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Maria Orosa, fellow World War II heroes laid to rest at San Agustin Church
Maria Orosa and her fellow World War II heroes were given a final resting place at San Agustin Church in Intramuros, Manila.
A funeral mass and commemorative event held on Thursday, February 13 also marked the 80th anniversary of the Liberation of Manila and the bombing of the Remedios Hospital in 1945 during World War II.
The hospital served as an emergency hospital for American war prisoners and used to be where Malate Catholic School now stands.
Aside from the Filipina scientist, civilian victims and volunteers of the Remedios Hospital were re-interred at the crypt of the historic San Agustin Church. They are hospital doctor Dr. Antonio Lahorra, Gustavo Basa Lopez, Gloria Fernandez, Juanito Chico, Francisco Marin Massip, Carlos Sobral Alvarez, Santiago Picornell Marti, Andre Cailles, Nikolai Prokopoff, Niels A. F. Hansen, Robert Allen Afzelius, and Carmen Rodas Calderon.
The unnamed victims were also honored with a special mention during the funeral mass.
The six boxes, which contained a total of 22 remains exhumed from the abandoned mass grave, were displayed in front of the altar, prayed over, and had flowers and Catholic symbols placed over them.
After the mass, the boxes carrying the remains of the war heroes were transferred to the crypt within the church.
These were placed in six neighboring niches on the bottom part of the columbarium. Orosa had her own tombstone dedicated to her, while the other war heroes had shared ones. Some of these were inscribed with their birthdays and days of death, others did not.
Orosa’s tombstone reads, “Here lie the victims of the tragedy of Remedios Hospital, Malate, killed during the Liberation of Manila on February 13, 1945.”
Milette Orosa, a niece of the food scientist, was present at the event. Orosa’s younger brother Jose, is Milette's father.
Milette said that although Orosa was featured in publications in the Philippines and around the world, “there was really something lacking because there was really no place for us to go and pay our respects to her.”
With this, Milette said they are happy that their family now has a place to visit and celebrate her legacy.
“After 80 years, after her death, finally, there’s some closure,” she told members of the press after the internment.
Per Milette, they confirmed the remains were Orosa’s through DNA testing from the female line of the family. Clementina, the daughter of the eldest woman of the Orosa siblings, provided the DNA sample. The body that was found was also 5 feet and 2 inches, and died at the age of 52, which fit Orosa’s description.
Milette said that although she never met her aunt as she was born “much later,” Orosa was very much celebrated in their family and had a large presence.
“My dad always talked about her," she shared.
Orosa was also the one who introduced Milette’s parents to each other.
Milette added that she hopes Orosa would be remembered "as somebody who loved her country, because everything she did was for the country.”
“She was supposed to go home to Batangas with all her siblings. My grandmother wanted all them at home during the war but she refused, she wanted to stay here, because she was helping. You know, smuggling food for the prisoners, to the guerillas and everything. She stayed behind,” she said.
George Ylagan, a grand nephew of Orosa, said she is more than just being the founder banana ketchup, as it was only one of her many achievements.
“What she did that was more important was to find food to feed the poor in the Philippines. Hindi naman niya kailangan gawin ‘yun,” he said.
Ylagan also cited that Orosa was one of the women who graduated with a Master's in Science degree from the University of Washington at a time when women did not attend school.
Orosa is best known for inventing banana ketchup. She also invented the palayok oven, which greatly helped local remote villages without access to electricity to cook their food.
Orosa was likewise a pharmaceutical chemist, a humanitarian, and a war heroine as she also smuggled food into Japanese-run internment camps.
Remedios Hospital
The re-interment of the WWII heroes is the conclusion of the five-year Malate Grave Project, a forensic archeological and anthropological project focused on a forgotten civilian mass grave site discovered at Malate Catholic School in 2019.
During the war, the hospital was staffed by Columban priest John Lalor of Malate Church and volunteers, and played an important role in saving lives while also covertly supporting activities of the guerrilla.
As the Liberation of Manila began in February 1945, the hospital was ravaged by Japanese soldiers, and, tragically, on February 13, bombed by Allied forces. It devastated the hospital, killing Father Lalor, several hospital volunteers, and patients in the process, including Orosa who was being treated for a foot injury.
The civilian casualties were buried in a mass grave on hospital grounds days after the bombing. A grave marker was later built on site, where the families of the war heroes gathered to pay tribute to their loved ones.
The original grave marker bore the names of 12 victims and innocent children, but it was fenced off and destroyed when Malate Catholic School expanded in the '90s.
The grave marker would be discovered by chance years later.
According to Matthew Westfall, a retired Asia Development Bank diplomat, military history author, and the head of the Malate Grave Project, he happened upon a genealogical reference to his Russian granduncle, Nikolai Prokopoff, online.
