Children of the Camps

by Mark Felton

  The famous British writer J.G. Ballard, who was imprisoned with his parents inside Lunghwa Camp for the duration of the war, provided an analysis of the internee population that he had carefully observed as a young boy, and that later influenced his writing of the internment camp novel Empire of the Sun: ‘Some of the prisoners behaved with great steadfastness. Most were withdrawn and listless. A few were scrimshankers, petty thieves, or open collaborators with the Japanese. But you’d expect that. I was happy there. It was like having a huge slum family.’35 Ballard particularly recalled how parents sacrificed themselves to protect their children: ‘Our parents starved themselves for us.’36 The point has often been repeated by other child survivors of the camps. ‘My mother once told me that I said, “Oh, Mummy, I’m so hungry!” I don’t remember saying that, but I remember being hungry,’ recalled James Maas. ‘But on the whole it wasn’t too bad because parents were very sacrificing, and we did get Red Cross parcels, which were a godsend, and I got most of the contents of those, and there were a few treats in them. I have a photograph, which was taken in August or September ’45, of Mother looking very cheerful, although very thin, and I look entirely normal.’37

  Cleanliness was a major issue and concerned the internees in Shanghai greatly. ‘The camp had previously been a Chinese dormitory and after being disused for so many years after the bombing [in 1937], there was nothing but lice and bedbugs, and filth that you had to learn to live with or fight,’ recalled Bosebury. The internees did what they could to eradicate the filth, but the Japanese did not issue disinfectant, which made the job of cleaning the camp extremely difficult. ‘I can remember my mother staying up most of the evenings with a match trying to go around the seams of our mattresses to make sure there weren’t any bed bugs there at night.’38 Fresh water was a problem in Shanghai and clean water sources were very important to prevent any outbreak of cholera. ‘Everyday a drinking water truck arrived,’ recalled Heather Burch. ‘My father was one of the people responsible for dishing water out. We called it the Dewdrop Inn. We had to boil it to make it safe.’39 Another water collection shack was christened ‘Waterloo’ by the prisoners, complete with a mocked-up London Underground sign.

  The death rates for civilian internees in the Shanghai camps were low compared with the huge numbers of Allied prisonersof-war who died in Japanese slave labour camps, and compared with civilian deaths elsewhere in Occupied Asia. Figures derived from incomplete records for the Shanghai camps list a total of 26 deaths in 1943, rising to 39 in 1944, and 49 in 1945.40 Most victims were the middle aged or the elderly, though at least 10 children also died. All along the China coast and in the interior ports British and other Allied nationals were interned. They were business people and missionaries, language teachers and university professors, engineers and administrators, and many had lived in China for decades, some had even been born there. It was a terrible wrench for most of them to be plucked from jobs and professions that they loved and to be parted from their Chinese friends and colleagues. The psychology of internees was as important a factor for survival as their ability to combat disease and starvation. For many of the older people, the shock of being plunged into a camp in old age was simply too great to bear. Perhaps the most famous British person to die in an internment camp in China was Eric Liddell of Chariots of Fire fame. He had been Olympic 400 metres gold medalist at the 1924 summer games. Liddell had been born in China, where his father was a missionary and after retiring from athletics he had returned to the land of his birth to assist with his father’s mission in Shandong Province. Liddell and fellow Allied nationals were interned at Weihsien Camp in the city of Weifang, and he died there from a brain tumour in February 1945, at the age of only forty-three.

  6

  Hell’s Waiting Room

  Much sickness was caused by poor sewerage and the women had to ladle the overflow of the cesspits into open drains which became a source of constant infection. Many women and children had open sores on their ankles and legs from infected cuts and the bacteria caused skin ulcers. I was one of them and had to have my sores washed out and bandaged regularly.

