Children of the Camps

by Mark Felton

  The Lunghwa Camp was opened in March 1943 and held almost 2,000 internees. Its commandant was the pre-war Japanese Consul-General in Shanghai, Mr Hayashi, though later in its history a far stricter commander was appointed. ‘[Hayashi] was considered quite civilised,’ recalled teenaged internee Heather Burch. ‘He had been to London before the war.’12 The buildings were formerly the Kiansu Middle School. The complex had been badly damaged during fighting in 1937 and consisted of 7 large concrete buildings as well as wooden barracks and numerous outbuildings and ruins. There were 59 dormitories, and a total of 127 family rooms.

  Rachel Bosebury remembered when the Japanese arrived at her family’s apartment building to intern the British civilians living there. ‘We went in April of 1943,’ recalled Bosebury, who was nine at the time. ‘A big, old truck came for us. We were allowed to take one box of stuff for all of us and we weren’t allowed any knives. You had to have tin plates and cups.’ The journey to Lunghwa Camp was not memorable to Bosebury. ‘I don’t really remember that much about the truck. When you’re a kid, anything like that is a bit exciting. I was always wondering where we were going and what the Japanese were going to do to us.’13 Ten-yearold James Maas also recalled the moment of internment: ‘We were allowed to take our clothes and took as much as we could. I took some toys and books.’14

  On arrival at Lunghwa Camp, the Boseburys were assigned a family room in D Block. Also interned alongside them were the Tullochs, a Scottish family working in Shanghai. Valerie Tulloch, who was eight years old at the time, recalled how her family was soon split up because her mother was ill and was sent away by the Japanese to a hospital in the city. ‘We were allowed to visit her only three or four times. I think whenever the Japanese guards thought she might be going to die. We missed her terribly, not only on an emotional, but also a practical level. She was good at knitting and sewing. Life would have been much easier if she had been in there with us.’15 The Tullochs were assigned a room in the block nearest the Japanese guardhouse, and next door to another Scottish family, the Calders. Valerie Tulloch would become close friends with the Calders’ eight-year-old son Ronald. James Maas recalled the spartan accommodation at Lunghwa: ‘We used a heavy trunk to sit on and had a folding table and three folding canvas chairs, which had our numbers on the back … It was a change, true, but we were with the same people, our friends, all together. So a boy of my age adapts pretty quickly and I took it in my stride.’16

  The other camps in Shanghai were soon filled up with internees as the city was systematically cleared by the Japanese of enemy aliens. Yu Yuen Road Camp in the centre of the city incorporated the former Western District Public School and the Shanghai Girls Public School. Most of the inmates, who numbered just under 1,000, were former Shanghai Municipal Council employees and their families. The remaining internment camps were either ‘menonly’ or for religious personnel such as priests and nuns.

  Not all of Shanghai’s foreigners were incarcerated in or near to the city. The Japanese shipped out over 1,400 internees on barges and river steamers up the Grand Canal to Yangchow (now Yangzhou), where the canal bisects the Yangtze River. In and around the small city of Yangchow the Japanese established three camps: Yangchow A, B, and C. Camp A held 377 British civilians in the former Southern Baptist Mission hospital, the internees living in the wards, corridors and even the bathrooms, as there was no running water in the camp. Yangchow B was the former Baptist Mission Julia Mackenzie Memorial School, and 382 internees were herded inside. Finally, Yangchow C was three miles northwest of Camps A and B, in the former American Episcopalian Boys’ School. It consisted of a walled compound, numerous houses and a church, and accommodated 673 internees in harsh and spartan conditions. At all three Yangchow camps, the internees faced water shortages to add to their misery. Camps A and B were shut by the Japanese in September 1943 and the internees transported by train back to Shanghai, where they were sent to the camps established within the city. Yangchow C remained in operation as an internment camp until October 1945, the inmates having been overlooked following the Japanese surrender and the arrival of American and Nationalist Chinese forces in the region. In Shanghai in April 1945 the Japanese closed Yu Yuen Road and Columbia Country Club Camps and transferred their prisoners to a new centre called Yangtzepoo Camp, located inside the Sacred Heart Hospital in Shanghai. Over 1,300 internees were crammed into the hospital buildings.

