by Mark Felton
Procuring sufficient food to maintain body and soul was an obsession for all of the Ghetto internees. The Japanese did not provide enough to actually keep people alive, so everyone had to resort to bartering or even stealing in order to survive, and by doing so they were breaking camp rules and could be heavily punished. Child internee Michel recalled how even children’s toys became currency: ‘In camp I kept myself busy playing and collecting toys by swapping and bartering and soon I had lots of toys. My mother persuaded me to exchange them for food as every time a kid had a birthday his mother wanted a toy so she exchanged it for food. The only set back was that the food was eaten and my supply of toys was dwindling so the bartering was even harder for me.’ Michel hit on a novel way to keep the supply of food coming. ‘I made my own lead soldiers. I had a mould and pinched lead from the roofs which leaked terribly in the rainy season afterwards. Soldiers were toys and food so bad luck for the roof.’13
The Japanese officially banned education for the children under their control in the Netherlands East Indies – a very different situation from Hong Kong or Shanghai where education was treated as a ‘right’ for the children and properly organized by internee committees – but lessons could nonetheless be ‘bought’ in Tjideng. ‘There were many teachers in the camp who gave lessons in return for bread,’ remembered Hetty. ‘This had to be done in secret and someone had to stand guard and whistle when a Japanese guard came near the place where we had “school”. We learned the three “Rs” and used slate or tiles with little pieces of lead from the roofs of houses as pencils.’14
As elsewhere in their Empire, the Japanese authorities at Tjideng expected the prisoners to organize themselves. A system was instituted whereby each house had an appointed leader from among the women prisoners and each street, or block, had a ‘block leader’. As usual this responsibility brought great risks, since the Japanese tended to punish the leaders for the infractions of the led. ‘In our second house my mother was chosen as the head of the house, the “kapala”,’ recalled Hetty. ‘This meant being in charge of delegating all the jobs that had to be done as well as being responsible for the behaviour of the women and children towards the Japanese officers. She also had to sort out strife between the women, she was good at that. She also had to organise the work shifts. I felt very proud of her, I remember.’15
Tenko was called twice a day. As the overcrowding in the Ghetto became progressively worse, with every room in every house literally wall-to-wall with mattresses, including the corridors and kitchens, some people had to live in garages or sleep on patios. Washing facilities almost ceased to exist as Lieutenant Sonei ordered the water supply shut off to the houses, and the toilets could no longer be used because the septic tanks were never emptied. Doors were removed and burned for firewood, and even some windows and walls were removed from the houses. It was not unusual to find eighty women and children living in one small suburban house designed originally for a single family. ‘The women in the house, realising they had to live together in very cramped quarters with the children, immediately made up a set of rules regarding the washing of clothes, general cleanliness and behaviour towards each other,’ recalled child prisoner Hetty. ‘Cooking was done in the central kitchen and food was fetched in turn by two women for the whole house. No cooking was allowed in the houses.’16 As a young boy, Hardy experienced the overcrowding: ‘The second place we lived was in the middle of the Tjitaroemweg along a canal. This house was not so big although there were 64 people “living” in it. We were housed in the half of a garage with a friend of my mother and her two children. We slept under each other.’17
The grim conditions in the Tjideng Ghetto were certainly exacerbated by the attitude and behaviour of Lieutenant Sonei. Undoubtedly a man of psychopathic tendencies, Sonei constantly attacked and victimized his charges and clearly enjoyed doing so. Former internees recalled many examples of Sonei’s brutality. His tenkos lasted for hours, recalled Hardy: ‘Sometimes we had to join a “kumpulan” (roll-call) and stay for hours in ranks. When it was done too slow the guards beat the women who were in charge of a (street) block. Once we stood a full night long and those who fainted were beaten up.’ Fear of the guards and particularly of Lieutenant Sonei was constant, but was especially in evidence during the tenko. ‘On one of the kumpulans I was sick and fell on the road, but my mother picked me up and helped me to bow,’ recalled Hardy. ‘She told me afterwards she was terrified. We had to make endless bows.’18 Michel recalled a dangerous game he played with the Japanese. ‘The most daring thing to do was to skip compulsory line up which was twice a day and try to knock some green mangoes off the tree in camp with a flat stone,’ he recalled. ‘If there was line up all the people were at the assembly so you had a clear go to steal mangoes. The point was if the Japanese found out that you were not at kumpul you were history.’19 The length of the kumpulan, an Indonesian word used by the Dutch in place of the Japanese ‘tenko’, was a good enough reason for young boys to risk disappearing on foraging expeditions. ‘Kumpul … could last until late in the afternoon if we had to be punished. Everyone had to stand in rows of ten for hours; all the women and children in the afternoon sun.’20 Sonei ordered the sick to attend tenko, adding to their distress, and tenko could be called at any time, day or night, depending on the whim of the commandant.
