Guam - 81-year-old Irene Perez Ploke Sgambelluri-Beruan was just 10 years old and living in Agat when the Japanese began their bombing of Guam in December 1941. She shared her story during this past weekend's Manenggon Memorial Service, which was at the site of the former concentration camp.

"Before the Japanese invasion the U.S. military warned my family to leave the island, but my mother refused. She wanted to stay because her grandparents were old. At the time of the Japanese bombing my grandfather sent help to transport our family to Hagatna where he lived so that we could be together we traveled light and left with some clothing and documents," she said. 

Beruan's father was in the Navy at the time and was a prisoner of war. She recalls the day her father surrendered to the Japanese, as she stood beside him in the jungle holding her hand. Her father was then shipped to a POW camp in Osaka, Japan, and it was more than three years before her family was reunited.