by Loet Velmans
Abruptly the Japanese stopped beating our stragglers. A standoff had been reached; a ragtag band of prisoners facing a solid line of Japanese soldiers, their bayonets aimed at our chests. Their leader barked a command; they lowered their guns and took a step back. “Sit,” their sergeant barked in both English and Japanese. We sat. The Japanese crouched, their rifles at the ready. We glared at each other. After two or three minutes of absolute silence, the order was given to move on. We took the weaker prisoners into the middle of our line and soon reached our destination.
The next night was the last of our nightly marches. The Japanese made no further effort to force the pace. Briefly we had won back our self-respect. And for a moment we thought, or liked to believe, that the Japanese saw us through different eyes. We had shown ourselves, we proudly felt, honorable warriors, if only for a fleeting moment. Still, the march cost us a dozen men—companions who died from exhaustion on the trail.
When we finally arrived at the camp that was to be our home for the next six months, we found it empty and far from finished. We gathered in front of two rows of identical, skeletal, and desolate-looking huts. Our own commanding officer asked us to stand in a half-circle around a Dutch Roman Catholic army chaplain who began a prayer. His words meant nothing to me; in my own way I tried to think of something positive. I looked for any sign of hope I might find in the pinched faces of my fellow POWs, in the trees and bushes surrounding us, or up above, high in the leafy ceiling hovering over the narrow clearing. We were a group of exhausted men huddled together around the chaplain. The sunlight broke through in uneven shafts.
For some never-explained reason, this new prison without walls was the only camp along the railroad that did not have a Thai name. It was called, ironically, Spring Camp.
5
Death Camp
WE HAD WALKED EIGHTY-SIX MILES but were put to work as soon as we arrived. First, we finished the construction of our huts, made of bamboo and roofed with atap palm leaves. The interior of the huts was divided into two low platforms made of split bamboo. We had practically no space on either side. Then we were ordered to clear the jungle from the muddy overgrown path that was used as a service road for the railroad under construction. On this badly potholed road, burlap bags of rice for the prisoners, food and other supplies for the Japanese guards, and rails and railroad ties could be delivered by truck.
The hardest and most dangerous part of the job, which kept us busy for several weeks, was cutting down trees. The Japanese in charge kept giving contradictory orders. At one time we were ordered to pull the ropes on a tree that was to fall in a certain direction; then our guards yelled at us to run back through thick underbrush to the other side, and pull hard in the opposite direction. No one actually got crushed, but there were several close calls. We grumbled incessantly; our sour mood was not improved by a Japanese command that we were to complete work on our own officers’ tent in the middle of the camp first before tackling what our British mates called “digs.” In general, though, the crews assigned to construct the rickety structures that would put a leaky roof over our heads displayed significantly more diligence than the road-building teams.
After the trees had been chopped down, I remained part of the crew that maintained our section of the road. It was a never-ending battle, as the heavy daily rains and the rapidly growing tropical vegetation made the road barely passable, even on the best of days. We were responsible for approximately three miles of road. There were flanking POW labor camps on either side (generally, the camps along our section of the Burma Road were from one to six miles apart). We were on the southeastern side of the Thai-Burma border, where at least thirty POW camps were located. In that broad area, the construction activity imposed on the Western military captives was intense. The Japanese plan called for us to be moved later to tackle other parts of the line farther to the northeast. My work with Spring Camp’s road crew lasted about two months.