The commandant constantly reduced the food rations to punish various infractions of his own insane rules. ‘The regime of the Japanese became more and more severe and cruel,’ said Hardy. ‘The food rations became smaller and smaller. There was a little bit of bread, rice, and “starch-paste”. Instead of meat the cook-shop made milled intestine.’21 The prisoners tried other ways to obtain food. ‘We tried to grow fish in the water well in front of the garden,’ recalled Hardy. ‘It was a hopeless task because most of the time there was no water in it.’22 Little boys took to thieving like Victorian street urchins. ‘One day I stole a piece of bread from a truck in the market-place. A guard saw what I did and came after me. I ran away and I hid myself. He did not find me.’23
Michel’s mother managed to obtain a much sought after job in the camp kitchens. She noticed that there was an open drain for the water on the floor to run outside, and this gave her a novel idea. ‘She quickly told me, one day, that I had to go to the back of the kitchen and watch the drain,’ recalled Michel. ‘I did what I was told and soon there were potatoes rolling down the drain which I picked up and put in my pockets. This was ok for a short time till my mother got found out and was reported. She got a severe beating and lost her job in the kitchen.’24 The kitchen was somewhere Michel had already taken to hanging around before his mother was punished. ‘I had to do a lot of jobs for my mother like catching water or standing in queues till she came to take over. Also if we were lucky I had to boil eggs at the kitchen steam overflow pipe. There was at the back of the kitchen a pipe where the excess steam was expelled and we found this a very good way of boiling eggs or other things. I found this out but soon everybody was doing it so you had to queue again.’25 Michel was busy in the back garden of the shared house where he lived an overcrowded life. ‘I made a veggie garden and planted a sort of spinach that grew very fast. It was not very nice, a bit slimy but it was food. I also managed to get some corn seeds.’26
The experiences of young children in the Japanese internment camps were necessarily different from those of their parents and other adults. Children view the world in a different way. ‘It is funny but as a kid you adapt a lot better than if you are a grown up,’ wrote Michel. ‘I never seemed to have a dull time because I was always doing or making things out of nothing. There were lots of other kids in camp so we just played.’27 ‘My mother loved a cigarette now and then,’ recalled Hetty, ‘but since there were no matches to be had she would send me to find a light somewhere. In order to keep the cigarette burning I used to take a draw on the way back. Sometimes I came back with half a cigarette, the rest I had smoked myself.’28
As mentioned, Sonei ordere
d many women to have their heads shaved for breaches of his rules, usually after first receiving a severe beating from the guards. He encouraged his men to beat women and children, often very severely, and even ordered older internee boys to beat to death the pet dogs brought into the camp by families. In a rage he was known to upend pots of food in the communal kitchen and once ordered his men to bury bread desperately needed by the starving internees. This last episode was witnessed by a 21-year-old Riet. ‘On one occasion when a woman did not bow, the commandant made us dig a hole and bury the bread and he kicked over the food in the kitchen and made us go without food for 3 days.’29
Prisoners were responsible for new arrivals in the Ghetto. ‘When new internees arrived we had to search their belongings,’ recalled Riet, ‘and if we had missed anything and it was found by the soldiers in their search, we would be beaten – not just one searcher, but all.’30 As in the POW camps, civilian internees had to bow incessantly to the Japanese. The Japanese were obsessed with this form of obeisance and any internee who forgot, or refused, to bend at the waist very soon discovered the Japanese propensity for painful retribution. ‘We had to bow to the soldiers and even to the trucks if they passed us,’ wrote Riet, ‘not doing so resulted in a savage beating and kicking.’31
Riet, who was imprisoned along with her mother and a younger brother, recalled the inferior bill of fare offered by Lieutenant Sonei. ‘Breakfast was gluey, had sago in it with very little nutritional value. Lunch and dinner was a handful of rice and vegetables that were leftovers from the markets and were often more water than vegetables. When there were no leftovers, we were given water lilies, sometimes with the flowers still on the stalks, which the women in the kitchen made edible with the use of herbs.’32 A novel source of food was soon discovered. ‘We used to search for snails to give to the sick in place of egg whites.’ Sonei was rewarded for his regime of terror by his superiors, who promoted him to captain. The death rate under his command was between six and ten women and children every day.
Disease stalked civilian internees every minute of their existence and even in the best run internment camps nearly everyone became sick at some point during their confinement. Because the Japanese authorities did not ordinarily issue medicines to the prisoners, many readily treatable diseases became death sentences. Child internee Hetty recalled the situation at the Tijdeng Ghetto: ‘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.’33 ‘Most of the time we played in the street,’ recalled another young child internee, Hardy. ‘I got a severe ulcer on one of my toes. They put me in a hospital at Laan Trivelli. It became a very big ulcer and at last they had to remove the nail. I was lucky because of the good food there.’34 Hardy’s next experience of hospital was far less sanguine. He was struck down with dysentery, caused by the appalling state of sewerage in the camp. ‘One day my mother and her friend carried me on a stretcher to the dysentery-house. I screamed very much because we all knew that you would never come back from there.
