by Loet Velmans
Our peace and quiet lasted for about two weeks. Then, early one morning at daybreak, a large new contingent of guards arrived. The combat troops had gone on to fight other battles; these new soldiers were the occupying force—our jailers. They immediately began patrolling the perimeter of our camp, installed a barbed-wire checkpoint at the gate, set up sentry posts at the corners, and summoned us to an eight o’clock roll call. Whereas the previous guards had left us alone most of the time, these new ones were a constantly menacing presence. They shouted at us at the top of their voices; they ran around on the double, rifle in hand, their body language expressing anger, impatience, and contempt.
Just before the eight o’clock muster, a smartly dressed band of Japanese soldiers marched in, escorting a sleek, shiny staff car that had once belonged to the Dutch headquarters staff, none of whom had ever visited us. The vehicle sported a large flag with an equally large red sun on it. Officers in pressed khaki uniforms, open-necked shirts, and polished high boots, one white-gloved hand resting on the hilt of their samurai swords, thronged around the most senior officer—our new commandant and warden—who mounted a small platform. We all stood at attention. You could have heard a pin drop. Then the officer started to bellow at us in Japanese. One of our interpreters translated that all radio receivers were to be turned in immediately. At roll call, we were to bow to the north to pay our respects to the emperor. We were to salute every Japanese soldier we passed. We would be put to work to earn our keep. We were not to have any contact with the outside world, and no one was allowed to enter or leave the camp without the express permission of the commandant. Any infraction on any of these rules would be severely punished; the penalty for attempting to escape was death.
Then he decided to give a little demonstration. Three prisoners had tried to escape from another camp, he said. He grabbed the rifle of one of his soldiers, let out a blood-curdling yell, and ran toward one of his lackeys as if he was going to drive the bayonet into his heart. He stopped just short of his target, and said no more. There was no need for a translation; his pantomime had been clear enough. We all held our breath. I looked around stealthily. My fellow prisoners and I stood erect, our bodies tense. I was scared and had difficulty controlling the trembling of my knees and the nausea that welled up in my stomach. Grimly the commandant walked back to the platform. He stopped again, impassively tossing the rifle at the soldier whose life he had threatened. It was the first time in my life that I was seriously afraid.
After spelling out the Japanese rules of our confinement and the penalty for breaking them, our new Japanese commandant ordered us to continue standing stock still while he outlined his vision of a new world order. The war was almost over, he said. When the time came, we would be sent home to the Netherlands. A victorious Japan would not tolerate either the Dutch, British, Americans, or French in the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” From the instant the first Japanese soldier had set foot on Java, he said, the Dutch East Indies had ceased to exist. The former Dutch colony was now incorporated into the Japanese Empire. Our fear was quickly replaced by scorn: the man was a raving lunatic.
From the start of the new regime, we had received no new supplies. We placed ourselves on reduced rations. The Japanese seemed to have no immediate intention of replenishing our reserves of rice, sugar, salt, oil, and other provisions. Our doctors took similar precautions: they restricted the dispensing of bandages, aspirin, quinine, and other medicines.
Rumors continued to have a life of their own. For twenty-four hours we lived in a state of euphoria, convinced of the truth of a report that the Americans had landed somewhere on Java. We came down to earth with a bang. No Americans arrived, but three Eurasian privates who attempted to escape that day were caught almost immediately. Our commandant proved true to his word. The next morning they were bayoneted to death. We were driven out of our barracks to witness the event. The Japanese guards were ordered to attend as well. Some of them were smiling and snickering; they seemed to be genuinely enjoying the spectacle. It marked my first encounter with killing and death.
We were all deeply depressed after that. We could not cheer each other up—this was not going to be a picnic. But our dark mood lasted only a few days. My friends and I were young, healthy, and resilient. We were put to work maintaining the camp in spick-and-span order. After work, the soccer league took to the field. A group of amateur actors organized a cabaret, which put on a new show every Saturday night. The teachers and academics began offering courses on a variety of subjects. It was all a concerted effort to keep up morale.
