Children of the Camps

by Mark Felton

  Once boys were old enough they would be forcibly removed from their mothers and sent to men’s internment camps. Heartrending scenes were played out. ‘I have seen little boys … taken away from their mothers and … sent to a camp for men only. They stood there on a truck, 10 years old leaving their mothers while their fathers were somewhere else, maybe Burma or maybe dead,’44 wrote van Kampen. The attitude of the Japanese commandant and his men to the suffering of the women and children was confusing to the internees. ‘[The] whole situation was so inhuman,’ recalled van Kampen, ‘we were all completely lost in a sadistic and very racial discriminating world. We couldn’t understand Japanese, so they screamed louder and louder.’45

  As in the rest of the Occupied Territories, child and teenaged internees were almost daily forced to bear witness to horrific bouts of physical abuse and torture perpetrated by their guards against anyone deemed to have broken the camp rules. The ‘punishments’ that were meted out to internees would today be classified as torture. ‘I have seen how women have been beaten up so badly that almost all their bones were broken,’ recalled Elizabeth van Kampen. ‘I can still hear the screaming in my head, we all had to stand there to watch.’ Lengthier punishments were often perpetrated by the guards, the rationale being to serve as a warning to the other prisoners to obey with a capital ‘O’. ‘I have seen three women be hanged for twelve hours long under the burning tropical sun, with their hands tied up on their backs. We had to watch all the time with tears in our eyes.’46

  At Bangkinang Camp on Sumatra, a small contingent of British internees formed a distinctive section of the mainly Dutch prisoner population. Being such a tiny minority affected British children significantly. ‘The part that I remember most vividly in Bankinang is how I lost the command of English, my native tongue, because we were with so many Dutch,’ recalled child internee Paget Eames. ‘There were also some Eurasians, some Indians, and a lot of Tamils, Chinese and Malays.’ Eames described the regime: ‘The Japanese even made the children work – we had to go and tend their gardens and collect buckets of water for them. We had to bow every time we saw a Japanese soldier and my friend and I would bow but we swore in Dutch under our breath as we did so, and we always had to say, “Nippon banzai! Nippon banzai! [Japan ten thousands years!]” ’ Punishment occurred regularly. ‘If anyone committed an offence, they were made to stand out in the sun for a very long period.’ Eames’s mother was a pillar of strength under very trying circumstances. ‘Every day my mother said to me, ‘Look, we’re going to make it.’ She also told me to keep the idea of my father with me, because we didn’t know what had happened to him.’47

  In June 1944, internee Johan Rijkee and his family were transferred again. They were taken out of Karangpanas Semarang Camp in Java, where they had been imprisoned for many months, and driven by bus to Camp 6 Ambarawa in the central part of the island. Predictably, conditions at the new camp were not much of an improvement and in many ways the family’s situation was deteriorating – the case for all prisoners of the Japanese. The Japanese continued to concentrate civilian internees into bigger camps, whilst concurrently reducing the sizes of camps.

  This camp was better organized than the previous one. However it was a very crowded camp. Space per person was now 18 inches (45 cm). The food situation was still very bad but at least they gave you something twice a day. Many times we were chased out of the barracks, when the Japanese wanted to search for forbidden articles such as money, pencils, paper, diaries, gold items etc. I managed to hide my father’s signet ring by putting it on one of my toes and covering it with dirt or mud.48

  The cruelty of the Japanese guards was as evident at the new camp as before, and Rijkee, still only a very young child, witnessed several harrowing incidents that were to stay with him into adulthood. ‘One day while I was sweeping, two Japanese were beating an Indonesian gentleman with bamboo sticks. When the blood was pouring out of his mouth one Japanese got an old food tin to collect the blood. They then forced the man to drink his own blood.’49 The emotional roller-coaster of civilian internment damaged children permanently, and in effect the violence that they were exposed to, and sometimes received, was a form of mass child abuse perpetrated by a nation state.