I stayed there for a month and went through the dying of a little girl (two years old?) in a baby-bed. The atmosphere was horrible. I heard screaming and crying in the opposite houses under big trees. I was told there were mad people housed there. In spite of everything I recovered.’35
Hygiene levels dropped to new lows as Captain Sonei’s regime became ever more depraved. The toilets had already ceased to work because of the overcrowding and ‘ “chamber pots” (old tins) had to be emptied daily. Water was no longer available from household taps, and instead it had to be fetched daily from a central point.’36 Child prisoner Hardy also noticed the state of the sewerage. ‘The garden behind the house was a mess. The sewerage had broken down and the dirt and shit was canalized in open gutters throughout the garden.’37
Even going to the dentist became, because of an almost total lack of proper medication and instruments, another torture to be endured by even the smallest children. ‘My teeth would be drilled without anesthetic with blunt drills and then filled – with what? When we were back in Holland I had to go on endless trips to the dentist to get the proper fillings for my teeth.’38
The prisoners, including the very young, were required to perform some labour for the Japanese. ‘Sometimes we had to work in a field, I think to grow crops,’ recalled Hardy. ‘My physical condition was very bad. On the hottest moment of the day I sat shivering in the sun. It was not malaria, but because of weakness and severe loss of weight I was very cold.’39
Elsewhere in the Netherlands East Indies, Dutch children and their mothers were shunted from camp to camp by the Japanese, and each new location was usually more miserable than the last. Seventeen-year-old Elizabeth van Kampen was one of a group of Dutch colonists loaded aboard trucks that bumped along a rough road, clouds of choking dust thrown up by their wheels. In the back sat white women and children, their faces full of apprehension and confusion. Japanese guards sat either side of the tailgates at the back of the trucks, their rifles propped between their knees, their expressions bored and listless under the hot sun. The convoy was making its way across the island of Java in February 1944. ‘All along the road were many very young Indonesians laughing and were calling us names,’ wrote van Kampen. ‘Of course the white masters were now nothing more but slaves to the Japanese Army. I bent my head, my eyes were full of tears.’40
Elizabeth van Kampen’s personal story was typical of the experiences of thousands of Dutch civilians whose lives were devastated by the twin experiences of invasion and internment. Van Kampen’s father had taken a job in the Netherlands East Indies in 1920, when he was twenty-two years old, working as an engineer for a Dutch shipping firm. He met his wife while on a long leave in Holland in 1926, and Elizabeth was born there in 1927. Van Kampen’s father had then moved the whole family east to the huge island of Sumatra, and later to neighbouring Java, in 1928.
Johan Rijkee was only a young child when the Japanese invaded. His father worked for Royal Dutch Shell at the Palembang oil-fields. The family was soon cast to the winds, as Johan’s father remained behind to assist the Dutch Army with blowing up the oilfields before the Japanese arrived, while Johan and his mother and sister travelled by train and then ship to Java in an attempt to escape the invaders. Their journey ended at the town of Malang, where, after three weeks, Johan’s father had managed to join them. However, they could not find passage off the island and when the Japanese arrived Johan’s father was arrested and sent to an all-male internment camp. Later on in 1942, the rest of the family was forced into a makeshift camp created by the cordoning off with barbed wire of a housing estate in Malang to create a ghetto known as District Malang, a similar arrangement to the Tijdeng Ghetto in Batavia.
In November 1943, Johan and his family were transferred to Karangpanas Camp in Semarang on the north coast of Java, and then Karangpanas Semarang Camp in the centre of the island. The 500-mile (805 km) journey was so exhausting for civilians who had been on starvation rations for years, and exposed to a myriad of tropical diseases, that on arrival at the new camp Johan was one of several who were immediately admitted to the makeshift hospital. ‘This “hospital” was just an empty room without any furniture,’ remembered Johan. ‘Since our luggage never arrived, I and many others, had to lay on the cement floor.’41 After three weeks Johan left the hospital and joined his mother and sister in a barrack block. ‘In the barrack there was a long continuous plank bed alongside both walls. Each person was allocated 20 inches (50 cm) of space. No more space or privacy. This was a real concentration camp … In this camp a lot of the men were already very old and since they were dying like flies my mother managed to obtain mattresses for us.’ Death came to the barrack blocks daily. ‘The dead were carried to the make-shift morgue on a
stretcher covered with a white sheet and when I asked what was happening I was told that the person was asleep.’42
At her Javanese internment camp, Elizabeth van Kampen had also fallen ill. ‘Every two weeks I had a malaria attack,’ she recalled. ‘I had tropical abscesses underneath my feet and in the end I also suffered from oedema. My mother too had malaria and another type of oedema, my younger sister had jaundice and the youngest one also had malaria and she became completely apathetic.’ Children perished under these conditions. ‘I have seen it daily how little children died of hunger and mothers who stood there with no tears left in their eyes when their dead children were carried out of the camp.’43
