by Loet Velmans
As the months wore on, each POW became more solitary; each individual tried to isolate himself from the pack. Our sore and diseased bodies required a lot. The only restorative we could muster was rest—we took scant interest in the complaints and self-pity of our mates. None of us could take much interest any longer in who, on any given day, might have been beaten up, collapsed, been sent to the sick bay, or died. In my waking moments, between trips to the latrines, I could only think of the food that I did not get and the life that I could not lead.
One night, lining up in front of our soup kitchen, where our rations were ladled by the cooks into porringers, a murmuring protest quickly grew louder: the officers were having a gourmet supper. The Japanese did not give our own officers any special food privileges. We all shared the same meager rations. But that night they ate sardines! They had acquired the precious stuff from the villagers who lived farther down on the bank of the river Kwai and who used to climb up to the periphery of our camp to peddle and smuggle their black-market luxuries into our compound.
The Dutch and the British officers shared a hut, but remained each in their own half. It was a leaky rectangular bamboo structure, only a few hundred feet away from our own shelter but on the opposite side of the camp. We couldn’t observe the sumptuous repast but could smell and taste the sardines in our imagination. It made us feel betrayed and angry. And it brought back all the old army’s class and rank distinctions.
Earlier, the Japanese had ordered that all officers should work on the railroad like the common soldiers. The Dutch privates had loudly cheered the announcement; their British mates went on strike. The green eighteen-year-old conscripts felt outraged too that their officers were humiliated. But the protest only lasted less than a day. Our Japanese guards cut off all food supplies and threatened that more severe measures were in store. The British commandant ordered the men to abort the mutiny and get back to work.
I gradually got better. In the absence of Western medicines, we turned to natural remedies, and these helped my own rapid convalescence. Willem and one or two of the other Eurasians were quite knowledgeable about jungle vegetation. George, always prepared to demonstrate his academic expertise in tropical botany, assumed the role of supervisory consultant. It turned out that Willem and his friends needed no supervision; they possessed the practical skill that allowed them to distinguish the healing plants from their poisonous cousins. Once the medicinal plants were properly identified, they were cooked and eaten as a supplement to our meager meals. I believed in their healing power, and that faith may have been instrumental in my regaining some of my strength. There were also healthful delicacies to be found in the jungle: small tomatoes, coconuts (some of the Eurasians were nimble and expert tree climbers), unfamiliar kinds of peppers, figs, and spinach that grew hidden in the deepest jungle or in the most unlikely places, such as the cookhouse and next to the latrines. But all that could be gathered surreptitiously wasn’t enough. It was a little bit of this and a little of that, never anything in sufficient quantity to satisfy the cravings of starvation.
Mother at home in Scheveningen, 1935.
Father and Loet on the beach at Scheveningen, 1936. In the background is the old pier, now destroyed.
The Velmans family in Scheveningen, 1938. Mother (left), Loet (center), and Father (right).
Zeemans Hoop (“Seaman’s Hope”), the coast guard vessel on which the Velmans fled Holland in May 1940.
Zeemans Hoop manifest of ship’s passengers and crew, May 1940.
Mother and Loet (in uniform) in Indonesia, 1942.
Secret Wireless Room, Changi, 1943, drawing by Ronald Searle. (Courtesy of Ronald Searle)
above left: Singapore, 1944, drawing by Ronald Searle. (Courtesy of Ronald Searle)
above right: Changi Gaol, Singapore, 1944, drawing by Ronald Searle. (Courtesy of Ronald Searle)
Prisoners whom the Japanese considered “fit to work.” Note the prisoner on the right can’t button his shorts because of his beriberi.
The Thailand-Burma “Railway of Death”; the railway cut through the rocks. (Lex Noyon Collection)
Typical huts for housing POWs. (Lex Noyon Collection)
Central Cemetery, Kanchanaburi. (Lex Noyon Collection)
Suspected Japanese war criminals, separated from the other prisoners, await transport. (Lex Noyon Collection)
Loet (left) with two army buddies, Chaplain Chaim Nussbaum (center) and Eddie Rappaport (right), Singapore, 1945.
