All Ships Follow Me

by Mieke Eerkens

  Until I began to research the camps, language was something I never thought of in relation to war, the way that it was withheld to keep people deaf, mute, and powerless. I see now how words were weapons and their theft a tool of war. I see how words became precious in their scarcity in the same way that things like food and medicine and shoes did. What is more central to the human drive than communication? The Japanese cut this instinct off at every turn in the camp as a form of psychological warfare. They make the prisoners speak Bahasa, and ban their native Dutch. They make them learn Japanese. They install the isolating gedek so they cannot communicate with the Indonesians outside the fence except in faceless whispers. They confiscate their books. Pens, pencils, and paper in the camps are guarded and hoarded as obsessively as food.

  In the Bangkong boys’ diaries, this becomes clear. While reading them at the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation in Amsterdam, I marvel at the delicate creased onionskin paper of the letters and diaries, just like that of my grandmother’s, the minuscule letters inscribed on every available centimeter, getting even smaller as words swarm toward the end of the paper with each page. Eventually, I have to ask at the desk if they have a magnifying glass I can borrow. “Of course we do,” the man there says, because many of the documents in the archives were written on the backs of wrappers and cigarette papers, he tells me; whatever a prisoner could get his hands on and hide from the authorities. It’s surprising to me that as a writer, I haven’t registered this particular hardship of war before. I suppose it’s because I take words for granted. I have never once had to worry about having access to the tools of expression whenever I wanted to use them. I open my laptop and type, I use full sheets of thick white paper and write in big letters. Sometimes I cross things out in frustration, crumple the paper. Sometimes I crumple several pieces of paper. I complain about not getting the words right. I start over. I cut and paste. I shake my pen when it runs out of ink and drop it in the trash, then reach for another.

  This privilege comes into sharp relief as I sit hunched over a table in Amsterdam squinting at Lilliputian script through a magnifying glass, noticing the economy of the tiny penciled attempts of one thirteen-year-old boy to document himself in abbreviations: 8 Sept. D Spitz died. 13 Sept. Boys fr Lampersari arrived. 19 Sept. J Kramer died. 28 Sept. Won’t lend my pencil anymore. Getting too nubby. 1 Oct. Can’t think straight. Have the runs. 29 Oct. Earned 1 spoon sugar catching 200 flies for officer. Have malaria. Pencil just nub now. Problem w/ b-bugs. 28 Feb. Miss my mother. Air raid. Is it Unkle Sams?

  As their own words are progressively taken away, new words are put into the prisoners’ mouths, words they do not choose. They are encouraged to send postcards to their families abroad, something that initially causes surprise and excitement, but that excitement quickly sours. The postcards are white, two by five inches, and a prisoner’s message can consist only of three sentences chosen from among of a list of approved pre-printed sentences and copied word for word onto the postcard. “I have dysentery and am starving to death, and over a third of the people in my camp have died” is not one of the included sentences. The approved sentences are: “We internees are permitted to write home by the generous government of Nippon.” “My health is excellent.” “Our camp is well equipped, and the accommodations are comfortable. Our daily life is very pleasant.” “We have plenty of food and much recreation.” “The Japanese treat us well, so don’t worry about me and never feel uneasy.” “We are permitted to grow vegetables and flowers which we like and enjoy working in the open air.” “This is a land of perpetual summer, full of natural beauty, with plenty of bananas, pineapples, mangistano, and coconuts. Love, _________.” Of course, the cards are a ridiculous farce, but sending them at least allows a prisoner to communicate to loved ones that he is still alive.

  The reality of the prisoners’ conditions is in such stark contrast to their postcards that the Red Cross determines that the prisoners are in crisis and delivers aid packages with food and medical supplies to the camps. On May 2, 1945, Bangkong receives a delivery, which is initially withheld from the prisoners, and then delivered with great ceremony on May 16, after the Japanese government receives international pressure for withholding humanitarian aid, and relents. The Japanese officers post a long screed in the center of the camp, and a translator reads it to the prisoners in Dutch. The speech is titled “Are Our Enemies Human?” It begins with the lines “During the course of the Pacific War, the Anglo-Americans … have time and again been guilty of numerous instances totally opposed to the dictates of humanity.” The announcement then details a long list of specific military strikes against Japan by the Allied forces. “In retaliation, the Japanese Government would be perfectly justified in withholding distribution of the relief supplies … nor would the Allies be in a position to lodge a protest against such action … To confiscate supplies destined for [POWs] would be an easy matter, as easy as twisting a child’s hand. But the Japanese know that these internees and prisoners of war are not and should not be held responsible for the treachery of their governments … His Majesty has directed that these relief goods be distributed among captive enemy nationals as originally planned, and this Imperial order will be faithfully carried out.” The prisoners are jubilant. The one hundred aid packages are to be shared by around thirteen hundred men and boys in the camp; there is food they haven’t seen in years. There are two types of packages, American and British, with slightly different contents, including canned corned beef, Prem and Spam, canned pudding, canned butter, condensed milk, chocolate, raisins, chewing gum, sugar, and processed cheese, among other items. It’s a feast for the starved prisoners, even if thirteen people have to share a package. In the corner, the Schuyer brothers segment their share of the food, counting and recounting. Sjeffie inhales his Spam and goes for the chocolate. To hell with rationing. He’s hungry right now.

