by Isabel Wolff
‘Now you understand why I wouldn’t let you bring the chess set,’ my mother whispered to Peter. He nodded miserably.
‘Poor girl,’ Kate whispered. ‘They’ll make her stand there all day – that’s what the bastards do.’ Two hours later, as we reached the head of the queue, the girl was still there, her hands still raised, her head drooping onto her chest, whether from exhaustion or a desire not to be stared at, I didn’t know.
The soldiers looked through Ina’s bag; then they searched her jacket pockets. I was terrified that they’d find the Bible pages, but they didn’t, and we all got through the inspection unscathed.
Tjihapit seemed to be much bigger than Bloemencamp and was far busier. The streets thronged with newcomers carrying or dragging their possessions as they looked for their accommodation. There were also women and teenagers walking to and from work, or fetching cans of food from the dapur. There were furniture ladies pushing carts loaded with chests of drawers, tables and chairs – even pianos. Children played in the street with improvised toys: some clattered along on ‘stilts’ made of tin cans with string threaded through them; others had a bicycle wheel and a stick. Many were so thin and listless that they simply sat on the kerb, pretend-playing with their hands.
‘Nice houses,’ said Kirsten with a sour smile.
Front gardens, festooned with lines of washing, grew wild; broken windows resembled missing teeth; shutters were askew, like drooping eyelids; paint peeled and lifted, like diseased skin.
Kate, her girls, and Ina were to be in the same house, on Riowstraat, while Kirsten and my family were very close by on Houtmanstraat.
I felt a wave of relief as we looked at the house – it was twice as big as the one on Orchideelaan. But as we went inside, my heart sank. There were already at least fifty women and children living in it. The utility room that we’d been assigned overlooked a scrubby back yard, beyond which rose the gedek, crowned with barbed wire.
We settled in as best we could. Kirsten put her mattress down in a corner of the sitting room, a few feet away from us.
‘Home Sweet Home,’ she said as she hung up her kelambu.
Because Houtmanstraat was on the very edge of the camp, sounds from the world outside would drift in; the clucking of chickens being taken to market, the rumble of a bus, or the tinkling of a bicycle bell. Sometimes we’d hear passing vendors calling their wares, their voices becoming louder, then fading away.
We had a stroke of luck in that my mother’s job at Tjihapit was not shifting furniture, but preparing vegetables in the dapur. Peter and I urged her to take advantage of her position, so once or twice she hid a carrot in her clothes. But when one dapur worker, who’d taken a piece of pork, was chased down the street by a mob of furious women hurling stones, Mum vowed that she’d never steal any vegetables again.
Snails, though, were there for the taking. One day, in the damp alley behind our house, my mother found a giant snail, or keong, and brought it back to the house. ‘We’re going to find some more,’ she said, showing it to us, ‘and we’re going to cook them. Well, the French like snails,’ she protested when she saw our disgusted expressions. ‘They consider them a delicacy and eat them in the finest restaurants.’
So the three of us went on a snail hunt and on our first foray we came back with ten. My mother heated a can of water on the back of her iron and boiled them – they made an awful, hissing sound I remember. As they were still tough, she boiled them again, then she covered them with a cloth and thumped them between two bricks, to tenderise them. Finally, she cut them up and put them in our rice, giving Kirsten some, as she had shared some of her food with us.
Kirsten kissed her fingertips. ‘Hmmm! Best snails I’ve ever eaten.’
‘Have you had them before?’ Peter asked her.
‘No. So those were the best.’
To our amazement the snails had tasted good; but word soon got round about them and within a short time Tjihapit’s keongs had gone. Nor, soon, were there any slugs, frogs, snakes or rats to be found and, to my distress, the lucky croaks of the tokeh could no longer be heard.