The first labor project the Japanese had in store for us was erecting a double fence around our barracks. The outer one was made of bamboo, the inner one of barbed wire. We were now properly imprisoned and could not see out. I strung barbed wire, and also had the thankless detail of cleaning the latrines used by the Japanese. This was one of the most risky tasks in camp—the Japanese soldiers in charge of our cleaning unit got a little overexcited seeing us on all fours, and beat us with passionate zeal.
We did not understand the behavior of the Japanese at first. Japanese officers, NCOs and privates alike, showed us only one face: cruel, ruthless, and devoid of any humanity. They would beat us up on the slightest pretext, using fist, stick, rifle butt, or boot. They doled out punishments if we failed to salute, if they saw two of us chatting, if they heard us laugh, or most frequently, for no reason that we could discern. Once, at early-morning roll call, several Dutch soldiers were judged to have failed to bow deeply enough in the direction of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. They were found guilty of disrespect and sentenced to stand at attention under the burning sun until sundown.
What made these Japanese soldiers lash out at us with such excessive fury? By listening carefully to our interpreter, we finally began to understand a few things. In the eyes of the Japanese, we were cowards. We had surrendered too quickly, without a fight. By surviving, we had offended the Japanese sense of honor and propriety. A Japanese warrior who was defeated was expected to take his own life. Suicide meant atonement for the dishonor of defeat, a dishonor that otherwise placed an unbearable burden on a warrior’s family and the nation as a whole. We were reminded over and over again that we were alive thanks only to the beneficence of the emperor, and that we were fortunate to be allowed to serve him as his loyal vassals.
Naturally, to us this talk was just so much gibberish. But our captors were so serious about it that we were finally persuaded that they truly believed what they were saying.
In fact, as I later learned, the guidelines for the treatment of POWs came from the very top. Prime Minister Tojo, in a meeting with his defense chiefs in Tokyo in April 1942, personally advocated a policy of humiliating POWs. He rejected his foreign minister’s recommendation, as well as the advice of one of his own senior generals, that Japan should adhere to the standards of the Geneva Convention (a document never signed by the Japanese). Tojo based his decision on the belief that treating POWs harshly would improve the morale of the natives of Southeast Asia and cure them of any respect they might have harbored for their former colonial masters. Europeans and Americans would be put on display, shown to be miserable creatures who, once stripped of their power, were both cowardly and shamefully subservient. On Java this Japanese strategy worked immediately. Many Indonesians were delighted to see the white master, now clothed in tatters, marched through the city streets on his way to some degrading manual labor. There was even applause for the beatings the Japanese guards dished out—the former colonial rulers were finally taken down a peg or two!
Some POWs managed to escape the blows and kicks; others, less fortunate, nursed their injuries for weeks. We suffered collectively; we were also acutely aware of the Japanese contempt for us. At mealtimes, when we were allowed to sit together, and at night, in the darkness of our hut, we returned the compliment.
Before falling asleep, under my torn army-issue mosquito net, I lay thinking of my happy youth, gone forever. I tri
ed to visualize the family celebrations, my summer holidays in the mountains of the Bernese Oberland, on the coast of Dorset, and in the Rhone Valley, near Lyon. I had a vivid picture of my seventeenth birthday party at home in Scheveningen with my friends Jaap and Hans, my cousin Dick and Jules van Hessen, and some of the prettiest girls in my class. I also saw my parents before me: I heard my mother’s happy, sometimes forced and exaggerated laugh, and winked back at my father’s wry smile. I was growing increasingly concerned about their fate. For the first time in my life, I spent time thinking about my relationship with my parents. I wondered why I had never been closer to Father. We had never talked freely or shared our feelings, except when we discussed world events—all the major political and military developments, subjects of passionate interest to us both. Why had I not told him more about myself? About my friends, about school, my arguments with Mr. Brouwer, the Nazi biology teacher? And why had I never asked this proud and independent man how it felt to be looked on as a refugee, first in London and then in the Indies?
