Children of the Camps

by Mark Felton

  At Kampong Makassar Camp in Java, the Japanese did not inform the 3,500 women and children internees that the war was over until 17 August 1945, two days after Japan had surrendered. The prisoners stayed put, unsure of what to do or where to go. ‘We had no courage to flee the camp,’ recalled Nel Halberstadt, who had a three-year-old daughter and realized that outside the camp rival gangs of Indonesian nationalists posed just as big a threat to life as the Japanese ever had. ‘One day men arrived in search of their wives and children,’ recalled Halberstadt. ‘Oh, what a sad sight that was, all those skeletal-like men only clothed in a “jawat” (loin cloth). In their hundreds the women and children flew towards the gate to see whether their husband or father was amongst them.’ Halberstadt’s young daughter ran to her mother. ‘Robke, loudly shrieking, came running into the hospital. “Mama, come quick. To the gate! Otherwise all the daddies will be gone!” What did she know what a daddy was. She had so often stood in the queue when something was handed out and thought we might miss out if we weren’t there quick enough. That moment I felt like crying. I told her she already had a daddy, that the man in the photograph was her daddy.’16 There was no happy reunion for Nel Halberstadt and her husband – he had already perished inside a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp.

  When the first British officers arrived to take charge of the Japanese internment camps, they were stunned by what they found. In the Netherlands East Indies, the camps resembled the recently liberated Nazi concentration camps in Europe. After visiting Tjideng, Kramat and Strimsweg Camps, one British officer, Lieutenant Colonel Read-Collins, wrote of the internees: ‘Their entire existence appeared to revolve around hunger and starvation. They were so conditioned to hunger by September 1945 that when adequate supplies of food arrived the women camp leaders could hardly be persuaded to issue them. They felt that it would be rash not to hoard them against some future shortage.’17 The tendency to hoard scraps of food was just one aspect of the psychological wound the Japanese had inflicted upon the internees. All of the prisoners had become compulsive hoarders, with an urge to acquire and possess trivial things like string, cigarette packets and cellophane paper. When the internees in the Netherlands East Indies were sent home by ship to Holland, many carried old tins with them, and during the voyage they saved every scrap or crumb of food from each meal inside these containers.

  Lieutenant Colonel Read-Collins noted that most of the women internees were listless and showed little or no emotion. The children in the camps, according to this British officer, were largely the same. All had suffered from dysentery and a multitude of other tropical diseases and they were all painfully thin. ‘Many of the youngest boys and girls had not seen a white man for the better part of their life. They would not have recognized their fathers,’ writes Gavan Daws. ‘And their fathers would not have recognized them, little boys and girls grown older but no taller, with stick legs and the distended bellies of malnutrition, hardly knowing where they were or who they were.’18

  The very worst camp was the Tjideng Ghetto in Batavia. By July 1945, the commandant, Captain Kenichi Sonei, had over 10,000 women and children confined in an area measuring only 1,000 square yards. The Japanese had taken away all the doors and windows from the Ghetto buildings and during the stifling heat of summer the inmates had suffered terribly. Women prisoners wandered about in thin cotton dresses over their painfully emaciated bodies, or just in their underwear. All had suffered from malaria, as well as oedema caused by a poor diet, and dysentery, beriberi and malnutrition. The husbands and older boys had been separated from the women years earlier and they were discovered in an equally poor physical condition at Struiswijk Camp located inside an old prison on the edge of Batavia. Many of the husbands and fathers had also died earlier in the war when the Japanese had forced them aboard rusting steamers, the intention being to ship them to other parts of the empire as slave labour. Some of these ‘Hell Ships’ had fallen prey to American submarines off the coast of Sumatra.

  Outside Tijdeng Ghetto, the British discovered that there was no food shortage. Investigators found only well-fed Japanese soldiers and well-fed Indonesians, so the food shortages at the camp had been deliberately engineered by Captain Sonei and his superiors in order to further punish the civilian prisoners. Lieutenant Colonel Read-Collins discovered 1,200 patients in the camp hospital, around 10 per cent of the camp population, who probably would have died had liberation been delayed a week or so longer.

  The surviving Allied internees originally imprisoned at Muntok Camp on Banka Island, who had been moved several times during the last year of the war, ended up at Loembok Linggan Camp in Sumatra. Incredibly, the Japanese had continued to run the camp as if the war was still going for over a week after Japan’s capitulation, and had concealed the fact that the war was over from the internees. The only concession to reality made by the Japanese had been the sudden increase in the quantity and quality of the rations they distributed to the internees through the month of August. It appears to have been a rather late attempt by the Japanese authorities to develop better relations with the prisoners. When the surrender announcement was at last made, it was the commandant himself who stood on a table and addressed the entire camp. ‘The war is over,’ he announced to his dumbfounded audience. ‘England won. Now we all friends.’19