  The Japanese hated idleness, and any work, no matter how demeaning or pointless, was made compulsory, largely to increase punishment. Children were forced to labour alongside their parents. ‘The hardest job was cutting grass between the barracks which was done by using a kitchen knife,’ recalled Rijkee. ‘Somebody then stole my knife, which was a major disaster because my mother had now only one knife left. The lightest but most frightening job was sweeping the Japanese quarters near the gate. Not only were the Dutch inmates punished there, but also Indonesians from outside the camp.’50 It was whilst sweeping this area that Rijkee had witnessed the torture of a local by two Japanese guards recounted above. Such sights were part of the normal, everyday rhythm of Japanese internment camps. Yet the usual sadistic cruelty could be suddenly punctuated by unexpected kindnesses from the Japanese towards the children. ‘Another time when I was sweeping the Japanese Commander’s bedroom, he came rushing in and ushered me outside pointing to a high flying British or U.S. war plane,’ recalled Rijkee. ‘He then forced me to hide under his bed. I suppose he wanted to convince me that the plane was the real enemy. When I finished cleaning his bedroom he gave me a biscuit.’51

  7

  Hard Times

  My brother told me that he remembers me sitting with this bowl of ghastly porridge stuff, which was just packed with weevils, and I was delicately picking out each weevil and putting it on the side of my plate, whereas he was eating it all and saying, ‘It’s more protein.’

  Jacqueline Honnor, British child internee

  Santo Tomas Camp, Manila

  There was a difference between the experiences of those children who were interned in the single-sex camps and those who lived in the mixed camps. The single-sex camps were mainly located in the Netherlands East Indies and, as we have seen from descriptions of the Tjideng Ghetto in Batavia, they were extremely grim places compared with the mixed camps in Shanghai, Manila, Hong Kong and Singapore. In the former the Japanese forced everyone except the very smallest children to perform manual labour and they actively banned education. The mothers and other women in these camps leaned very heavily on the older children to take up some of the duties of absent husbands and fathers, including work and childcare. Inevitably, many of the youngest children were left unsupervised for hours at a time, and their lives lacked the structure afforded to British and American interned children in the mixed camps. An astounding 33,700 out of a total of 41,260 Western children interned by the Japanese during the war were Dutch, and they suffered the majority of the ill-treatment given out by the Japanese.

  Ernest Hillen was eight years old when he entered Bloemenkamp internment centre. His mother was immediately sent to work. ‘My mother was a mover, handing furniture out of houses and, after sorting … loading it on to huge wooden carts that had been pulled by buffalo before the war. These she and other “furniture ladies” then pushed to already empty houses for storage for the Japanese: to be used in their quarters or shipped to Japan. She did this all day long in the sun, growing brown and thin.’ Hillen’s elder brother also worked. ‘Jerry was put to work in the kitchens where boys of his age [12] lifted drums of boiling water or soup or rice from wood fires and toted them around on bamboo poles. I was left alone.’1

  Some of the mothers in the Dutch camps tried to begin education classes for the youngest children, but the pressures of work interfered with this. At one camp, the Japanese tolerated a school for three months before shutting it down, also outlawing a whole host of other activities important to the internees. ‘No more shows, no more school, no more gym, no more church, no more meetings unless with guards, no more nothing,’ recalled one former internee, ‘instead we had to work harder.’2 ‘Education was not allowed,’ recalled another internee, ‘so if there
was a bit of education we had to do it in secret. I had the Old Testament with me … I feared that I would forget how to read so every day I read for half-anhour. I taught my sister to reckon [add-up] and a bit of reading and writing but we had to do it with some wood in the sand. I taught them to sing several songs. I told them fairy stories.’ In this case, an older child was effectively a mother to her younger siblings, and a teacher. ‘It was difficult. My little sister would ask “What is a horse?”, “What is a sofa?”, “What is a father?” This was so difficult … That was the only education we had.’3

  Connie was ten when the Japanese sent her to work. ‘The Japanese insisted I did one-and-a-half hours every day cleaning the streets with other girls of my age … Some had to clean the toilets, the drains and the floors. After the morning parade I had to clean and wash the vegetables, clean the big pots they used to cook rice. I would then go to my sisters where my next duty was to catch flies. Everyday we each had to hand in ten dead flies. The Japanese ordered this.’4

  Eleven-year-old Eurasian British internee Eileen Harris was imprisoned in Sime Road Camp in Singapore. The Japanese had suddenly moved her, her British father, Malay mother, and six siblings from the infamous Changi Prison after eighteen months of tough internment. At Sime Road, the internees were segregated according to gender and herded into wooden huts, ninety persons to each hut. Although Harris was in the same camp as her father, who ironically had been a prison warder before the war, she had little opportunity to see him during the duration of their imprisonment.

