STATEMENT OF MAURICE MAZER
former WWII Prisoner of War in Japan
Boca Raton, FL
Good morning, Senator Hatch. My name is Maurice Mazer. I am one of the survivors of the Bataan Death March and forty two months imprisonment in various camps, both in the Philippines and Japan. I was proud to serve as the National Commander of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor for 1952 and 1953. I thank you for holding this hearing on our behalf today, to call attention to those who served in the Pacific during WWII and were captured by the Japanese. We became slave laborers of private Japanese companies after our capture and suffered unspeakable torture under our captors. Our government has never recognized our sacrifice and the Japanese companies who enslaved us have never compensated us. Further, we have never been compensated by our government and have not received an apology from anyone. We deserve closure.
I was imprisoned in Hanawa camp in Japan. Each morning the Japanese soldiers turned me and my fellow prisoners of war over to the guards for Mitsubishi mining, a private company which enslaved us for its own profit and forced us to labor in its copper mines and smelter mines. I was beaten unmercifully by the Mitsubishi guards and had my back broken in he mines when one of the guards ran a car carrying the mine operative into me, slamming me against the wall of the mine. Today I suffer numerous health problems directly attributed to the time I spent as a slave laborer. It is absolutely unconscionable that our government has awarded reparations to Japanese American citizens who were in the United States relocation camps during WWII, many of whom were proven to be spies and Japanese sympathizers, and has ignored the plight of its military men and women who were enslaved by the Japanese. It is incomprehensible to me that our Justice Department has taken a position against our American prisoners of war who became slave laborers at the hands of private Japanese companies during the war. At the same time this Justice Department made a conscious decision not to interfere with claims pending on behalf of Holocaust slave labor victims. Those of us interned by Mitsubishi, Mitusi, Nippon, Ishihara Sangyo and many other Japanese companies suffered our own Holocaust and this have never been recognized. This terrible injustice needs to be rectified as soon as possible. We who are the victims are old and are dying off. We have waited too long for our private hell to end. It is time for closure.
Thank you again for having this hearing. I appreciate your efforts to rectify the injustices that I and those I was imprisoned with had to endure. I hope that through your efforts me and those I was enslaved with will find our peace.