"One day Pinatubo asked Maria Rosa if she wanted to join the Huk. She was glad to be offered a chance to fight back against the Japanese. After joining, she was assigned to carry messages and collect food, medicine, and clothing from people sympathetic to the Huk guerrillas.
Once, while on her way to collect medicine and deliver a message, Maria Rosa saw some Japanese soldiers a long way off. She quickly ate the message. The soldiers suspected nothing and let her pass. But Maria Rosa knew she’d had a close call. Those suspected of working with the Huk were always taken to the local Japanese garrison, where they were tortured for information before being killed. So the Huk held their meetings in different neighborhoods in order to avoid detection. And as Maria Rosa went from village to village for the Huk, she was careful to never disclose her real identity: her code name was Bayang.
Maria Rosa’s work gave her a deep sense of purpose. Yet she was continually haunted by the memory of the rapes, especially when she sang the following lines of a song with her comrades:
They should be vanquished, the fascist Japanese,
The scourge of our race.
They seized our possessions and raped our women.
After singing those words, Maria Rosa would always whisper to herself, 'I am one of those women.'"
Excerpt from "Maria Rosa Henson: Rape Survivor" from Women Heroes of World War II: The Pacific Theater.
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