  The regime at Lunghwa Camp has been recalled by several former internees as dreadful, but not nearly as bad as Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. ‘We did learn right away to behave, not to say a word if the Japanese were talking, you shut up,’ recalled child internee Rachel Bosebury. The daily tenko roll-calls were taken very seriously by the Japanese, the camp being administered and guarded by the Consular Police and not by the Imperial Army. ‘You had to learn to stand up at roll call every morning and not make a sound until they went through the buildings and told them you were all clear to go back in your rooms.’17 The Consular Police were reputed to be more humane in their treatment of prisoners than the regular army, though they wore military uniforms, while the ordinary soldiers carried rifles and the officers were armed with samurai swords and automatic pistols. Many of the camp guards were press-ganged Koreans, and several did abuse the prisoners on occasion. ‘If you moved or went in your room or had to go to the bathroom or anything, it didn’t matter if you were a little baby or a grown-up, you didn’t dare do that because you could get slapped around or beaten for moving,’ recalled Bosebury of tenko time. ‘You learned very much to be afraid of the Japanese guards and not to dare do a thing you weren’t supposed to.’ Bosebury remembered two Japanese guards in particular, whom the children had nicknamed ‘Snake Eyes’ and ‘Never Smile Again’, and who were deemed to be quite malicious. ‘One would do the roll call and you’d think they were down and out of the building, another would come up the other stairway and try and catch anybody who moved before the all clear for our building was sounded,’ said Bosebury. ‘They caught a woman; she was the Belgian Consul’s wife … we heard her getting slapped because she was ill and turned to go back to bed before the all-clear sounded. The other guard came around and I remember everybody had to stand and watch and listen.’18 James Maas also recalled tenko and the assault on the Belgian Consul’s wife:

  We had inspection twice a day – roll-call. We all had to stand to attention outside the door and a very small Japanese with a very big sword would come clattering along and check off the list. If you weren’t standing up, it was very serious. One lady, the wife of the Belgian consul, was feeling a bit rotten one day and sat down. Another guard spotted her and came up and gave her a tremendous slap. Her son had to be restrained … All the while, that violence was under the surface.19

  For young white children from respectable homes to suddenly be exposed to the worst kinds of brutality and violence was a steep learning curve for most of them. ‘If you want to know what it was like, it was pretty awful,’ said Bosebury, though she and other former internees have made the point that Japanese brutality at Lunghwa was constrained because the Swiss Consul continued to oversee the prisoners’ welfare from his office in Shanghai. ‘The Japanese didn’t dare go too far because there was a Red Cross presence – other nations observing.’20

  Fear of the guards was the one constant for the internees inside Lunghwa Camp. ‘I don’t recall anything but total fear of the Japanese guards,’ said Bosebury. ‘We kept away from them as much as possible, any guards. You didn’t go anywhere near the guardhouse, you knew not to even walk anywhere close to the no-man’s land [by the perimeter wire] … I never got to know them,’ admitted Bosebury. ‘They didn’t speak English anyway. They roamed camp and they could walk in on you or anything anytime they wanted to.’ The guards were always on the look-out for contraband, and perhaps an opportunity to steal from the prisoners. ‘They did periodic searches if they thought you might have a knife or something. They could come in in the middle of the night, wake us all up and go
through our rooms.’ Everyone, including young children, witnessed acts of Japanese brutality in the camp and they all knew what the Japanese were capable of if anyone stepped out of line. ‘They were people to be feared,’ said Bosebury, ‘because they had the guns, and they were cruel. You had this constant fear that you might have been shot, picked up, tortured, anytime. That was a fear, and it’s terrible.’21

  Fortunately for the internees at Lunghwa, the Japanese authorities administered the camp in a similar fashion to Stanley Camp in Hong Kong, leaving the mostly British internee population to organize themselves, with minimal interference from the Japanese commandant or his men. Guards ‘roamed camp’, occasionally terrorizing the inmates, and they conducted the twice-daily tenko roll-call, but the day-to-day running of the camp was the responsibility of the prisoners.