After the access road had reached a passable stage, I was assigned to a unit that chiseled and hammered away at rocks that obstructed the railroad bed. We slaved nine hours a day, with just three short breaks. We were allowed less than an hour of free time, in the late afternoon, after work, and before supper. During the first few weeks, the Japanese, at unpredictable and unexpected intervals, might decide to give half the workers some time off on a Sunday morning or afternoon. In making the brusque announcement that some of us were furloughed for a few precious hours, the guards made it sound as if we had stolen something valuable from the emperor. In those rare free hours, we would engage in an ineffective battle to improve our living conditions—by digging new latrines, for instance, or building a narrow bamboo table down the center of our cramped sleeping quarters. We also tried to secure our hut against the drenching rain, but we did not have enough palm leaf for a proper roof. It is not unusual in this part of the tropics to be pummeled by up to ninety inches of rain during the four-month monsoon season. Insects throve in the oppressive humidity. Our hut was infested with all sorts of flying and crawling creatures. I would be awakened several times during the night by bedbugs. Their bites kept me awake much of the night, despite my physical exhaustion. I would doze off again after crushing a few bugs between my nails. The creatures left a sickly sweet smell.
Our food consisted of three small bowls of rice a day, a thimbleful of overcooked stringy vegetables, an occasional sweet potato, and sporadically, a soup of onions with, even more rarely, a few slivers of meat. The rice that had rotted away (on the open trucks that carried supplies to the camps) further reduced our rations. I soon came down with dysentery. A watery fluid poured out of me every two to three hours, gradually increasing to about fifteen times a day. Others drained themselves forty or fifty times a day. Many died. Throughout the camps the incidence of dysentery assumed epidemic proportions. Because I could stand upright at roll call, I was automatically declared fit for work. But even if I had not been able to stand, I would not have been excused from labor. With few exceptions, the Japanese guards would force the sick to go to work too.
One day, I collapsed and was unable to get up. But it was not dysentery that knocked me off my feet. It was a sudden outbreak of malaria. I was shivering violently and, two days later, began suffering from hallucinations. It was the first time in my life that I had been seriously ill. When the time came to fill the day’s quota of POW workers, I could do nothing but lie flat on my back and watch.
A Japanese soldier, accompanied by our Dutch medical officer, walked through our hut to inspect the sick that had been ordered by our doctor to stay in bed. To the Japanese we were all malingerers. The Japanese soldier on duty looked at me for a moment. Blinking, I waited anxiously for the grinning apparition standing by my cubicle to move on. Was he a ghost? The small figure suddenly blew up into a gigantic form, and then shrank back again into a little man, someone my own age, with dark patches of sweat staining his khaki shirt.
Then he barked something and walked on. He drove about a dozen other men from their beds, over the strong protests of our physician. In the course of the morning inspection, our guards took pride in arbitrarily sending some of the most obviously sick and skeleton-like POWs out to work. On some days, twenty to thirty of the two hundred POWs who were too sick to work were pushed and jostled to their workplace.
After the war I learned that the Japanese high command in charge of railway construction had set a policy whereby no more than 15 percent of the available POW manpower was permitted to be sick or absent from labor for any other reason. In Spring Camp the actual number of disabled through sickness must have been 30 to 40 percent of our total strength on any given day. Further, the Japanese command decreed that no prisoner was allowed to have more than one day in bed. The fact that we could not deliver on either requirement infuriated our guards and made them kick us out in the manner of slave drivers throughout history.
During the long workday, the Japanese drove us hard. At dusk, when we got back into our hut, we were mostly
silent, too exhausted to talk. Conversation was no longer a solace. When we needed to communicate, we did so tersely and sparingly, speaking softly. In the night all human sound fell silent, and the steady and heavy rainfall drowned the sounds of the jungle out.
I was allowed to rest and recover temporarily. I was lucky; George, who bunked next to me, was not. His affliction, caused by malnutrition, was beriberi; his belly was bloated, and he had abscesses on both legs and both feet. Day after day, the Japanese guard drove George out of our hut to work. George had an explanation for it: “I am so ugly,” he said, “that I offend their concept of aesthetics.”