  * * *

  Camp Bangkong, Semarang, Indonesia, 2014

  After we visit Lampersari, Joko drives us to Camp Bangkong, the place of most significance for all of us. Both my father and I are astounded by how close to each other the two camps actually are. It could not have taken more than forty-five minutes to walk between the two. It’s a stark reminder to me of how subjective memory is, how there is no such thing as a fixed account of history, and how “nonfiction,” outside of dates and measurable facts, can only ever be one person’s version of “the truth.” “It really, truly felt like hours that we were walking,” my father says, and he seems genuinely troubled by the clear evidence that his memory doesn’t match up with the facts. For me, it’s jarring as well, as I have always thought of the physical distance between my father and his mother as significant and now must adjust the story, which I have heard several times. But fact and truth are two different things. In the end, I think that regardless of how far the walk from Lampersari to Bangkong was in actual miles, to my father and those other boys who believed they were being taken to Bangkok and who would not speak to their families for years, it was a walk to the other side of the earth. That was and is their truth.

  Today, Camp Bangkong is a private school. Children in uniforms have their classes in the former internees’ hans. My father shows us the han where he slept upstairs. As I videotape, children slip out of the class, the more extroverted ones giggling and performing for my camera. Their teacher comes out into the hall, and we try to explain why we are there, but she doesn’t understand, though she allows my father to stick his head through the door of her classroom to see his old quarters. He laughs and waves at the children, a massive smile on his face. It’s good to see the space now filled with learning and joy.

  My father shows us the different parts of the camp, and I make him take me to where he was standing when the war ended so I can photograph him there. He shows us where the boys left via the back gate to work in the fields, where they stacked the bodies of campmates who died, where they carried them out. He shows me the “pharmacy” where he worked, now a locked uti
lity closet. Meanwhile, it’s the middle of a busy school day, with oblivious children and teachers walking through the halls in the twenty-first century. It adds to a surreal experience of being in the spaces as my father explains what the function of each one was.

  We see another teacher near the chapel and again we explain what we are doing there. She seems aware of the school’s past and begins nodding, then hurries off. There is a small plaque on the wall outside the chapel that acknowledges the people who lost their lives there. The school director appears with the teacher we’ve just spoken to and a log for us to sign. She tells us that many children of former prisoners of the camp have been there and signed the logbook, but in the past decade, my father is the only person she has met who was actually interned there himself and returned. She tells my father it is an honor to meet him and shakes his hand, which I can see makes him feel good.

  Later that evening, after an emotional day, my father and I visit the buffet on the roof of our hotel, next to the infinity pool. My father cannot resist an all-you-can-eat buffet, often overfilling his plates on multiple trips. A chef stands at a station making stir-fry to order, satay and rice with peanut sauce are available at another station, and fresh fruit salad and different Indonesian desserts are displayed on another table. It’s a beautiful evening, the sun just setting. There is a live band playing music, the tropical air has cooled to the perfect temperature, and the views are spectacular. We look out over the city to the Tjandi Hills. Suddenly, I realize that a building directly in our line of vision is unmistakably my father’s former camp, the school we visited that day.

  “Oh my God, Dad! That’s your camp right there.”

  “Wow!” he says. “It looks so small from here.”

  For me it offers a moment of symbolic satisfaction, seeing my father next to this pool, seventy years later, looking down at the place where he nearly starved to death, with an all-you-can-eat plate of food.

  * * *

  Hiroshima, Japan, August 6, 1945

  In the black of night, Little Boy passes over a sleeping Pacific, snug in the belly of the Enola Gay. A worse misnomer than “Little Boy” for such a destructive and powerful force could not exist. The atomic bomb, the first the world will know, is armed just before 8:00 a.m., just before Little Boy is released over the city of Hiroshima. The crew of the Enola Gay moves into place.

  There is a moment when the bomb falls, suspended in air, a moment between what Little Boy was and what Little Boy becomes in the time line of history. In this liminal moment, innocent lives are being traded for other innocent lives, for as much as rightfully horrified minds have tried to reason that perhaps Japan would have surrendered on its own, the fact remains that it would not have been in time for my father or his family or most of the internees in their camps, who were months, if not weeks, from death by starvation on August 6, 1945. In some cases, it would prove too late and they would die in the days that followed. This second in time, in which the belly of the Enola Gay opens, determines that my father will live and others will not live. It allows me to be born and prevents others from existing at all. It ensures the war trauma of generations of Japanese families. For forty-three seconds, Little Boy plummets silently through the atmosphere. Then, in a flash, seventy thousand people and an entire city center are blown cleanly off the map. Three days later, “Fat Man” free-falls over Nagasaki, sweeping another forty thousand to seventy-five thousand lives from the earth. It saves my father’s life.