Loet (right) with Ambassador Yagi, chairman of the Hill and Knowlton Tokyo office (standing to Loet’s right), the ambassador’s wife (seated to Loet’s right), and three senior managers of the Tokyo office.
As soon as I was a little more fit, and felt it, I was sent back to work again, clearing the railroad bed.
Statistics gathered after the war show that the Dutch POWs had a better survival rate than the Australians, who in turn did better than the British. One reason for the difference must have been the different cultural makeup of the three main groups of Western prisoners. The preponderance of men of Eurasian origin within the Dutch army accounted for the fact that the Dutch contingent, on the whole, had more survivors. Although most Dutch Eurasians were born and had lived in urban or developed agricultural areas, they proved themselves to be superior to the Europeans in adapting to the primitive life of the jungle. The Australians, many of them tough and hardened farmers from the outback, were in the best physical shape at the beginning of the war and also turned out to be the best organized and most disciplined. Despite the fact that they came across as rugged individualists compared to the Dutch and the British, they seemed less self-centered and genuinely keen to support each other. Many of the British were pale-skinned youngsters from Liverpool and other towns in the Midlands, just off the boat in Singapore, totally unprepared for the heat and humidity of the rain forest. Even though they were fairly young, they looked pale and undernourished even before they were taken prisoner. Many of them had little endurance.
There is not much point, of course, in making sweeping generalizations about national background. I realized this after the war, whenever I read published diaries or memoirs of ex-POWs that were, almost without exception, strongly biased in favor of the nationality of the author. However critical he might be of his own army, each writer tended to call the “others” undisciplined, egotistical, or just plain dirty. That is not to say that these generalizations did not carry a grain of truth. But the narrow national perspective of each individual POW always shone through. In documents found after the war, the Japanese commanders ranked the prisoners according to their endurance and usefulness. The Australians were given the highest mark; the British came second; the Americans third, and the Dutch placed bottom of the heap. There is, of course, some irony in the fact that, mainly due to the large number of Dutch Eurasians, the Dutch outranked all the others by far when it came to a category of no particular interest to the Japanese: that of survivor.
As for me, equally at home in different languages, accents, and mores, I was able to glide easily from one culture to the next and back again. My incubation as a chameleon had started in young adolescence and continued in camp. I was chummy with the Brits, the Scots, the Yanks, the Aussies, the Eurasians. The only nationality I did not feel any affinity to and stayed away from at all costs was the Japanese.
Throughout the monsoon season, walking anywhere—in our camp site and on the muddy trail to the railroad—was hard work, like running an obstacle course. It was difficult to keep from slipping and falling on the sopping wet ground. Next to cigarettes, boots were our greatest need—certainly more important even than food, for we had lost our appetites by now. (We rationalized this by telling ourselves that the dysentery had shrunk our stomachs so much that we could do without the food that we had no hope of obtaining anyway.) But the lack of footwear increased the risk of incurring an open wound, which could lead to infection and ulceration. One time, I remember, the Japanese supplied us with poorly made, sh
abby-looking tennis shoes. They weren’t any help at all.
My work consisted of carrying rocks. Day after day Willem and I would make the same trip, dozens of times, each carrying a basket loaded with stones to the top of an embankment created by the dirt we had dug. There we would empty our load of stones, only to turn back for more. Late one afternoon, after we had been at it for more than a month, the guard who had been watching us, brandishing his bamboo stick and yelling “Speedo!” at me all day long, took it into his head to hit me in the small of my back, not with the stick he usually used but with a hammer. I fell down and blacked out. I was carried back to camp on a stretcher. The incident turned out to be a blessing in disguise. It was the last time I ever worked on the railway.
Our sick bay was restricted to twelve beds, at least nine of which were filled with dying men. The infirmary was now nothing more than a hospice for the dying. Terminally ill POWs for whom there was no room in the sick bay died on their own hard bamboo bunks. I was one of the few who, miraculously, survived that sick bay. After regaining consciousness, I was allowed to remain there for two full days. I enjoyed a luxurious rest. Instead of dragging myself out to the latrines, I was permitted the use of a bedpan.