Did I seem as distant to him as he seemed to me? Or was it Mother who had interposed herself between us, preventing us from establishing a closer bond? I tended to think of Mother as always pushing herself to the fore-front, as speaking for all of us, always answering her own questions before I could open my mouth. And of her often embarrassing me in front of others. I did worry about her, of course. But I spent even more time dreaming of the beautiful hairdresser’s daughter and about walking hand in hand with Marie-France in the woods around Lyon.
It was a time of daydreaming. I fantasized about the nature of my freedom. Would I go back to Holland? Perhaps England was a better place to go to university. Even in wartime, London had seemed a livelier city than The Hague. It never occurred to me to make a life on Java: Asia, I felt, belonged to the Asians. (Of course, I couldn’t foresee that throughout the rest of my life I would retain a feeling of nostalgia for the lush Indonesian landscape and the sight and smell of the buildings in the back of our house in Jakarta where our djongos and his family had lived.)
At least once a week we were subjected to a harangue delivered by our Japanese camp commander. We would be ordered to stand at attention while a flood of angry Japanese words washed over us. The officer did not pause long enough to allow our Dutch army interpreter to keep up a running translation. We didn’t understand a word until, at the very end of the speech, lasting twenty to forty-five minutes, we were given the gist of what had been said—a mixture of profanities, threats of our impending death, and always, an obsequious hymn of praise to the emperor of Japan. While these insults and obscenities were being hurled at us, we had to remain standing rigidly still. The slightest movement put us at risk of a beating by the Japanese privates who walked up and down our ranks, rifle butts at the ready.
The bombastic martial language did not sound too dissimilar from that of Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, whose ranting I had listened to on the radio at home in Scheveningen. The difference was that now I could hear it live, right here in the middle of our campground. Although I tried to shrug off the threats, it often felt as if a noose was being tightened around my neck. I experienced real fear. Compared to this, the crossing from Scheveningen to Dover had been a breeze—a boy’s adventure.
Our commandant never tried to persuade us of his point of view, never justified his own actions or those of his superiors and subordinates, nor did he provide an incentive for good behavior. There was no point hoping for better food or medicine, or even the least reward for our obedience. Repeatedly we were told how he and his men were going to punish us for having started the war, for daring to think that we could put up any sort of resistance against the emperor. He and his men were going to see to it that we would all go to hell.
One day, two American merchant marines were pushed out of a truck onto our doorstep, victims of a bureaucratic foul-up that had separated them from several hundred other Americans who had been captured on Java. They were ordered to bunk in my hut. We became fast friends. I taught them the ropes—how to avoid Japanese patrols, which latrine to use at night when a strict curfew was in effect, where cigarettes—of which they carried a large supply—fetched the best price, and where to buy the black-market rarities we all craved: canned corned beef and sardines and sweetened condensed milk. They talked about “back home” and lent me their old copies of the Saturday Evening Post and House & Garden. Reading these magazines further whetted my appetite for America. My image of that faraway country had been formed by The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a few Hollywood movies, the music of Benny Goodman and the Andrews Sisters (on whose recordings I used to spend my entire monthly allowance), and a single Duke Ellington concert I’d attended in The Hague, where I had enthusiastically clapped and stamped my feet. Perhaps my admiration for America was an outgrowth of my admiration for all things English. In any case, I took an instant liking to these two Americans, the first I ever got to know. Everywhere in the camps, Americans were called “Yanks,” an Australian army designation. I appropriated these two—they became my Yanks.
It took a day to devour, and a week or two to commit to memory, the magazines’ pages of mouthwatering food advertisements. I was fascinated by the small-town rural America depicted by Norman Rockwell. (Sometimes I wonder whether I chose to retire near Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where Rockwell lived and worked, because of the indelible visual impression left on me by those Saturday Evening Post covers with their enticing depiction of a carefree normality that was so hopelessly unattainable in prison camp.)