Even in his deepest misery, George’s mind raced in all directions. He was nostalgic for his life in Wageningen, a sleepy provincial town in the eastern part of Holland where he had obtained his degree in botany and where, with his beer-drinking fellow students, he had been known to disturb the peace. He fondly recalled his cell in Wageningen’s police station, which, he said, was infinitely more comfortable than his bunk in Spring Camp. As for the swill, there was no comparison. George’s more scientific ruminations went over my head: his impassioned monologue on plant mutations; on the nutritional value of miscellaneous parts of the palm tree other than the coconut; on the fertility of the tropical soil, the history of the black tulip, and sundry exotic subjects of remote interest to me. Still, we seemed to complement each other in many other ways, and after the Japanese separated Frans from me, George became my best (and only) friend.
Eventually, even the Japanese guards supervising George’s work found him useless for any type of labor. He was repeatedly sent back to camp. After about a week of being dragged out and sent back, he reached such a pitiful state that when a bed became available in our small sick bay, he was finally admitted. (Usually, the only way to get a bed in the sick bay was through the death of an occupant.)
In the bunk opposite me lived Henry. Although we now all carried more bone than flesh, Henry’s body was somehow even more tentatively held together than most others’. His was an awkward frame of protruding ribs with matchstick arms and legs that called to mind a Giacometti sculpture. Henry was a very shy man, the loneliest of loners. He never initiated a conversation. When I asked him a question or expected him to respond to my greeting, he gave me a wordless sweet smile. Six months earlier, when most of us were still in good health, he told me that he had been called up as a member of the Dutch Army Reserve. In peacetime he had been the technical director of an ice-making factory. He was born and educated on Java and ten years older than I. Stationed in India as an aspiring cold-storage expert, he had converted to Hinduism. He became a fanatic vegetarian. It was not clear whether Henry followed the mainstream precepts of his newfound religion or belonged to one of its fringes; anyway, he only ate food that had fallen off a tree. Such strict adherence to a diet of tropical fruit had given him a skeletal appearance long before the Japanese further reduced his caloric intake. In the prison camps of the Indies and Singapore, where hardly any fruits and vegetables were available, Henry was compelled to break the sacred rules of his cult and take nourishment from a few grains of rice. Now, in our sick bay, white-haired and hunchbacked, Henry often made an effort to get out of his bed. For a moment he would stand next to his bunk, looking like a biblical apparition. Then he’d fall back. I never learned what his illness was, but he seemed to be dying happily, softly murmuring to himself. George said that he recognized the chant as a Hindi funeral hymn.
The days that I was allowed to stay in the camp on sick leave were extremely uneventful and monotonous. My few daytime companions were even weaker than I was. They were laid out flat on their backs, asleep or staring emptily into the distance. If I tried to talk to one of them, there was usually little or no response. Nor were there any books or old magazines for me to read. As so often before, I was very conscious of being the youngest. My fantasies were my only distractions. The other way I managed to keep utter boredom at bay was by focusing (even in the daytime) on killing the bedbugs, whose population had grown exponentially. I made sport of it—trying to kill two in one blow. I also kept score, counting the number of bugs I killed in one day and comparing it to the number killed during the day before. If I broke a previous record, I would feel a momentary pang of pleasure.
We were all weakening rapidly. There was little medicine, hardly any nourishment, and backbreaking forced labor. Some deteriorated slowly; for others death came quickly.
We became acquainted with death and familiar with its many faces. Some of the signs of approaching death were clearly visible: bodies covered with septic sores, arms and legs totally disfigured by a rash of pellagra (I saw one sore that had formed a circular hole a couple of inches in diameter). Scabies-type growths would also appear on scrotums and buttocks, and in groins and armpits. Gangrenous ulcers were among the worst horrors to watch—a spectacle of incurable misery. A sickening stench would accompany the crawling mass of rotten maggots gnawing at the open ulcers—a foul smell as sweet as, but a hundred times stronger than, that of a crunched bedbug. The distortions of beriberi were grotesque too: gross edema of feet and stomach, facial swelling, ulceration at the corners of the mouth, and an oversize raw scrotum. The withering dying seemed determined to prove the point that color is not always beautiful. It was as if they had been painted in the ugliest yellow fleshtone imaginable, mottled with streaks of lurid pink. A rainbow accompanied approaching death—blue, green, and purple.