  Hetty, Dutch child internee

  Tjideng Ghetto, Batavia, Java

  By 1943, after a year of internment in Japanese camps, Allied civilians started to notice that their living conditions were beginning to seriously deteriorate as events elsewhere began to conspire against their survival. The war was now going badly for the Japanese, following the defeat of the Imperial Navy by the Americans at the Battle of Midway in June 1942. After Midway, the Empire was forced onto the defensive, as the Americans began a two-pronged assault against Japan, and British and Commonwealth forces readied themselves to strike back from India. General Douglas MacArthur led the thrust by the US Army across the central Pacific towards the island of New Guinea, with the eventual liberation of the Philippines as his ultimate goal. In the northern Pacific, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz and the US Pacific Fleet ‘island-hopped’ towards the Japanese Home Islands, bypassing many of the more serious enemy garrisons that would be left, in Nimitz’s immortal words, to ‘wither on the vine’. Britain was slower to begin the fight-back, but Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten’s South-East Asia Command had begun making plans to insert special army units known as Chindits behind the Japanese lines in occupied Burma, to disrupt the Japanese position, and Mountbatten and his generals were formulating concrete plans to invade the colony in the near future. The eventual goal of the British was to recapture Malaya and Singapore.

  The effect upon the Japanese of suddenly finding themselves thrown onto the defensive was dramatic and unpleasant. With each defeat suffered by the Imperial Army or Navy, the Japanese directed their fury at the Western prisoners that they held. Although military prisoners-of-war were appallingly badly treated by the Japanese, civilian internees, including women and children, also suffered conditions of incredible hardship, brutality and bureaucratic indifference far in excess of those experienced by Allied military prisoners who fell into German hands during the Second World War. The civilian internment camps slid inexorably into squalor, disease and starvation, often overlaid by stupendous acts of barbarity by the vindictive Japanese. Starvation conditions were exacerbated by every Allied success, as Japanese supply ships were sunk in unprecedented numbers by Allied submarines and the Japanese diverted most of the available food, especially in the Empire’s outlying regions, to their military garrisons. Allied military POWs were forced to act as slave labour, in mines in Japan and Manchuria, in factories, on the Burma-Thailand Railway, and a multitude of other projects that cost thousands of lives. Civilian internees were generally left to rot inside their camps, labelled ‘useless mouths’ by their Japanese masters. Combined with the institutional racism of the Japanese military towards Western and Eurasian peoples, the last phases of the war were the most dangerous for internees and their survival was by no means certain. Japanese resistance was fierce, suicidal and quite effective in slowing down the Allied assault on the Home Islands and in 1943 it looked as though the war would drag on for a very long time.

  I have previously mentioned that civilians unfortunate enough to be interned in the Netherlands East Indies endured great hardships and privations in a string of camps set up by the Japanese throughout the archipelago. Tijdeng Ghetto in the city of Batavia was one of the worst. Established in present-day Jakarta, on the island of Java, the camp was for women and children only. In March 1942, when the Japanese took control of Batavia, all Allied men and boys over the age of twelve were removed from their families and placed in male-only camps. The Japanese reasoned that as so many men and teenage boys had been members of the reserve Stadswacht Home Guard, they could be deemed military POWs, and they were treated accordingly. The thousands of women and the 33,700 children who remained were put into several camps that were initially under the control of the Japanese Consular Police.

  The Tijdeng Ghetto consisted of a closed-off section of one of the poorer suburbs of Batavia. There were dozens
of small houses, all badly constructed and each standing on a small plot of land. The Japanese then shut the internees off from the rest of the city with a barbed wire fence and, later, a wall made of matted bamboo. The physical size of the Ghetto was progressively reduced by the Japanese, even as the population of the camp was dramatically increased. Dutch internee Michel was seven years old when he was herded into the Ghetto with his mother and three siblings. ‘Our new house was not in a very nice part of the town,’ he remembered. ‘The houses were made of sugarcane matting and plastered with cement. The roofs were baked clay tiles and the floors were cement. They were all of the same design.’1

  Initially, the Ghetto held only about 2,000 women and children, but by June 1945 this figure had increased to 10,300, as the Japanese gradually shipped in thousands more people into the compressed area. In 1942, under a more considerate Consular Police administration, the women internees were able to cook in the kitchens of the houses, visit shops within the Ghetto area, and attend church services. One internee, a 21-year-old Dutch woman called Riet, recalled that the regime was fairly relaxed. ‘The first year was not too bad as we were under an Economic administration and the camp commandant was a kind man – even interceding and defending us against bad rulings.’2 The contrast between this and what was to come later, under Imperial Army control, was stark. ‘The commandant loved music and even encouraged musical entertainment choirs and even Church services. We were also allowed visitors at this time,’ wrote Riet. ‘The Commandant was also lenient with regard to attending roll-call twice daily – one could miss roll-call if not well.’3 This liberal regime came to an abrupt end when control of the Tijdeng Ghetto was transferred to the Imperial Japanese Army in April 1944, and a new commandant, Lieutenant Kenichi Sonei, was appointed.

