n. At first, the internees knew that they needed to create a hospital as their main advantage for survival. They knew that a critical part of survival was to adapt a medical center for the sick and incapacitated. Medics and volunteers set up a laboratory and hospital in just a few days using broken medical equipment. This possibly saved the lives of hundreds of internees. At one point, the doctors in the internment camp sent a list of drugs they needed to the Japanese. The doctors received only a few drugs. Later on, the Swiss got a hold of this list and brought the drugs and some food into the hospital. If internees got badly injured or terribly sick, they could be sent to an outside hospital that was very difficult to get to and expensive.
At Weihsien, there were more housing units than most other Japanese internment camps. Weihsien housed approximately eighteen hundred people at a time and each person was allowed to have around four to five square feet of space. Women and men were separated on different sides of the buildings; women on one side and men on the other. The internees were placed in the basements of rooms of the hospital, school buildings, and previous Chinese dormitories. Family housing was set up in compounds, with long rows of rooms that usually held a two to four people each. The rooms were approximately nine by twelve feet and were crammed. In the course of finding suitable housing, some internees were placed into classrooms for their sleeping needs. When placed in the classrooms, the number of people could range from around ten to thirty people. These classrooms had no privacy and were extremely overcrowded. Some people had to sleep on the floors. Some lucky people were able to bring cots to sleep on. Others slept on tables, chairs, and the occasional bed. These living situations made it hard to keep warm in the winters and when the summers came, it became too hot for normal comfort.
There were twenty-three toilets for eighteen hundred people and the lines became extremely long in the morning. The toilets never flushed since there was a limited water supply. Empty cans were used to flush the toilets because the cesspools were always clogged. The Japanese supplied no toilet paper, causing contamination, disease, and a bad stench.
There were barely any full-sized bathrooms. There were four bathing areas that had a scarce source of water. Most of the internees used buckets to wash themselves and to keep themselves clean. One shower for the men and one shower for the women were open, each with many shower heads. Also, there was a limited amount of water in the showers. Because of this, women were allowed to shower only three times a week, though men were allowed to shower daily. For laundry, there were basins and pails in the hospital basement and some other buildings.
Food and dining areas
There were three dining areas that had kitchens. At first, there were twelve refrigerators, but they were eventually taken by the Japanese for their personal use. Internees were sent meat from an army slaughterhouse; it was brought through the compound by train. This meat was unrefrigerated and many times kept uncovered. The only equipment left over or given to the internees was two large frying pans, two copper pots, some tin pails, a dozen knives and a couple of bowls. Most of the other remaining kitchen equipment was items that the internees were allowed to bring with them into the camp.
Chinese farmers who lived outside the compound risked their lives to smuggle food over the walls to the prisoners. The Chinese farmers also smuggled news and messages into the camp for the internees to know what was going on outside the camp. At one point, Chinese Nationalist Party guerrillas even helped two internee men, Arthur Hummel, Jr., and Laurance Tipton, escape from the camp. These escapees lived with the guerrillas until the end of the war.
On August 17, 1945, two days after the official Japanese surrender to the Allies, a small rescue team parachuted from an American B24 Bomber. The team included six Americans (Major Stan