  Allied troops liberated the camp a week after the commandant’s announcement and they discovered that the Japanese had been hoarding Red Cross food parcels sent to the internees, as well as stockpiling life-saving medicines. The Japanese had been using this illicit supply for their own purposes, in violation of the Rules of War. Undoubtedly, this cynical exploitation of resources intended to help prisoners led to countless deaths from starvation and disease. It was a common pattern throughout the Japanese camp system across Asia – everywhere Allied investigators discovered warehouses piled high with Red Cross parcels. Drina Boswell’s mother was in such a bad way that Allied doctors reckoned that she would have perished had the war lasted another week. As it was, the surviving members of the Boswell family, in common with thousands of other devastated families who had endured the camps, required immediate hospitalization due to the state of their health. The Boswells were flown to Singapore by the Royal Australian Air Force in September 1945. On arrival at the airport their plane was met by Red Cross volunteers who were eager to distribute steaming mugs of tea and slices of cake. As Drina reached for a slice of cake, a strong hand clamped down on her shoulder, and an army doctor spoke to the volunteers. ‘Nothing to this plane load of passengers,’ said the doctor. ‘They are too ill.’20 The Allies had learned the lessons of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau concentration camps liberated a few months before in Europe. If severely malnourished prisoners were overfed, they died. In the case of Singapore, army doctors had to be cruel to be kind and so bad was Drina Boswell’s health that it took a week in hospital before she could manage to eat a whole boiled egg. Drina also suffered another bout of malaria in the hospital. For many of the rescued former internees, the horrors of the camps continued to rack their bodies in the form of disease or parasites for decades after they had left the tropics, unpleasant reminders of the whole ordeal at Japanese hands.

  * C.J. Norman was Commissioner of Prisons in Hong Kong in the 1950s, and had spent the war in Stanley Internment Camp.

  12

  The Lost Children

  The Japanese tortured, murdered, raped and killed so many people, so many people, and nobody knows about it. Nobody cares. The Japanese Government would like people to believe that the war was a figment of our imagination and if there was a war, it was our fault anyway. They’re trying to whitewash the whole thing as something we dreamed up, or at worst, something we started.

  Rachel Bosebury Beck British child internee, Shanghai 1943–45

  ‘We spent three-and-a-half years in utter hell,’ said Muriel Parham, who was aged five when her family was interned in Manila and is now a spokeswoman for the Association of British Civilian Internees Far East Region. ‘W
e were all skeletons when we came out.’ Parham’s mother never recovered from the experience and committed suicide in 1960. ‘Nobody spoke about it after we came out,’ said Parham, ‘and the Japanese have never even admitted it happened.’1

  Eileen Harris, a British Eurasian who had been eleven years old when she was interned at Changi Prison in Singapore in early 1942, emerged an emaciated teenager from the Sime Road Camp in September 1945. Her family was reunited, but ‘we were too ill to start living a normal life,’ she recalled. The entire family was sent to a recuperation hospital in India. After that, they spent a further year in England before returning to Singapore. Her father resumed work as a prison warder at Outram Road Prison, ‘but he was far from a fit man due to his ill-treatment and the appalling hardships and privations.’ Harris’s mother, Clara, ‘was never fully well during the whole time of her captivity, was very ill and becoming weaker …’2 Eileen Harris’s parents both died on the same day in 1949. Her brothers and sisters were fostered out to relatives in England, and her family was scattered to the wind. This typical pattern of family break-up and physical and emotional trauma was the result of Japan’s failed quest for empire, and its race war against those who fell into its hands as civilian captives.

  Arie den Hollander was just four and a half years old when he was released from an internment camp on Java. The Den Hollander family, mother, father and child, arrived in the Netherlands after an extensive period of convalescence in Singapore and moved in with an aunt’s family. The experience of imprisonment had estranged Den Hollander’s parents and they divorced less than two years after being liberated. ‘My parents had grown apart from the effects of three and a half years of brutality and starvation at the hands of the Japs,’ recalled Den Hollander. ‘They were no longer the same people who had fallen in love with one another some years earlier.’ Den Hollander was left with relatives in Amsterdam and his father returned to military duties in Sumatra. ‘I was one of many kids who had been robbed of three and a half years of childhood behind the barbed wire of prison camps, where rules were many and pleasures didn’t exist,’ recalled Den Hollander. 3

  We didn’t talk about that miserable time. It was not the thing to do, and the countless shocking experiences were buried in our sub-consciousness. Consequently the people in the home country were not aware of what had actually happened. A striking example was a remark made by a kind soul who had spent the war in Holland under German occupation. ‘We had to make do with ersatz coffee and margarine instead of butter, and everything like meat was rationed,’ she moaned. ‘You were well out of it!’4

  One of the effects of prolonged incarceration in the camps was deep psychological damage to even very young children, as Den Hollander remarks: ‘Neither could people understand why I was such a weird child: timid, scared of every aircraft flying over, speaking politely in what was not much more than a whisper and positively terrified of anything approaching violence, even among children outside. If a crust of bread was left, or crumbs fell on the table, I would eat them or put them in my pocket for later, even though I was no longer hungry.’5 Den Hollander was still a toddler when he arrived in Amsterdam. ‘I, myself, had by now recovered enough to be able to get around without my legs trembling with the effort of standing up.’ Home life was strained. ‘At four and a half years old I should have had the benefit of a loving relationship, but less than two years later my parents were divorced, after the unhappy marriage was “blessed” with a second child.’ With his family unit unravelled in Amsterdam, young Den Hollander found it difficult to come to terms with his earliest childhood memories, which were all of the camps in Asia. ‘After the separation I, together with my little baby brother, were being cared for by people in Amsterdam I hardly knew, father having been posted back to Sumatra for another turn of military duty.’6

