A Pinoy @ The Movies : Quezon's Game

I can't recall where I read about this story of humanity: the Philippines was able to bring in Jews from Europe giving them a safe haven and ensuring their survival from Hitler's diabolical purge. Surely, I didn't read this from Philippine history books or heard it from history classes at school. Or maybe my own school teachers didn't even know about this. (Sadly, the Philippine Department of Education lacks the competence to include regional and local history to its lessons at school.) Or maybe I read about it when Schindler's List was shown in local theaters years ago when someone tried to make the local connection.

The movie Quezon's Game is a story of how a Philippine president successfully brought to the Philippines more than a thousand Jews from Germany, saving them from oppression and execution. His name was Manuel L. Quezon, the president during the  Philippine Commonwealth from 1935 until 1944 when he died in the US from tuberculosis.

From 1938 until 1941, Quezon, with the help of Paul McNutt, then high commissioner to the Philippines and, would you believe, Dwight D. Eisenhower, then military adviser to the Philippine government and later the 34th American president (as the Philippines was a US colony at that time), and Jewish businessmen living in the Philippines, planned and successfully executed the expatriation of Jews to the Philippines, disguising their departure from Germany as employment for skilled professionals. 

While the movie was not like Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List where we saw (and eventually could not unsee) how the Nazi's carried out their purge, President Quezon, like Oskar Schindler, also had a list. As to how a list of 10,000 names just became 1,200, you have to see the movie.  

My knowledge of President Quezon is limited to what I learned from school: he led the Commonwealth government, exiled himself to the US during the Japanese Occupation, and died from TB there. And the sad fact that his widow and daughter were later killed by local rebels who rained bullets on their car in 1949.

But after watching this movie, I now place Manuel L. Quezon up there among Philippine leaders whose compassion for their people and humanity is more admirable than their political achievements. Raymond Bagatsing, the actor who played Quezon, and Rachel Alejandro, who played Aurora, his wife, both convinced me that this couple drew strength and shared each other's kindness for the Filipino and other races.

Last year, I discovered that President Manuel L. Quezon played a part in my hometown's history (Read blog here). In the late 1930s, our town mayor, Don Felix Montinola, met President Quezon at Baguio City to seek his help in building our town hall. I even have a photograph of our town mayor with President Quezon taken during that meeting. Now, I wonder whether, during that meeting, Quezon's plan to help save the Jews was already being discussed in whispers.

While my takeaway from Schindler's List was a better understanding of the Holocaust as well as its very memorable theme song (composed by John Williams and played on the violin by Itzhak Perlman), which, to me, is the saddest of all time, I bring home from Quezon's Game, the pride that, once in our history, we welcomed and gave refuge to brothers and sisters, not of our race, when other nations did not and would not.😢   

This movie is a must-see for all Filipinos. We should be aware of this part of our history and let's celebrate it as this is who we are as a race and as a nation.😂 This story should be part of every Philippine school's history lesson.

That day when I watched this film, I went inside the cinema curious. I came out as a proud Filipino.😋

PS. Quezon's Game has won several awards from film festivals in Texas, California, and Canada. These posters I used are courtesy of the movie's Facebook page.