran down the hall and there was the German delegation so she got her things to come out now Bernhard on the other hand Ben Bernhard comes with his has his stuff in his hands like walking out like he's at the normal airport and of course the guard's stopping and they tell him you're not taking that stuff with you Bernhard actually had a very good diary that he kept and so they confiscated the materials and she said I could hear him I was like down the hall I was going home and she said I could hear him yelling at the guards again setting up this big stink and the guard says if you don't shut up you're not going today and so one of the American prisoners standing in the yard goes I don't know about you but if you don't want that scene on the plane I'll sure take your place and so she said he kind of sulked off and left but he didn't get to take any of his stuff out so she was repatriated in March 5th of 1973 she said she remembers mostly about the repatriation was her first bath she sat in the bathtub for four hours and the German delegation had told were told to be on suicide watch for the prisoners she said they kept coming in the bathroom checking on me thinking that I'd done something myself and she said I just like leave me alone this bath is so amazing so for four hours she sat in her bath so when she returned to Leibach she continued pediatric psychiatric nursing but her position sometimes meant she had to watch children die and she said it was just too much so she went back to school and became a maternity ward nurse and she was a nurse for over 500 children in her city she said she still sees a lot of those she said that's a nice memory to help deliver those so while I was there I asked her if I could see some of her artifacts it took her three days to trust me and so on the third day when I got there she had her pajamas and so forth with her and she had a lot of photography the last slide you saw were some of the photographs of her coming out and what's interesting about this uniform I said what's that white block on the lapel of that uniform she said well I was a woman so they told me to sew this thing over it cause I didn't get a number I didn't mean anything I didn't get a number now the other thing I was looking at this and I said what's that these pajamas see how they look like they got a permanent crease in them she said you would do anything in camp to make yourself feel better and she said I thought it would look more professional if I had a crease down the center of my pajamas so I hand stitched this crease in here and she says you wouldn't believe the ribbon I used to get from the military officers like what are you doing there I'd like my pajamas to kind of look that good now the other thing about these pajamas though when you're actually holding them she also tried to bleach these out that's a bleached that's bleached she bleached and bleached these things trying to get them back to about the color of that patch over there so when you're close up to them you can tell there are blood stains and other marks in the material and trying to get them back to that original color she just couldn't do it so I've never seen cloth that was so deeply and permanently turned to color from living and suffering and I gotta tell ya that was probably the most emotional moment I had talking to this woman looking at this finding that she lived in those okay so that's Monica Schwinn's story she also refuses I've asked her to come here before questions at the end I've asked her would you please come and speak to us and she said absolutely not and she meant it so she said but you can tell my story all you want Amy can you skip for, oh thanks Amy so now I'm gonna tell you a few short stories and this is Maria Bachcareva who fought in World War I she was a warrior actually she was a field combat eventually she became an officer but she was a listed personnel in the beginning and so we're moving back in time to World War I and then I'm gonna move forward and just give you some examples from World War II now Bachcareva was known as Yashka by her man and the name Yashka comes from Egyptian literature and this woman if there is a gypsy out there she was truly it she was born in Russia in Siberia to an alcoholic abusive father they were serfs right around the end of the century 1880s 1890s so you can imagine the tough situation she was in she married two men the first one around 15 or 16 years old who were also both abusive and the first husband tried to hang her one evening and only because of the help of neighbors did she get down from that alive she married the second husband who was a con man and he was sent to a gulag and she followed him to stay with him World War I broke out and a very interesting story she wrote a letter directly to the czar she wanted to join the army and women of course at the time weren't allowed to join the military so he wrote her back and said sure go into it I'd like you go ahead and this is the book if any of you are interested in a good read this is her personal narrative it's a really remarkable life and author Isaac Donald Vine she told this story to him in the United States when she came here for a little while in 1919 it's worth a look so just to tell you what this lady was like on the battlefield upon entering the army she established what she noted was proper relations with the men and this plays out a little more in her story they came to respect her and as the war intensified her name was well known throughout the front for bravery, hard work and battlefield leadership now remember this is trench warfare she's on the Russian front so during her first battle she slipped into no man's land and she brought back dozens of wounded men it was so dangerous the men watching her she was given a medal for bravery next she was wounded in the leg and after recuperating from that she went back into battle in August was wounded in the hand and arm was put up for another medal but this time she was denied and you'll find most of these women in their careers don't receive their medals until many decades later posthumously in this case on the reports for her medals they actually say you can't have that medal because you're a woman so they give her two grades less or whatever so that's her first denial of a medal and after recuperating and going back again she gets removed to the rear for recuperation she's bored and she asks for something to do so they put her in charge of 12 stretcher bearers and she works day and night for two weeks