After eight months in our old barracks in Bandung, we were given a day’s notice to pack up. It was not until well after midnight of the next day that we were marched to the Bandung station. There we boarded a train for an eight-hour journey to a camp just north of Tandjong Priok, Batavia’s port and main shipping terminal, where my parents and I had disembarked only about two years earlier.
After three weeks in a camp not dissimilar to our own, we were on the road again, this time on foot. In order to avoid the heat and humidity of the day, we were marched to the docks in the middle of the night, carrying our gear. The roads were completely deserted except for the Japanese staff cars that sped up and down our column. In the night’s quiet and darkness, we were not rushed and could proceed at a leisurely pace. When we reached the port, we were herded onto an old and battered Japanese freighter. Close to two thousand men were sardined into several holds next to or on top of each other. My mates and I could only see what was immediately around us: a sea of men in a space so cramped that it was almost impossible to lie down.
The four-day voyage felt like an eternity. Nauseated by the stench of vomit, urine, and feces, soaked in sweat, we nearly suffocated from lack of air. Occasionally the hatch was opened, letting in a blast of heavy and humid tropical air. Then the hatch was closed again. Twice a day, a barrel of watery soup with a few grains of rice floating in it was lowered and distributed in meager portions. Twice a day we climbed a narrow ladder and stood on deck, pressed uncomfortably together, herded by a handful of guards. We were allowed on deck only long enough for a detail of POWs to hose down the hold. On deck there were four smelly stalls. We pleaded to have more time for their use. The response was kurro! — Japanese for “hurry up.” In less than an hour we were driven back down into our hell down below. The voyage sapped all our strength. Diarrhea was rampant; about half a dozen men died.
As soon as I felt firm land underfoot, my zest for life returned. We had landed in Singapore. On the quayside some of our own men were assigned to hose down the others. Gratefully I undressed and stood naked under a strong jet of water. For the first time in days, I smelled clean and felt invigorated: the filth, sweat, and despair was washed away. But the Japanese were in a hurry again. My shower lasted only a minute. Some of my friends risked a beating by holding their clothes and other belongings under the stream too. Our spirits soared. Refreshed, we were sure that whatever awaited us, nothing could ever be as bad as that crossing.
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Trucks ferried us past a large square building surrounded by an imposing wall that one Dutchman who had lived in Singapore identified as the infamous Changi Gaol. When we drove on and it was clear that the prison building was not our destination, he cheered. I let out a yell of relief too, for the building reminded me of the prison around the corner from our home in Scheveningen. Our celebration was short-lived; a few minutes later our convoy came to a halt, and we were ordered to get out of the trucks. We had stopped in the middle of a sprawling complex of two-story stone barracks in a garden-type setting. We were still in Changi, but in an outlying complex where the guards and other prison staff used to be housed.
Thousands of captives—British, Australian, and Dutch—were crowded into our camp. They did not exactly welcome the arrival of another contingent of POWs. A new lot of prisoners came through the same gate at least once a week, further restricting the already overcrowded living and sleeping space.
The barracks were a cosmopolitan mini-metropolis. Bandung had been a provincial backwater compared to Singapore. The POWs who were already there had developed an amazing menu of activities to keep us occupied—from international soccer matches, chess and bridge tournaments, art shows, comedy theater, and classical and jazz concerts to lectures and courses in mathematics, drawing, philosophy, English literature, history of art, ancient and modern history, French, Chinese, and many other subjects.
Not everyone was engaged in intellectual pursuits. Heavy betting was the order of the day among select groups of poker players. Money gained and lost was tallied on scraps of paper; one copy for the winner, one for the loser, to be cashed in when the war was over—in the not too distant future. Hundreds of British pounds in the form of IOUs changed hands. Meanwhile, a much larger crowd found entertainment and stimulation in bingo nights held twice a week.