Gradually we got to know some of the people in this new house. There was a woman named Ilse who came from a tea plantation in Central Java. The Japanese had shot her husband because he’d refused to hand over his car keys. I thought of my mother, desperately willing my father to hand over his. Then there was Shirin, who was beautiful with long dark hair and expressive brown eyes, though they often held a sad, defeated look. I assumed that Shirin was Belanda Indo but, one day, as we chatted on the front steps, she told me that her father was Persian. She’d been living in Balikpapan, on Borneo, where her husband had worked for Dutch Oil. As the Japanese approached, Shirin explained, she had been evacuated, with other women and children. Her husband and his colleagues stayed behind, and had managed to blow up the oil refinery, partially destroying it. In a low, calm voice, Shirin added that they had all been beheaded. So the rumours that we’d heard had been true.
There was another woman named Vena, who was very pretty. She had blonde hair and wore a tightly fitting black skirt with a lacy white top, through which you could see her bare skin: she used to put on red lipstick in the mornings, then go and stand by the main gate. I asked Kirsten why Vena dressed like this, and why the women in our house often called her rude names.
‘They can’t stand Vena,’ Kirsten replied, ‘because she’s being nice to the Japs in the hope that she’ll get more food and better treatment.’
I thought about this for a moment. ‘Couldn’t we be nice to them too?’ It seemed sensible, given how thin we were getting.
Kirsten laughed, darkly. ‘No, sweetheart. Better to starve.’
It wasn’t better, I reasoned. Then I wondered what Vena had to do to be ‘nice’ to the Japs. Did she have to chat to them? Tell them jokes? Sing songs? Whatever it was, it must have worked, because some time later I saw Vena leaving with her case, presumably for a life outside, because we didn’t see her in the camp after that.
One problem that we had in Tjihapit was that the soldiers were always searching our rooms, ordering us out while they ransacked the place for ‘forbidden items’. In addition, they were always putting a stop to this activity or that. There had been lectures and knitting circles, but these were now banned; there was also to be strictly no gedekking, although it still went on in secret. One woman in our house managed to get out of the camp by going through the sewer ditch, and came back with some bananas. Had she been caught, she would have been beaten. A few days later, we heard, someone had swapped a cocktail dress for ten eggs. After she’d been given the eggs, the woman had thrown the dress over the fence, but it caught on the barbed wire. The Indonesian had tried to lift it off with a stick but a guard saw him and the man was dragged away.
The following day was an ordeal that still haunts me. At dawn the whole camp was ordered onto the field. The commandant arrived and shouted for the woman who’d traded the dress to step forward. No one stirred. ‘You will stay here until she does!’ he screamed.
We stood in the sun all morning and were still standing there in the afternoon. Children cried. Adults groaned. Women fainted with sunstroke and, inevitably, wet themselves, or worse. We knew that the commandant would, if necessary, make us stand there for days. He had to, in order to ‘save face’; because for inmates to be gedekking implied that the rations weren’t enough, which would reflect badly on his running of the camp.
By the time we’d been on the field for eight hours, I just wanted the ordeal to end, no matter what the outcome. An elderly woman had died. Several children were ill with sunstroke. Babies screamed with hunger and pain.
There were furious whisperings.
‘Why doesn’t the wretched woman step forward?’
‘How can she bear to let everyone else suffer like this?’
‘Who is she? Does anyone know?’
Towards sunset, by which time we’d been standing in the sun for ten hours, someone gave an offi
cer the gedekker’s name.
The commandant was duly fetched. He walked through the rows, then stopped. My heart lurched.
‘My God,’ I heard Kirsten whisper. ‘It’s Kate …’
I braced myself for the commandant’s rage, but he simply looked at Kate for a few moments, sadly almost, then took her by the elbow.
‘Wait,’ Kate said to him. ‘Please …’ She turned to Corrie and hugged her tightly, kissed her, then whispered something to her. Next, she kissed each of the twins; they’d been asleep at her feet, but were now awake, screaming, their arms stretched towards their mother. As she was led away, Corrie tried to console them, though she was crying herself.
From that day on it was Corrie who looked after her little sisters, with Ina’s help. But Kate was never seen again.