she's still sick and she's got some wounds she's got to care for she carries 500 corpses off the battlefield she's awarded another medal and she's promoted a corporal she volunteered to lead a 30-man scouting team and during one of her patrols she bayoneted a German it's one of the first times she's in hand-to-hand combat her story tell you some of that her right leg was shattered next by a bullet and three months later once again on the front she was paralyzed by a piece of shrapnel in the base of spine she goes back off the field and she's recuperating for six months and miraculously this woman actually comes out of this and she learns to walk again she comes back to the front and she's captured with 500 soldiers and this is her story and it was a reward worth having what did I care for a wound in the spine and four months paralysis if this was the return that I received from my sacrifice trenches filled with bloody corpses held no horror for me then no man's land seemed quite an attractive place in which to spend a day with a bleeding leg the screech of shells and the whistle of bullets presented themselves like music to my imagination ah, life was not so bleak and meaningless after all it had its moments of bliss that compensated for years of torment and misery the commander had in his order of the day stated the fact of my return and promotion he furnished me with an orderly to show me the way to the trenches again I was hailed by everybody as I emerged from the dugout of the commander of the company who had placed me in charge of a platoon of 70 men in this capacity I had to keep an inventory of the supplies and equipment of my men a soldier acting as clerk under my instructions our positions were on the bank of the Steyr which is very narrow and shallow at that point on the opposite bank were the German trenches several hundred feet from us was a bridge across the stream which had been left intact by both sides at our end of it we maintained a post while the enemy kept a similar watch at the opposite end our line was very uneven owing to the irregularity of the river's course the Germans were very persistent in mind-throwing however the mines travel so slowly that we could take cover before they fell on our side my company occupied a position close to the enemy's first line I had not spent a month in the trenches when a local battle occurred which resulted in my capture by the Germans the latter had continued their mind-throwing operations for a period of about twelve days so regularly that we grew accustomed to them and were not expecting an attack besides it was past the time of year for active fighting and the cold was intense one morning about six o'clock when we had turned in for our daily sleep we were suddenly awakened by a tremendous hurrah we nervously seized our rifles and peeped through the through the loopholes great heavens there within a hundred feet of us in front and in the rear the Germans were crushing the Steyr before we had time to organize resistance they were upon us capturing five hundred of our men I was among the number we were brought before the German staff for examination every one of us was tormented with questions intended to extract valuable military information threats were bestowed on those who refused to disclose anything some cowards among us especially those of non-russian stock gave away important facts as the examination was proceeding our artillery on the other side opened up a violent bombardment of the German defenses it was evident that the German commander had not many reserves as he made frantic appeals by telephone for support it required a considerable force to keep guard over us and even larger force to take us to the rear as the enemy expected a Russian attack at any moment it was decided not to remove us until help arrived so I'm a German prisoner I thought how very unexpected there is still hope that our comrades on the other side will come to our rescue only every minute is precious they must hurry or we are lost now my turn is coming what shall I tell them I must deny being a soldier and invent some kind of a story I am a woman and not a soldier I announced as soon as I was called are you of noble blood? I was asked yes I answered promptly decided to claim that I was a Red Cross nurse dressed in men's uniform in order to pay a visit to my husband an officer in the frontline trenches have you many women fighting in the ranks was the next question I don't know I told you that I was not a soldier what are you doing in the trenches then? I came to see my husband who was an officer of the regiment why did you shoot then? the soldiers tell me that you shot at them I did it to defend myself I was afraid to be captured I served as a Red Cross nurse in the rear hospital and came over to the fighting line for a visit the Russian fire was growing hotter every minute some of our shells wounded not only enemy soldiers but several of the captives it was past noon but the Germans were too nervous to eat their lunch the expected reserves were not forthcoming and there was every sign of a fierce counterattack by our troops at two o'clock our soldiers went over the top and started for the German positions the enemy commander decided to retreat with his batch of prisoners to the second line rather than defend the front trenches it was a critical moment as we were lined up the hurrah of our comrades reached us it stimulated us to a spontaneous decision we threw ourselves five hundred strong at our captors rested many of the rifles and bayonets and engaged in a ferocious hand-to-hand combat just as our men rushed through the torn wire entanglements into the trenches the confusion was indescribable the killing merciless I grasped five hand grenades that lay near me and threw them at a group of about ten Germans but they must have all been killed our entire line across the river was advancing at the same time the first German line was occupied by our troops both banks of the Steyr were then in our hands thus ended my captivity I was in German hands for a period of only eight hours and amply avenged even this brief stay there was great activity in our ranks for a couple of days we fortified the Nuluan positions and prepared for another attack two days later we received the signal to advance the woman has a remarkable combat so that's where the eight hours in the title of my book comes from that's the eight hours of capture what's interesting about Bajkareva is she eventually got involved with suffragettes which