  Under Sonei’s command, the Tijdeng Ghetto became one of the foulest camps in the Japanese Empire and the thousands of mainly Dutch women and children interned there were systematically starved far more severely than at many of the other ghettos and camps. The conditions at Tijdeng were comparable to those in the Jewish ghettos set up by the Germans in occupied Poland. The youngest children worked in the small allotments that the commandant permitted, growing vegetables to supplement the meagre rations distributed to them by the Japanese. ‘Twice a day we got “bread” which was hard and transparent. Each person got 5cms. The mothers made soups out of tea with spices in it,’ recalled a young Dutch child internee named Hetty. ‘I had to knit socks for the Japanese soldiers for which we were rewarded with a piece of sugar. It was the only sweet I ever tasted in the 3½ years. This put me off knitting for the rest of my life.’4 Hetty had entered the Tjideng Ghetto as a seven-year-old child with her mother and brother. Her father had been a member of the Stadswacht, and this meant that the Japanese considered him to be a military prisonerof-war. Hetty’s father was sent to Struiswijk Prison on the outskirts of Batavia while the rest of the family was initially held under house arrest. Hetty, like thousands of other children, was never to see her father again – he drowned off the coast of Sumatra when the rusting and unmarked transport ship he was on, the Junyo Maru, was sunk by an Allied submarine – just one of thousands of Allied soldiers who perished at sea as the Japanese shipped prisoners around their vast empire to act as slave labour. Hetty and her family were sent to Camp Kramat, an internment camp in Java, in November 1942, and in August 1943 the whole family was sent to the Tjideng Ghetto. They were forced to leave behind all their possessions except for some clothing and bedding. ‘At the thought I became physically ill and had a temperature,’ recalled Hetty.5 They were transported in tricycle taxis to Tjideng.

  Hetty’s first house in the Ghetto was on two storeys, but packed with nearly forty people. ‘We had our own little pad curtained off by some material (maybe sheets hung up from a cupboard to the wall). I remember the cupboard had a hole in the back panel and every time my mother or I changed I saw the eye of a peeping tom, a boy who later left the camp when he was 12,’ wrote Hetty. Privacy was almost impossible for internees in any of the camps across Asia, and was to have a deep impact upon their morale and mental well-being.

  In the Tijdeng Ghetto, tenko was a gruelling ordeal for the internees. ‘This meant standing to attention any time of the day in the hot sun or at night for long periods of time while counts were made of those present,’ recalled Hetty. ‘The soldiers often made a mess of this and hence we had to endure lengthy periods of waiting till they got it right. The camp commander used these occasions to carry out house inspections and to search for illegal goods or anything they fancied for themselves.’6 Hetty’s mother only had a few valuables left, and she was determined that the Japanese would not get their thieving hands on them. ‘I had a teddy bear in camp and my mother hid a few pieces of jewellery and some money in its tummy,’ said Hetty. ‘I had to carry that teddy bear with me whenever we had “tenkos” or house inspections. I do remember often being afraid.’7 Another Dutch child, Hardy, recalled: ‘Radio and photo-equipment was gathered by the Japanese in big trucks. Several times the people were driven out of the houses to a square or out of the camp. The Japanese were looking for hidden money, jewels, radios, flags, etc. Once we spent the night in a room with 20 other people, some suffering from diarrhoea. I can still remember the dark and the smell.’8 The children were also forced to witness the most appalling acts of violence and brutality carried out by their guards on fellow internees.