For months afterwards I dreamed about Kate. I understood why she hadn’t confessed – she knew she might be killed. Then I wondered who had informed on her, and whether that person felt bad about it or believed that they had done the right thing. I prayed that I myself would never be faced with such a dilemma. But the time was going to come when I would.
By now we’d been in this second camp for a year, and the rice allowance had dropped to one cup a day. Most women gave half their food to their children, but my mother didn’t. She told Peter and me that the women who did this were falling ill.
‘You mustn’t be ill, Mum,’ I said, suddenly terrified. ‘We need you.’
‘I know,’ she responded, ‘which is why I’m determined to stay strong.’ Even so she was, by now, pitifully thin, her pillowy plumpness long since gone. At night she would get the photo of my father out of Peter’s bear, and hold it to her sunken cheek.
Once more we were ordered to grow food. We planted tomatoes and carrots, which grew very well, but to our despair they would always be stolen, either by our neighbours, or by soldiers. One day, when I was tending the plants with Shirin, I burst into tears at the frustration of having to work so hard to grow food that we would never get to eat. Between sobs, I said I wished we could build a wall round our plot to keep the plants safe. Shirin agreed. She told me that in old Persian, the word ‘Paradise’ translates as ‘walled garden’. From that moment I dreamed of having such a Paradise myself one day.
‘How ironic,’ Kirsten said bleakly, ‘that we live on Java, where everything grows like mad – yet we’re starving.’ She sighed wearily. ‘Do you ever think about that, Klara?’
‘I try not to,’ I answered bitterly.
As time went by we became obsessed with food. A little water, heated on an iron with a few grains of salt became ‘lovely soup’; rice with a sliver of onion became ‘delicious rice’. Being given a tiny lump of sugar in our rations was a sensation that would be talked about in the camp for days afterwards.
Then a strange mania started, for collecting recipes. We’d all sit round and read our favourite ones aloud to each other, mentally assembling the ingredients, discussing the method, then mentally ‘eating’ the finished dish, savouring it over and over again. We found that doing this did, somehow, alleviate our hunger. I was able to remember the recipes that I’d copied out from Irene’s Home Notes magazines. Because they were English recipes, the other women didn’t know them, which seemed to make them especially appealing. So they would rush into our room and ask me to recite them, then they’d sit on the floor, get out their pads, and feverishly scribble down the ingredients for Irish Stew or Lancashire Hot Pot or Victoria Sponge, though they’d often argue about the quantities because I wasn’t good at converting pounds and ounces into grams. My mother kept a recipe book, and said that after the war she was going to cook every single thing in it.
Yet the truth was, we shouldn’t have starved. We knew that the Red Cross were sending food parcels, but we never saw them because the Japanese didn’t distribute them. We got just one, on 25 May 1944; I remember the date because it was my mother’s birthday, and she said it was the best present that she’d ever had. In the boxes were tins of butter, ham, sardines, sugar and coffee – ordinary items, yet to us, manna from heaven, and we eked it out for as long as possible, relishing every morsel. But even more sustaining than the food inside were the labels on the outside, stating that these things had been sent by the American Red Cross in Washington DC. Up until that moment we felt that the world had forgotten us. Now we knew, for the first time, that people far away were trying to keep us alive. This knowledge gave us a huge psychological lift.
The food situation continued to deteriorate. The allowance had dropped again, this time to less than half a cup of cooked rice a day. By now, women and children were falling ill. They had tropical ulcers that wouldn’t heal, and dysentery. Worse, some people were starting to show the swollen legs of beriberi. The gravity of our situation was unmistakeable.
‘I feel almost nostalgic about Bloemencamp,’ Kirsten told us miserably. ‘There we could just about cope. But in this dump …’ She pinched her fleshless hip. ‘For the first time I know I might die.’
‘You’re not going to die,’ my mother said to her. ‘You’re going to be fine. We’re all going to be fine, and we’re all going to—’
Kirsten grimaced. ‘Live happily ever after?’