  At Sime Road, working closely to Prime Minister Tojo’s orders, the Japanese used the entire camp as a giant pool of slave labour, including the very youngest children. In some spurious and convoluted way, the Japanese believed that this illegal action was somehow helping their war effort. ‘Every morning we were all put to work, cutting grass, cleaning drains and knitting socks for the Jap soldiers,’ said Harris, describing the experiences of young children inside the camp. At Sime Road, some of the organization present in the other British camps, such as Changi, appears to have been lacking – probably due to malnutrition and, in some cases, outright starvation amongst the prisoners. ‘We had no schooling, so played amongst ourselves most of the time.’5 Starvation was, it appears from the available evidence, deliberately engineered by the camp authorities. ‘The food was awful,’ wrote Harris, ‘rice boiled until it looked like wallpaper paste, a bit of salt, fish and plants were added to make it interesting.’ Children actively foraged for food just to survive. ‘Hiding and exploring one day, a friend and I realised that a nearby underground sewer ran past the Japanese quarters and right beside their food store. At great risk, while she kept guard, I crawled along the sewer tunnel, out of a drain cover and into the food store. There, I stuffed what I could into my flimsy clothes and crawled back again … Most of the food I managed to get back was given to those who were really very ill.’6 Her father, alongside all of the other male prisoners, was sent out to labour in the fields, where he was regularly brutalized by sadistic guards. ‘My father was very badly beaten and he never forgave them.’7

  In the Netherlands East Indies, Ernest Hillen’s mother coped with the horrors of internment through sheer determination. She was ‘stubborn about routine’, and she focused her children’s minds on the ideals of family and national and Western cultural rituals in an effort to civilize her sons and survive. ‘Always say “good morning” at the start of the day,’ recalled Hillen, ‘drinking tea in the afternoon (or hot water if there was no tea): talking in the evening; and celebrating – our birthdays, those of friends in the camp, my father’s, those of family members in Canada and Holland and of the royals of both countries and all feast days of both. “It’s fun,” she told us, “this is how we’ll survive.”’8

  Many mothers severely disciplined their children in the Dutch camps. The mothers ‘were hyper-nervous, underfed, overworked, and were cooped up in the heat in such appalling condition for so long that they were often at the end of their tether. As a result, some disciplined their children harshly and then were racked with guilt.’9 As we have seen, some of the boys over ten or eleven years of age were taken away from their mothers and placed in the men’s camps, where they also faced serious challenges. ‘It was lousy-bad,’ recalled one boy prisoner at Ambarawa 8 Camp. ‘Looking after the old sick men. We had to do the dirty work … Emptying pots because they were not able to get to the toilets, cleaning them, taking them to a special place when they were dead and putting them in a coffin – sometimes twenty and thirty a day … We were cutting wood, unloading trains … At the end they put two camps together. Obviously things got worse.’ Large numbers of young boys eked out an existence completely separated from their families. ‘We were eight hundred boys in one barracks close together, all night people always going to the toilet … It was always dirty, other people didn’t manage to get to the toilet in time … It was terrible, you were never alone …’10

  Ten-year-old Olga Henderson was at Changi Camp along with her parents and two brothers. This was a mixed-gender camp. They were forced to tend allotments and then to hand over all the vegetables that they managed to grow to the Japanese, who, due to the very successful Allied submarine campaign against Japanese supply lines, were also starting to feel the pinch. Inadequate rations forced even young children to risk their lives scavenging around the camps. ‘We used to go out at night on raiding parties,’ recalled Henderson. ‘You had to be quick to get in between the searchlights. If you were seen, the guards would open fire.’ Being captured on any of these illicit operations would result in physical punishment, children included. ‘If you were caught, they’d make you kneel on the tarmac road all day in the sun. If you fell over, the guards would whip you until you got on your knees again.’11

