Haddonfield, N.J. — Mary Previte believes there are special times when a simple thank-you note just will not do.
She plans to embark on a journey this week halfway across the world to hand-deliver a thank-you more than 70 years after a heroic deed saved her life.
Previte will travel from Haddonfield to China to personally express her appreciation to the last member of a daring group of seven rescuers who liberated her and 1,400 others from a Japanese prison camp during World War II.
It took 18 years for Previte to locate the last man: Wang Cheng-Han, who was the Chinese interpreter for the liberation team. They were reunited last year when they spoke by phone.
“It is the end of a dream to actually have found all of the heroes and have an opportunity to see them face to face,” said Previte, 83. “It’s really an opportunity to say thank you.”
Wang, 91, is the last surviving member of the liberation group. Previte made contact with four others in the late 1990s, and found the widows of two others. But she said she couldn’t rest until she showed her appreciation to the rescuer she knew as Eddie Wang.
“They were all over,” Previte said. “I said, ‘I am going to take a pilgrimage and thank every one of them.’”
Previte will also take with her well wishes she has gathered from other internees living in the United States and abroad, as well as proclamations and tributes for Wang from the U.S. ambassador to China, Max Sieben Baucus; and from New Jersey Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester), who wrote that Wang was “deserving of the highest commendation and praise.”
U.S. Rep. Donald Norcross (D-N.J.) entered Wang’s name into the Congressional Record for his “selfless acts and service.”
“If you and your brave comrades hadn’t saved us, I would probably have died before I reached 19,” Pamela Masters-Flynn of Placerville, California, another former internee, wrote in a letter to Wang. “Thank you for giving me 70 more years of living here on earth with all the wonderful people who touched my life along the way.”
Wang and six other paratroopers liberated the Weihsien Civilian Assembly Center on Aug. 17, 1945.
They rescued Previte, who was 12, along with her grandfather, her three siblings and about 1,400 others who had been imprisoned at the camp. Her family spent nearly four years there.
Previte’s parents had left her and her siblings at a boarding school in China in 1940. The parents resumed their missionary work until the end of the war. Her grandfather Herbert Hudson Taylor, a retired missionary living on the grounds, was also interned.
The Japanese army captured the school shortly after the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. About 200 students and teachers, mostly Europeans, were sent to the prison camp.
The detainees endured horrible living conditions. Previte and the others were also forced to work.
When the U.S. rescue planes arrived, the captives had no idea that the Japanese had surrendered and the war was over. It was the first time Wang, then 20, parachuted from a B-24, a grandson said.
Wang, a retired engineer, lives in Guizhou province. Previte plans to travel to Hong Kong to meet up with a nephew, James Taylor, a missionary who speaks fluent Chinese, who will escort her in China.
After the liberation, the former captives were reunited with loved ones and settled around the world. Many have died. Some survivors meet periodically for reunions and stay connected through a Weihsien camp website, which helped Previte find Wang last year.
Previte, a former New Jersey assemblywoman, easily found the other rescuers. She located Stanley Staiger, the mission’s commanding officer, in Nevada; Tad Nagaki in Nebraska; James Moore in Texas; and James Hannon in California. She found the widow of Raymond Hanchulak in Pennsylvania, and Peter Orlich’s widow in New York.
“My life has been made so beautiful with these friendships,” Previte said. “This is the last stop on my pilgrimage to find my heroes.”