My mother pursed her lips. ‘Who knows what the future holds? But we’re going to help each other to survive.’
Kirsten shrugged. ‘Not all women are helping each other, are they?’
This was true. There was a lot of bickering and arguing, even fights. The day before, there’d been a vicious argument over a bar of soap – there’d been slaps and hair-pulling before the two women had been separated. There was a furious squabble going on right now, with voices being raised because someone’s kelambu was taking up too much room.
Under such pressure it was impossible to maintain a civilised veneer. A woman in our house went to the gedek and traded her wedding ring for a piece of bacon, which she then cooked for her three children on the back of an iron. She stuffed a sheet under the door of their room, but the delicious aroma still drove us insane. Some women wept, but others called her names and swore that they’d betray her to the Japs.
‘They can’t cope,’ Kirsten said as we listened to this. ‘They can’t cope with the fact that she’s been able to feed her children, where they haven’t been able to feed theirs.’
‘Exactly,’ Ina agreed. ‘And the courage she showed only makes them feel worse.’
Seeing other mothers crack under the strain, Peter and I worried that our mother would crack too. But she had enormous self-control. She kept out of trouble at work, and avoided getting into arguments with other women. Sometimes she got angry with Peter and me, especially if we squabbled, which we often did. But we were living on top of each other, we were always hungry, and bored, because we had no toys or books. Although our bickering grieved our mother, she never smacked us. But some mothers did hit their kids, not caring who saw.
By this time there were several thousand of us in Tjihapit; yet every day hundreds more arrived. The Dutch and other Europeans had long since been rounded up, but now it was the turn of the Belanda Indos. They’d previously been exempt, on the basis that they were really Asian and therefore on Japan’s side, even though most felt themselves to be Dutch. They were being interned because, we now knew, Japan was losing the war and its leadership wanted to eradicate any Western influence. So we watched the Belanda Indos stream through the gate.
They had a lot of possessions, which we eyed covetously: more importantly, they had food – baskets of chickens and ducks, and sacks of flour and rice, which we stared at like ravenous dogs. I have never forgotten their horrified expressions as they first laid eyes on us. We were all desperately thin, our hair matted and louse-ridden, our bodies filthy, our clothes heavily patched or in rags.
‘Welcome, ladies,’ Kirsten called out to them as they walked by. Some of them held hankies to their faces because we stank. ‘Welcome to our delightful camp and we very much hope that you enjoy your stay – no
t that we’ve the slightest idea where you’ll all fit.’
More houses were cleared, or people simply had to squeeze up. But with so many extra people, the water supply became a trickle. The sanitation was revolting, and we were catching illnesses from each other. Worst of all, there was even less food.
One morning Shirin announced that the Japs had figured out how to solve the overcrowding problem.
‘How?’ Kirsten demanded indolently. ‘Are they going to kill us?’
‘No,’ Shirin answered seriously. ‘They’re going to send more boys to the men’s camps.’
Mum looked up, alarmed. ‘From what age?’
‘Thirteen.’
My mother closed her eyes with relief.
At the start of internment, boys up to the age of fifteen had been allowed to stay with their mothers, but some women had complained that the boys were staring at them, or flirting with their daughters. So these fifteen-year-olds, having been deemed a ‘danger to women’, were transferred to the men’s camps. Then fourteen-year-olds were sent away, too; and now it was to be the thirteen-year-olds. Some of the mothers in Greta’s house mounted a protest against it. They all wore white – the Buddhist colour of mourning. They told the commandant that these boys were still children and begged him to reconsider. Instead, he had them beaten and locked up. The women were let out three days later, to be told that their sons were to be transported at first light.
‘They don’t even know where they’re being sent,’ my mother murmured as the boys walked past our house to the waiting trucks. Some of the mothers were brave and refused to cry; but, as the engines started, many of them wailed and surged forward, clawing the air as they tried to reach their sons. The soldiers crossed rifles and pushed them back. Then the trucks drove away through the gate.