  * * *

  Camp Bangkong, Semarang, Dutch East Indies, August 1945

  He doesn’t know it yet, of course. In the week following the bombing of Nagasaki, Sjeffie hears distant explosions rumbling throughout the city, and the prisoners see planes. Smoke plumes rise into the sky, black and thick, only a few miles away. There are excited whispers throughout the camp. The prisoners don’t know it, but what they are witnessing is the Allied fighters bombing the Semarang harbor. The Japanese officers are tense and quieter than usual. They patrol with their bayonets gripped tightly and don’t bark the usual orders at the prisoners, keeping their eyes averted. They announce that the patjolers will not be going to work in the fields this week. This announcement increases the rumors, but still, the prisoners are unsure of what is going on. Some are afraid that the Japanese will kill them instead of surrender. Sjeffie practices climbing up to his secret hiding spot, preparing himself. Then a small plane flies over the camp, dropping slips of paper and rolling back and forth to “wave” its wings at them. These turn out to be Dutch pilots stationed in Balikpapan, the already-liberated seaport city on Borneo. Almost all of the slips flutter off into the wind, missing the camp, but one or two land inside. They say “De redding is nabij”: “The rescue is near.” The few who have caught slips hide them from the officers, afraid of being harmed. After many false alarms, they begin to hope that this could be the real thing. And it is. Sort of. The Japanese officially surrender on August 15, 1945, but this fact is not announced to the prisoners, and the officers stay at their posts, ordering the prisoners to remain in their barracks or in the yard. For another full week, the prisoners live in this limbo, unsure if the war has ended or if they are doomed to be imprisoned forever, or worse. A few succumb in this week, and the others carry the bodies out as usual.

  On August 23, Sjeffie goes to his job in the pharmacy. While walking there, he hears shouting coming from behind the gedek. Making sure nobody is looking, he climbs a pillar behind the pharmacy from where he can look over the double fence. There, he sees Indonesians running through the streets. One man spots him and calls out, “Hey, boy! The war is over! It’s over! Do you have clothing? Trade clothing for food!” Unbeknownst to him, the Indonesians on the outside of the camps, while still having access to food, have had no access to textiles throughout the war, and clothing has become a valuable commodity. In the camps, where close quarters mean lice and sweat and it’s nearly impossible to keep a wardrobe clean, the boys and men haven’t worn full clothing in years, and now wear only shorts or a cawat, a loincloth that they can easily rinse each day. The Indonesian man holds up a large bundle of bananas, and Sjeffie can’t believe his luck. He still has a couple of untouched shirts in his suitcase in the han. “Wait here! Wait here! Don’t go away!” He scrambles back down the pillar and runs as fast as he can to his han. He returns, out of breath, with a shirt, and scrambles back up the pillar. To his relief, the man is still there, holding the bananas. “Throw the bananas over first!” Sjeffie yells, afraid it is a hoax. The man pauses, considering, but there are more bananas, and he regards this skeletal child behind the fence. He throws the bananas, and they land with a thud a few feet from Sjeffie’s pillar. Sjeffie quickly balls up and throws the shirt. The man catches it and smiles. Then Sjeffie scrambles down so nobody else can grab his bananas.

  He wolfs one down immediately, then hides the rest of the bananas in a secret spot he has in the pharmacy where sometimes the nuns leave him extra food from the unused rations of patients who die. There is another boy who works in the pharmacy, Fons, and Sjeffie motions him over eagerly. He reveals the bananas, offering to share extra food as they usually do. But Fons frowns. “That’s illegal. You can’t talk to anyone outside the gedek. We’ll get in trouble.” “Fine,” Sjeffie says. “You don’t have to have any. But I am eating them.” An hour later, though, a hancho shows up. Sjeffie has been ratted out. The bananas are confiscated and Sjeffie is ordered to stand under the clock in the sun as punishment. Sjeffie watches his plump, beautiful bananas leave with the hancho and walks dejectedly to the clock. He stands there and stands there. Sweat trickles from his shorn head and down his face in the relentless sun.

  But around him, the camp begins to stir. Others have gotten similar offers from the other side of the gedek. They start trading over the top of the fence too, and nothing happens. Sjeffie looks around and notices that the Japanese officers who have been guarding them vigilantly for years have suddenly evaporated. He takes a cautious step from his appointed spo
t. Nothing happens. No officer appears. No John the Whacker. No Bucket Man. No Hockey Stick. He takes another cautious step. No Pretty Karl. No Bloodhound. No Chubby Baby. They have all vanished. Nobody stops him. He takes a few more steps, looking around him. Nothing. And then he is running to the gedek, where the others are now furiously trading, throwing clothing over the fence as fruit, pastries, even meat come flying back over the top. Emboldened, some of the prisoners begin tearing down the gedek. Nobody stops them. They now climb through the hole and trade openly with the Indonesians.