  The Swiss Consul-General made sure that Red Cross parcels were delivered to Lunghwa Camp regularly, which was an almost unheard-of luxury within the Japanese prison and internment camp system. As with Stanley Camp in Hong Kong, food was a major preoccupation for the internees, as the Japanese simply did not provide enough of it. However, because the British were left to create a camp organization, an efficient system of committees and work details meant that nobody actually starved to death. ‘Lunghwa Camp was mostly British. We did have Americans and Dutch and a few other nationalities, but it was mostly a British camp, and they organized, and they had different people doing various duties,’ recalled Bosebury. ‘My mother had to take turns in the kitchen, and my dad had to work in the kitchen.’ A small farm was established, ‘so that the little children got milk. They had goats.’22 ‘We had a camp council which we voted in and a labour exchange to distribute jobs, which everyone had to have,’ recalled Heather Burch. ‘People were allowed to choose and we worked normal working hours.’23

  The few American citizens in the camp made a big impression on the British children. ‘It was a family camp, there were not too many young men,’ recalled James Maas. ‘We got the crew of an American ship, which had been seized at the beginning of the war. They were transferred to the camp to do some work. The Americans weren’t too cooperative, but they produced a little bit of colour and excitement when they played softball and would get angry and noisy, which amazed us kids. To us, this was un-British behaviour!’24

  Bosebury recalled the maggots present in the food issued by the Japanese, which some prisoners nevertheless ate, claiming that it was at least ‘fresh meat’. Bosebury had a hard time accepting the poor quality of the rations. ‘I couldn’t eat it. It was really ghastly awful. They say when you’re really starving you’ll eat anything; it’s not necessarily true because I just about starved. The gosh awful, rotten smell that permeated our building when they brought that stuff in two or three times a day,’ recalled Bosebury. From the central kitchens ‘huge cauldrons of stew and rice were toured in on carts by camp service and we all queued,’ remembered Heather Burch.

  Money still played an important part in the lives of the internees in Shanghai, and Burch’s family was fortunate to have been wealthy before they were interned. ‘We had left money with some Portuguese or Norwegian friends in Shanghai and once a month we were allowed a food parcel, but they had trouble finding this in the city for themselves let alone us.’25 Eight-year-old Ronald Calder ate all the weevils and maggots that he could find in his food, understanding the value of the protein in a diet largely devoid of meat. ‘My father made my mother take them out. I would shout “Can I have those, please?” Since then I have eaten whatever is put in front of me.’26

  As at Stanley and many of the other camps, education for the children was seen as very important. The Japanese provided no dedicated teaching facilities, so it was left to a committee of prisoners to scrounge for books and writing paper and to find teachers from among the many professionals who had been interned. The head of the Lunghwa Camp School was the former headmistress of the British School in Shanghai. ‘At first the Japanese allowed us to have a school in the buildings that we used for kitchens and stuff,’ recalled Bosebury, ‘and then they moved us to another building.’ For paper, she remembered they used cigarette packets, which were opened up to provide a rudimentary writing surface. Some internees had brought books with them into the camp. ‘People loaned whatever they had so that you could borrow books to read,’ said Bosebury. Bosebury described one elderly gentleman by the distinctive name of Mr Riddler, who became one of the few sources of entertainment for the children. ‘Mr. Riddler had some books, and because he didn’t want to loan them to the kids in our camp, he would sit and as long as the light held in the evening, we’d sit out on the lawn and he’d read to us from some of the great books … He would read in such a way that it was like storytelling time, but that was our only entertainment.’27 Valerie Tulloch enrolled in the camp’s Brownie Pack, begun by an industrious woman who had been a Brown Owl before the war started. ‘She embroidered little badges for us to earn,’ recalled Tulloch. ‘We did things like gardening and hostessing and I really enjoyed it.’28

  James Maas stressed how important educating the children became to the internees. ‘There were a lot of ex-missionary teachers. My mother was also a teacher, and we kept up quite a good standard. They kept to the normal curriculum and everything was quite well taught – maths, English, French, history, geography, all the usual subjects, science and biology … It was fairly relaxed, but I began to work quite hard for the exams when I was about twelve, I began to realize I worked for myself, not for my parents or the teacher. They did give exams. Whether they counted I don’t know.’29 Like Rachel Bosebury, Maas recalled the poor facilities and equipment that the students had to contend with because of Japanese indifference to educating interned children. ‘There was a building set aside for the school, and we had desks; we didn’t have much paper to write on. We had to open cigarette packets and bind them together for paper …’30