Prokopoff was a Terek Cossack military officer who fled the Russian Revolution and later sought shelter in Manila with Westfall's grandparents. Prokopoff was among the war heroes who died in Remedios Hospital during its bombing in February 1945.
This pivotal moment then led to the discovery of the abandoned mass grave marker in Malate Catholic School in July 2019, and then eventually to the founding of the Malate Grave Project.
In early 2020 during the pandemic year, Westfall convened a team of archaeologists and anthropologists from the University of the Philippines Diliman’s (UP Diliman) Archaeology Studies Program and Department of Anthropology to exhume the mass grave site.
Significance of San Agustin Church
San Agustin Church now serves as the final resting place of the 22 civilian casualties of the Remedios Hospital bombing, and the location couldn't be more fitting.
The structure is the oldest stone church in the Philippines, having been completed in 1607. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a national historical landmark, and a burial site of numerous famous historical figures, among them the Spanish conquistadors Miguel Lopez de Legazpi, Juan de Salcedo, and Martin de Goiti.
Painter, sculptor, and political activist Juan Luna is also buried there.
The church’s museum, which features exhibits on Filipino culture, art, and history, is also home to the crypt where the heroes of Remedios Hospital have been re-interred.
The vaulted stone chamber features a memorial at its center to pay tribute to the 140 Spaniards killed during the Liberation of Manila.
The Malate Grave Project
The Malate Grave Project led to the discovery of 22 sets of commingled human remains, which were carefully exhumed and extensively documented by the archaeology team.
A major discovery during the dig was a second grave marker, or lapida, for Orosa.
As the pandemic lockdown ensued, the exhumed remains were delivered to the forensic anthropology lab at UP Diliman for a two-year process of bone cleaning, inventory, reconstruction and identification led by Dr. Francisco Datar, one of the country’s leading forensic anthropologists.
Dr. Datar’s laboratory findings were cross-referenced with historical research studies, declassified United States Army files on Japanese War Crimes from the U.S. National Archives, news articles, a first-person account published by survivor Pedro Picornell titled “Remedios Hospital – 1942-1945: A Saga of Malate,” and the victims’ unique biological profiles.
This paved the way for the project team to identify a large part of the remains with a high level of confidence.
Unfortunately, some of the victims may never be identified.
Nevertheless, the mass grave bone samples and DNA test results from a number of descendant family members were sent to King’s College London's DNA Laboratory in England in hopes of cross-matching DNA. However, the highly sensitive testing yielded inconclusive results as the remains had been significantly burned at the time of the original mass grave burial in 1945. Per the project team, the high heat likely damaged most if not all the DNA in the samples.
Looking forward, Westfall shared that a potential project would be commissioning and installing a bronze memorial sculpture. He and the team are still looking for a place to build this, but options include the Malate Catholic School, which is the original site of the mass grave, and the Malate Church.
A lot of hard work was put into the Malate Grave Project to finally put at rest the remains of the war heroes together, according to Westfall.
“So, when you see the lapida of my granduncle Nikolai Prokopoff, he's actually there with probably two or three other people. It's all mixed up. And the argument there is this: they were buried together for 75 years together, laying at rest in the mud, somewhere in the back of Malate Catholic School," he said.
“So, they're pretty much where we found them, but within a much more dignified place with the honor that they deserve."
Westfall shared that giving the war heroes a resting place feels like reaching a finish line and restarts the conversation about the American and Japanese invasion in the Philippines.
“The amazing thing about this mass grave memorial that was originally at Malate Catholic School—it was destroyed, it was forgotten, families emigrate, families, next generation doesn't remember, oral histories get lost,” he said.
“All the families that came together now, they used to gather at that memorial in the '50s, '60s, and '70s every year to remember that event. But if you take away the memorial and you take away the remembering, it's very hard for those stories to remain in currency. They become forgotten and they just get lost to the past."
He believes Filipinos can learn a lot from the Malate Grave Project, noting the significance of knowing the sacrifices of the Filipino people for their independence and sovereignty.
“They fought a Spanish colonial power. They fought an American occupation, the Japanese occupation, and finally had liberation. And that's something to celebrate and always be remembered."
Looking back at the past, per Westfall, is also a way to see how historical events greatly impacted the Philippines today.
“We lost hundreds of thousands of Filipino civilians. The city itself was destroyed beyond recognition," he said.
“And in fact, many of the problems we have today, traffic and slums and so forth, are related to that absolute moment in time in 1945. So looking back at that, remembering the heroes and their sacrifices, but also remembering and keeping in mind the impact of war and what war goes to a society."
Maria Orosa and her fellow war heroes who died during the Liberation of Manila at the Remedios Hospital were given a final resting place at San Agustin Church in Intramuros.
— Nika Roque (@rqNIKA) February 13, 2025
February 13 also marks the 80th anniversary of the Liberation of Manila. @gmanews @gmanewsbreaking pic.twitter.com/r4y1wCwxxi
— CDC, GMA Integrated News