Most deaths were from multiple causes. It was almost impossible (and in Spring Camp useless anyway) to pinpoint a single culprit. Men were afflicted with dysentery and, at the same time, with malaria. Or beriberi and diphtheria did them in, with a dose of mephitic tropical ulcers thrown in for good measure. To our doctors, and gradually to the rest of us, an exact scientific diagnosis was irrelevant.
We all suffered from one of two types of dysentery: bacterial or amoebic. We hoped and prayed for the bacterial kind, which was less fatal, in my case a mere harmless emptying of the bowels. My mates and I spent much time in the latrines comparing notes: those who saw blood in their stool were judged—and later usually proven—to be amoebic, and therefore in mortal danger. Death from dysentery, too, was unmistakable, a skeleton drowned in its own bodily waste.
Along the railroad malaria was by far the most widespread sickness. After the war it was established that malaria had been twice as common among POWs as all other illnesses combined.
This mosquito-borne disease could also be deadly. It also inspired us with black humor. The expression, “That Jap’s got malaria on the brain,” was much bandied about. This was when we considered the behavior of one of our guards especially peculiar or obnoxious. We also used the term to ridicule each other. In truth, there was nothing to laugh about: cerebral, or malignant tertiary (what doctors called “M.T.”), malaria often meant a tormented struggle, ending in an inevitable and horrifying death. Its early symptoms were a violent flailing of the arms and legs, accompanied by wild outbursts of gibberish. At times the patient would be raging totally out of control, temporarily losing his capacity to think or act rationally. For some, cerebral malaria meant madness. Most POWs, including myself, were afflicted with a milder variety of malaria—the kind that only made us shiver with fever, hallucinate, and lose our stamina, aggravating our already weakened state.
We developed a sixth sense about what was happening to our bodies. Those who had the mental strength battled their illnesses; others denied it, and some just gave in. In the absence of any professional help from our impotent physicians, who were lucky if they were still in possession of their stethoscopes, we had developed an uncannily accurate capacity to diagnose ourselves. We had learned to do this by being in a group in which everybody was in a state of ill health and where a very thin line separated the living from the dead. We did not need any medical knowledge or training to understand that starvation led to dysentery, beriberi, and the other diseases. We knew how to identify the fatal cerebral strain of malaria. Each of us had a se
nse of whether he was going to die, or live.
The slowest forms of physical emasculation were the most painful to watch. Those stricken with beriberi or gangrenous limbs were more pitiful than the rest of us. At first we remained silent witnesses, listening helplessly to their moaning and their shrieks of pain. We had no palliative to give them, not even an aspirin. Later, when the place had become unbearably noisy, the moans and shrieks got on our frayed nerves. Losing our patience and compassion, we would yell at them to shut the hell up. Afterward, we would feel embarrassed and ashamed.
Strangely, though many died, it never occurred to me that I might die too. When others talked about death, I listened carefully but a little impatiently, not willing or able to visualize my own.
Besides George, a few other fellow POWs were part of a small circle of men with whom I communicated: Willem, a Dutch Eurasian; Colin, an Englishman, and Mac, a Scot. We spoke sparingly, for we were always too tired to engage in conversation. Very rarely, one of us would succeed in mustering enough energy to tell a joke—a feeble attempt at keeping up the morale. Usually the jokes were stale, as were the scenarios in which the tables were turned and we depicted for each other the Japanese suffering a worse fate than they inflicted on us. We imagined them all drowning simultaneously in the river or hanging from the very trees that we had to cut down for the railroad ties. As a way of venting our anger and frustration and keeping us mentally alert, it did not exactly work. We were too exhausted and demoralized to be lifted out of our gloom for more than a fleeting instant.