is a big thing in this era the end of World War I and they became especially enamored with her because she's basically known for what's called the Russian women's battalions of death and she developed these battalions after the Trotskyites took over and thought she can embarrass the men back into the fight she's watching her really beloved army fall apart and so these four women became instrumental in her life there are suffragists, socialites and journalists and Bessie Beatty writing for the San Francisco Bulletin used the battalions as an example of women's capabilities as warriors and she wrote women can fight women have the courage, the endurance and even the strength for fighting and Russians have demonstrated that if it is necessary all the other women in the world can demonstrate it now the other hand Florence Farmboro went to the trenches just like Bessie Beatty did to write some of this up and she was a nurse for a while a British nurse she wrote this about the women's battalions many of them painted and powdered had joined the battalions as a romantic and exciting venture but Bajkareva loudly condemned their behavior and demanded iron discipline and the two thousand that applied slowly dwindled the two hundred fifty and it was recorded they did go into the attack they did go over the top but not all of them some remained in the trenches fainting and hysterical others ran or crawled back to the rear in fact Bajkareva's battalions secured three trenches and held them in regards to her iron discipline and observing one of her women having sexual relations with a soldier in the field she bandated the couple on the spot for not obeying regulations so she spent the next several months trying to connect with the whites if you know the history of Russia the whites are the are the group that are going against the Trotskyites and so she's considered an enemy of the state by this time and so she runs the front front in the sky she evades capture by the reds and was twice recognized and escaped two more captures and then through several transfers and links to the suffer jets she fled back to the u.s. she met president wilson and talk to him about supporting the white army and he agreed to do that and then the suffer jets center over to england and she met uh... a king in england and he said the same thing that he would support uh... what she was doing so she returned to russia and she found uh... white admiral alexander colchak and he's he put her in charge of developing a uh... nursing uh... women's nursing detachment and later that year she was captured again by red troops uh... she sent to cyber area she was interrogated for months and uh... executed and this is the execution notice for her so she died in nineteen twenty let's move on to world war two and this is uh... keeping a little bit with the russian theme this is pilot anna tim o'feeva i grow up now during her in nineteen thirties when she was a young adult uh... the russians had a lot of youth corps and she was a caulk her for the moscow subway system she helped build a moscow subways so at the end of these fourteen sixteen-hour days a lot of the youth in the country were allowed to go to camps and she she went to flying camp she was very interested in flying and so uh... she was very good pilot kind of right off and uh... they actually moved her forward into the one hundred thirty detached aviation division once the world war two started so the other story tied to her are a group of women there are thousands of these women it's not just a couple there were four or five thousand women that flew for russia during world war two and i just want to tell you a little bit about them the germans called him the night witches and in russia they were belovedly called the red demons and stallants falcons and these were the three groups they were signed the five eighty six five eighty seven and five eighty eight and just a little bit so you know what kind of planes uh... these women were flying so five eighty sevens uh... three crew petla petlakov uh... they were so effective they were actually given the award of guards here's the uh... these guys of the five eighty eight and i want you to look at i put this up here just so you could see these decrepit planes for gosh sakes are made out of material and wood uh... but you see up here all the words here here here are the soviet union the highest award you can read receiving the soviet union they were very effective night bombing group uh... here's a few of the women now one in the center uh... that's a number of effective bombing sorties she had in two years of war and then the five eighty six these were the hot shots uh... these women flew the yak one uh... which was a fighter plane they did dog fights and everything else and the woman on the left liliya let back if you're interested in russian history uh... she's an interesting care character to look at she's very loved in russia she was called the white rows of russia because we're beautiful blonde hair and she stitched white roses on the cuffs of her flying jacket and put roses on her cockpit for the number of kills she had now these are the planes that uh... i want to call her tim of fiva that's her married name that uh... i grow up flu just to show you she's the first woman in the military to fly the stermovic aisle two narratives at the bottom um... she was confused a lot she'd walk into camp and they'd date assume of course that she was a man and they'd say well you're not an aviator you're an aviatrix she'd go yes sir reporting for duty uh... they said she had a natural flaring talent for flying they recognized that very quickly she does a lot of flying she shot down twice the first time by mesher schmitz and she survived severe burns she gets back to her regiment she flies out again on another sortie and uh... she gets shot down again only this time she has a passenger he's a general russian general and they wind up hiking this is in february in cyber in the cyber area region so you can imagine the cold they hiked back in and she actually reconnects with the regiment after frostbiting both her feet one time right before she gets captured they started to send allied regiments out as they start to uncover the death camps in in germany and poland and so her regiment was sent out to my dana death camp and i put this picture up here she describes how she felt like going through these uh... buildings and that's a russian soldier right there walking amongst uh... women's purses and children's shoes