  Henderson was a member of the Girl Guides and she, along with seventeen other young girls, decided to make a patchwork quilt as a birthday present for their leader. This seemingly innocuous activity was fraught with very real danger, for the Japanese had forbidden practically every leisure activity enjoyed by prisoners on pain of a beating or even death. The Japanese commandant was determined to make prisoners’ lives absolutely devoid of diversions and interests. Their humanity was being carefully and deliberately stripped from them by the Japanese regime. Henderson and her friends determined to make the quilt regardless of the rules, determined perhaps to retain something of their old lives amid the horror of the camp, by engaging in an activity that young and free girls enjoy all over the world – needlecraft. Every scrap of material required for the quilt, which eventually measured six feet long and three feet wide (1.8 × .9 m), had to be scrounged, and putting the quilt together had to be done in the strictest secrecy. ‘To get what we wanted, we had to steal or scrounge,’ recalled Henderson. ‘The fabric came from bedcases, pillowcases, anything. If someone dropped a handkerchief, you kept it. If you saw a bit of rag hanging on a line, we’d steal it.’ The secret sewing circle met once a week ‘in a hut with two little windows with grilles on. We used to show each other what we had managed to scrounge. Pickings were so thin that the quilt took over two years to make. To get thread, we’d unpick worn-out clothes. The back of the quilt was made of calico flour bags.’ The girls worked in constant fear of discovery by roving Japanese guards. ‘The Japanese couldn’t know about it – they’d beat you if they found you doing something you shouldn’t. If you heard their boots on the concrete floors, you’d have no time to hide. You’d just have to shove the bit you were working on down your knickers, needle and all.’12 The quilt now resides in the collection of the Imperial War Museum in London, one of the more unusual objects to have emerged from the Japanese internment camps.

  At Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila, food had become the main topic of conversation among the American and British internees, for there was never enough to feed the almost 4,000 men, women and children. The camp was desperately overcrowded, and the living conditions of many of the internees were terrible as insufficie
nt accommodation space had meant that hundreds of families were living in destitution inside a shanty town on the campus. ‘The really vital part of our day was getting food any way we could,’ recalled British child internee Jacqueline Honnor. ‘My brother had a spinach garden, and we grew ginger, which seemed to do well. The Japanese kept pigs and they would put out their pig swill and I’m afraid the kids would go and get it if they possibly could.’13

  For the first two years of the war, the commandant had allowed the internees to barter for extra rations with local Filipinos, who had been permitted to enter to camp to trade. Allotments had also been laid out to grow vegetables, though some of the campus grounds were taken up by shanties, which limited how much food the internees could grow. Fraternizing with the local population was stopped when the Imperial Army took over the running of the camp in 1943. The new commandant, Lieutenant Colonel Toshio Hayashi, instituted controls over the rice issued to the prisoners in order to make more available to Japanese troops, who were running low on supplies as General MacArthur’s army prepared to invade the Philippines any day, and this caused terrible suffering among the internee population. The Japanese cut the rice ration from three servings a day to only two. ‘My brother told me that he remembers me sitting with this bowl of ghastly porridge stuff, which was just packed with weevils, and I was delicately picking out each weevil and putting it on the side of my plate,’ remembered Honnor, ‘whereas he was eating it all and saying, ‘It’s more protein.’’ ’

  Hunger drove some internees to extreme lengths to feed themselves and their families. Stealing among the prisoners increased dramatically, leading the camp committee to take steps to punish those who were caught, not only to enforce a sense of community upon the prisoners but also to prevent the Japanese from taking over the punishing of the internees themselves. Extra-curricular activities dropped off sharply as vitamin deficiency diseases like beriberi and scurvy increased, and one of the first things to go was the education classes for the children. ‘Some people became panic-stricken and ate boiled hibiscus leaves or cats but the doctors soon put a stop to this for those people became very sick. However, the large flock of pigeons that had nested in the eaves gradually disappeared,’14 recalled American internee Ada Hayes. A few of the elderly internees at Santo Tomas actually died of starvation, but fortunately the children fared a little better. Parents made sacrifices for their children, and even the Japanese occasionally showed a glimmer of humanity towards them. ‘During the periods when the Japs were dining, the children would hang around the table. When they could not stand it any more, they would toss scraps of food from the table to the wide-eyed hungry children.’15