s. Towards the end of the war, the Japanese threatened a reprisal if this area was bombed or attacked.
Barbed wire and barrier walls with electrified wires surrounded the camp. There were also guard towers that surrounded the perimeters. Every day, the internees woke up to starvation, guard dogs, prisoner badges and numbers, daily roll calls, bayonet drills, bed bugs, horrible sanitation, and flies.
The climate was at times a major problem for the internees. It was nice in the spring and fall. The summer heat began in May and became extremely hot in August. There was also a rainy season that began in August, which included substantial rains. These rains, though, sometimes hurt the environment and the architecture. Occasionally, roads were flooded and walls collapsed. The architecture at this time in China did not fulfill requirements for dreadful rains, so leaking sometimes occurred in the buildings. The winters in this area were dry and cold towards December, January, and February and there was little in the way of heating the cramped quarters. The weather started to warm up in March and the summer heat was usually humid.
In order to survive, the internees knew that they all had to work together. They created kitchens and a hospital, started a library, and educated their children without desks, chairs, or a classroom and with few books. Since the internment camp was in squalid conditions, people from all walks of life came together to peel potatoes, stoke the ovens, clean the latrines, and perform other repetitive and boring tasks. All of these tasks were necessary for survival, though. Latrines had to be cleaned to keep the sanitation at a good level and some internees had to peel potatoes to make dinner for hundreds of people at a time. Sometimes, the Japanese even had the internees dig graves for the dead or living. In these cases, the dead were never recorded.
By the time the Japanese herded the allied civilians to the camp, the former Shadyside Hospital had been gutted and looted, and supplies had been taken. 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