  Once the Imperial Army took over control of the Ghetto in April 1944, camp discipline became very severe. The level of brutality in Japanese prison camps depended largely upon the personality of the camp commandant. The new commandant, Lieutenant Kenichi Sonei, was ruthless and sadistic, perhaps even psychologically unbalanced. ‘If women refused to bow to the Japanese they were hit to the ground and often had their hair shaved off,’ recalled Hetty. ‘The worst punishment was to be bound to a chair outside the camp entrance gate and have to sit for 48 hours in the sun and through the night without food and drink. At full moon Sonei would order the whole camp – including the sick – to attend roll call or tenko where he made everyone stand at attention for him. He would then make the women and children bow down to him time upon time again. If he was not satisfied he would cut the food rations.’9 Many prisoners later considered that Sonei’s worst excesses occurred when the moon was full, as if he underwent a psychological change. Sonei instilled great fear through the Ghetto population every day, but with a full moon the internees believed that this officer’s sadistic mania was aggravated.

  Sonei had formerly been an officer at the infamous Bicycle Camp for military prisoners-of-war, which was also located on Java. Bicycle Camp was a hell-hole, pure and simple, with no redeeming features whatsoever. In April 1942, one month after the Dutch and British surrender on Java, 2,600 British, Australian and American military prisoners were marched to the town of Bandoeng, and thence into a former Dutch barracks complex that had originally been built to house Indonesian colonial troops. The camp soon gained the nickname ‘Bicycle Camp’, as the original colonial occupants had been military cyclists. The POWs were joined shortly afterwards by bedraggled Australian and American survivors from the cruisers HMAS Perth and USS Houston, sunk during the Battle of the Sunda Strait, who numbered around 500 officers and ratings, all in an appalling state of neglect. The naval prisoners marched slowly and painfully into Bicycle Camp, covered by Japanese guards toting their long rifles and fixed bayonets, as the military POWs silently watched the tragic procession, pressed up against the perimeter wire. Most of the shipwrecked sailors had lost nearly all of their clothing and many could only walk with the assistance of their comrades.

  Since being taken prisoner by the Japanese, the seamen had been denied medical attention with the result that over 80 per cent of the men who shuffled into the camp were ridden with either malaria or dysentery, some unfortunates had both. Immediately after being captured the sailors had been herded by Japanese sentries into the town of Serang, accompanied by some Austral
ian troops who had surrendered on Java, some Australian and British soldiers who had managed to escape from Singapore before the end of resistance there, and many Dutch civilians with young children in tow. The Japanese had placed them all inside a cinema, their guards refusing any medical aid for those who were injured or ill. ‘At night they had to lie on top of each other in the stink of festering wounds. The latrine was an open pit outside, with flies rising off it in huge clouds, making a blaring noise like a brass band.’10 The Allied senior officers among the prisoners were taken away and then the rest of them were herded into the town jail, packed tightly into cells by the Kempeitai military police. The sailors were still denied medical care, systemically starved and given little water until, in April, they were transported as pitiable, diseased wrecks to Bicycle Camp. The civilians fared little better and were shipped off to the Tjideng Ghetto, or to a series of other physically challenging camps across Java.

  When Lieutenant Sonei took over as commandant of Tjideng in April 1944, the Ghetto population stood at 5,286 women and children, roughly double what it had been when the camp first opened. By the time he relinquished command in June 1945, Sonei had managed to increase the Ghetto population to 10,300, whilst simultaneously considerably reducing the physical size of the prison. Sonei’s regime marked the end of any freedoms that the internees may have enjoyed under the humane Consular Police commandant. Church services were immediately banned; shopping was stopped as no more trading was permitted with the Indonesian population who lived beyond the Ghetto wall, and even cooking was forbidden inside the houses where the internees lived. All meals were forthwith cooked in a central kitchen and then distributed to the internees daily. However, Sonei’s rules did not stop people from trying to trade with those outside the walls. ‘In Tjideng the houses of the camp were isolated from the rest of the world by means of a high fence of barbed wire and platted bamboo – “gedek” – to keep us from looking out and making contact with the outside world,’ recalled Hetty, who was only seven at the time. ‘This did not stop us children from sliding somehow under the gedek and getting out of the camp to do some trading. An old blouse or pair of shoes for bananas, papaya, and sometimes a few eggs, even a chicken now and then. The penalties for discovery were very severe!’11 Another child prisoner, Hardy, recalled a similar black market for food. ‘People exchanged bottles for little fish with the “inlanders” outside the camp. It was thrown over the gedek and the canal.’12