The Long March of Time

Being bar mitzvahed circled the old sergeant back to the heritage he concealed from his Japanese captors more than six decades ago after seeing other Jews beaten by guards who sympathized with the Nazis. It is a faith he never really reembraced until now.

Tenney was 21 in April 1942 when approximately 12,000 U.S. soldiers and 63,000 Filipino soldiers surrendered on the Philippines' Bataan Peninsula. The next month, Allied forces also surrendered the Filipino island of Corregidor.

Guards forcibly marched the prisoners through tropical heat with little or no food and water in one of the most brutal episodes in the annals of the war. Tenney said his march lasted 12 days and covered 68 miles, while other survivors have testified at war crimes trials about marches of four days to two weeks, depending on where they were captured. Survivors have recounted witnessing disembowelments and rapes, guards cutting the throats of rows of marchers, and prisoners being beaten with rifle butts simply because they fell from exhaustion. Thousands died along the way, victims of beheadings and bayonet thrusts, as well as rampant malaria and dysentery.

Tenney, who barely escaped death when a guard on horseback slashed his back with a sword, said he survived by focusing on what he remembers as "crazy goals." Make it to that herd of caribous way off in the distance. Then to the mango grove. Then to the bend in the road.

"Nothing would stop me," Tenney recalled. "Stopping meant dying."

Surviving the death march meant that Tenney was alive to suffer for more than 30 days on one of the fetid "hell ships" that transported prisoners to camps in Japan, where he said he was enslaved for nearly three years in a coal mine owned by the Japanese company Mitsui. (Japanese companies have argued that they were exempted from survivor lawsuits by peace accords that ended the war.)

When Tenney was liberated at the end of the war, he was 98 pounds, half his normal weight. His wife, thinking he'd died, had married another man, and her union with Tenney was annulled. He eventually married again, but by 1959 he had divorced and moved on to California, where he was lonely and looking for a new life.

As in Bataan, he set a goal: He would meet 90 people whom he could invite to lunch or dinner in 90 days. He made it all the way to 90, but well before he did, he fell for a divorcee named Betty Levi -- No. 12 or 13, best he can recall. She became his wife, and is still married to him today at the age of 89.

In 1968, Ed Levi, one of Tenney's stepsons, set in motion a process of healing. He asked if the family could host an exchange student for the weekend. There was one thing, though, that Ed was nervous to reveal: The young man, a 20-year-old college student named Toru Tasaka, was Japanese.

"He wasn't sure how I'd take it," said Tenney, who now seems as comfortable talking about his war experiences as he does about doing magic tricks and playing drums in his senior-center band.

Decades ago, Tenney recalled, he was "angry and bitter," and almost never talked about being a prisoner of war. Tasaka was equally ill at ease, so rattled on learning that Tenney had been a prisoner of war that he declared, "I won't be able to tell mama-san." But he stayed for the summer, inspiring his host father to reconcile old wounds.

After returning to Japan, Tasaka invited the Tenneys to attend his wedding there in the early 1980s. It was Tenney's first trip to the island since the war. He and his wife had such fun that they joined the newlyweds for their honeymoon -- a tour of the country.