  Children soon adapt to new environments, and the youngsters imprisoned inside Lunghwa Camp did so very quickly indeed. ‘We children just played our games together – we were always outside shooting or exchanging marbles,’ remembered Maas. ‘We had a strict code or rank of marbles and that took up a lot of our time. And then there was football and softball – the American influence. We were always kicking a ball around because there was a big playing-field right outside the block. The camp would have covered forty-three acres, so plenty of space to wander but not too close to the boundary. Certain parts would have been out of bounds … We didn’t mind being restricted to camp. We kept busy all the time and we just accepted it, up to my age anyway. I adjusted.’31

  Adding any more children to the camp population was not seen as desirable by the internees, though with many married couples and single adults in the camp it was inevitable that women fell pregnant and children were born under Japanese rule. ‘Malaria was a big problem and we all took quinine,’ recalled Burch. ‘It was also supposed to act as a contraceptive, so the married women used it for this as well. They wanted to avoid getting pregnant, because if you did then you had to go to a hospital in Shanghai and then to a different camp for mothers and babies.’32 Married women were better off than in the Netherlands East Indies, having been permitted to remain with their husbands, and no one wanted their family unit to be broken up during such uncertain and stressful times.

  Even though becoming pregnant was actively avoided, in the early months of internment many women had entered the camps shortly after having conceived. Although in most cases they had subsequently been separated from their husbands, their babies were carried the full term and born into the straitened circumstances created by Japanese rule. Unsurprisingly, the Japanese made absolutely no allowance for pregnant women or nursing mothers inside the camps, but the prisoners themselves banded together to create a hospital and maternity facilities with the limited equipment and drugs at their disposal. Fortunately for all, there was an abundance of doctors, surgeons, nurses and midwives among the camp populations, so at least med
ical professionals were available in most cases to assist with births, and to help the babies and mothers afterwards.

  Nel Halberstadt was a young Dutch woman who was pregnant when she entered Camp Kares-e in Bandoeng. The camp was located in West Java in the Netherlands East Indies. Her husband was in the Army Air Force and he was taken as a military prisoner and sent away to slave for the Japanese. ‘I was growing enormous,’ said Halberstadt, describing what it was like as the months passed. ‘The baby started to assert itself and one evening, when my pregnancy was in its seventh and a half month, I was scared to death by a Jap, who suddenly appeared in front of my nose, just when I went outside.’ A calamity ensued. ‘I slipped down the few steps and ended up lying in a puddle of amniotic fluid. At my shrieks people flew towards me to help. My father almost attacked the Jap, but managed to chase him from the yard. I think the man was shocked by all the chaos.’ Fortunately Halberstadt’s parents were with her in the camp and they would prove invaluable. ‘supported by papa and mama I walked to the small hospital, which had been set up by a midwife. There, the midwife, Sister Martha, welcomed me and a Salvation Army nurse dressed me in an old gown and took me to the delivery room. It already contained three women with legs up high in various stages of labour.’33

  Halberstadt’s labour was very short, but memorable. ‘I strained a few times … and out slipped a small parcel. The baby was lying, completely wrapped in the membrane, in the bedpan. Sister Martha and the other nurse threw themselves on me and the bedpan, removed the child and took it out of its membrane. ‘Aduh, born with the caul,’ Sister Martha exclaimed. Apparently this is supposed to be a sign that the child will have second sight,’ recalled Halberstadt. ‘I was totally confused. I have born a child without very much pain and no shriek had passed my lips. “It has been born too early,” Sister Martha said. “She will need to go into the incubator.” ’34 Both mother and daughter were to face three more years of grim internment camps before eventual liberation, and providing sufficient nutrition for a growing baby was to prove nearly impossible in most of the internment camps. Many children suffered the effects into adulthood, including being small in stature, or still carrying the residue of infectious tropical diseases or deficiency disorders.