  Many adults who were prisoners of the Japanese when they were children have spoken about their own strange behaviour, similar to that exhibited by Arie den Hollander, after they returned to Europe or America. It was ingrained reflexive behaviour that was also commonplace among the adult prisoners, both civilians and military POWs, who were released from Japanese camps, and it had been created by habituation to a terrifyingly unpredictable regime where even tiny infractions of the rules brought on extreme violence, and by living with disease and starvation as daily bedfellows. Today, these survivors, children and adults, would be diagnosed with a form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and sent for treatment. In the immediate postwar period, psychological treatment was not even considered – people were expected to consider themselves lucky to have survived and were encouraged to bury the past and to move on with their lives. ‘If a crust of bread was left, or crumbs fell on the table, I would eat them or put them in my pocket for later, even though I was no longer hungry,’ are the words of Arie den Hollander as we have seen above, and this was extremely common behaviour among all released prisoners. Even among Allied soldiers who fought the Japanese in appalling jungle campaigns in Asia, many recall food shortages that have led to compulsive behaviours in later life. My paternal grandfather never leaves a scrap of food on his plate after a meal; when I asked him once why he ate absolutely everything, he recalled the dire situation for those young British soldiers operating deep in the Burmese jungle in early 1945, where, wracked by malaria and dysentery and with inadequate supplies, he and his comrades battled against fanatical Japanese troops in conditions few of us could imagine in our worst nightmares.

  Arie den Hollander remembered how normal childhood desires were absent from his life. ‘Toys were a wonder to me and we received a few, though for a long time I never asked for any. This was something, I felt, one didn’t need.’7 Some children were forced to confront what had happened to them more directly, as families returned to the colonies after a few years rest and recuperation in home countries, with many fathers returning to jobs that they knew and locales that they were familiar with from before the war. Arie den Hollander was seven when he was shipped back to the Netherlands East Indies. ‘The lady who cared for us married my father by proxy, and we boarded a steam ship to Belawan, Sumatra, to join him. After eighteen months as a family we received news that father’s new posting was to be in Holland and the three of us moved into a transition camp for a month in Semarang, from where we could be easily transported to the port as soon as a ship became available.’8 Being back inside a ‘camp’ was the event that broke down young Den Hollander’s fragile composure. ‘It was during this month in Semarang that nightmares I had suffered with from time to time suddenly increased in frequency. My father took me to see an army psychologist, who could not provide any answers.’9 In later life Den Hollander realized the profound significance of the Semarang camp and its relationship with his earlier experiences of internment. ‘It is, in retrospect, interesting to note that the transition camp, although comfortable and with plenty of food, was surrounded by a barbed wire fence and was guarded by armed military personnel to discourage any marauding Indonesian nationalists.’

  Rose, who had been a child prisoner of the Japanese at Bandoeng and Kampong Makassar Camps in the Netherlands East Indies, found herself unwillingly transported back to internment in much later life. ‘I had completely forgotten about the camp, until one fine summer day, some ten years ago, I tried to persuade a fat lazy fly to leave the room by waving a newspaper at it. Instead I killed it. The horror I felt was so disproportionate that it stayed with me for days. It was only when I read a book about our particular camp and the measures which the Japs had taken when the combination of open latrines and dysentery had caused the fly population to grow alarmingly, that I understood why. Handfuls of flies had to be handed in each day.’ Standing in her living room in 1995, five decades after the events that had profoundly shaped her childhood, ‘the sickly sweet smell came back, too. Horror upon horror.’10

  Not only had Arie den Hollander’s parents’ marriage collapsed because of internment, and his own life been scarred by his experiences as a very
young prisoner, but his relationship with his father became increasingly negative. In late 1950, the Den Hollander family moved back to the Netherlands and there took up lodgings with his stepmother’s sister and her husband. ‘My uncoordinated awkwardness would, at times, cause problems and my father, who had been hardened and twisted by the years under the Japs, was unable to restrain himself from becoming violent towards me. This caused a bit of friction with my step auntie and uncle. When we eventually moved to a home of our own, the relationship became more strained as I grew towards puberty and it was decided that I should spent a few years with another family in another town.’11 Arie den Hollander cut short his education and joined the merchant navy, working the North Sea coasters, and eventually he and his father became good friends.

  The psychological trauma and damage caused to the children of the Japanese wartime camps is a subject which has only just begun to be seriously studied – but it demonstrates how internment shaped the lives of children unlucky enough to experience it, and how the emotional baggage of that experience remains with the survivors, now all pensioners, to this day.

  13

  Blood Link

  Where my parents and grandparents were born has nothing to do with my Britishness, nor anyone else’s.