On the third day the physician, a Dutch army doctor from Amsterdam, gave me a hard-boiled egg and discharged me.
“I’ll assign you to the operating room,” he said.
So, thanks to a fellow POW’s sympathy, or compassion, I was appointed medical orderly. The medical staff consisted of one Dutch doctor, who was our resident general practitioner, and one traveling surgeon, who moved from camp to camp, plying his trade. Once every two or three weeks the surgeon, an Australian, would pay a visit to Spring Camp. It was our job to line up those patients who were considered likely candidates for amputation. Our surgeon stayed with us for a day or two and then went on his way again. In the operating room he was attended by two assistants. I was one out of that total of two completely inexperienced medical orderlies. My predecessor, a professional paramedic, had just died on the job. “Multiple diseases and exhaustion,” my doctor said encouragingly when I asked about the cause of death.
The operating room was a small tent divided into two sections. One was the surgery proper, equipped with a wobbly bamboo operating table and a bucket that served as a receptacle for amputated limbs. A smaller table with a chair in front of it stood next to the operating table. When the surgeon arrived, he carefully put a few surgical instruments on the table. They consisted of a scalpel, a bone saw, and some bandages. The other half of the space was the recovery room, furnished with one bamboo bed, nothing else.
Our surgeon, tough, self-assured, but friendly, practiced only one procedure: amputating ulcerated and gangrenous arms, legs, and feet with his primitive saw, without anesthesia. As far as I can remember, I don’t believe any of our patients survived their operation by more than a week or two. Yet the surgery was a marvel of precision, and the patient could now die with a clean-cut stump rather than an arm or leg bursting with pus, larvae, insects, and blood.
When I was not required to attend surgery, I worked in the sick bay or in one of the huts, scooping maggots out of open wounds and removing the white crawling larvae to a place where they could be burned. I also tried to scrub clean the bodies of the bedridden.
“Just leave my jockstrap alone,” one of them said to me.
After every operation the other orderly—he was as weak as I was—and I would enlist any POW we could find in the vicinity to help carry the patient to the recovery room, where my colleague and I would bandage him. We would do this together, because more often than not we did not have the strength to get the job done on our own.
I am long haunted by the memory of the man we dropped because he was too heavy, or perhaps because we were too weak. Too often, my task was to wrap a spindly cadaver in burlap and help carry it to our jungle graveyard.
Funeral rites were minimal. Our primary concern was removing the bandages of the dead. These would then be boiled and reused. We improvised each new funeral service but kept it short. (A clergyman who had been with us at first had been sent on “up country.”) Usually, the length of time we were permitted to spend at the graveside depended on the patience of the supervising guard. Most were in their usual hurry and made us perform this task, as any other, on the double. Others allowed us a few minutes of mourning and rest. On those occasions my mate and I would take a deep breath. It was our silent lament. As time went on, too many died in too quick a succession for the Japanese to bother with us too much. We were left alone and dared to stay at the cemetery for five or ten minutes. We would fetch a friend of the deceased or anybody who was able to muster enough strength to say a few words commemorating the short life of the soldier we were burying. Since everyone had to put in a full day’s work on or along the rail bed, these brief services often took place at dusk, just before the evening meal. At one of these I remember that a young English lieutenant expressed his grief in the words of Rupert Brooke:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England…
Looking at the dense jungle surrounding us, I was struck by the aptness of those words, here at a burial ground some nine thousand miles from Flanders and twenty-five years after World War I.
It was impossible to determine which of George’s many ailments ultimately caused his death, which had been as predictable as it was inevitable. He had been unconscious for a day, but became lucid just before his heart stopped. It was the middle of the night. I stood by his side for a long time, holding his hand. “I told you that it would do no good getting rid of my mustache,” he whispered.
In the early days on the railroad, when we were building our huts and the access road, we had worked side by side. He was the only comrade with whom I once had a conversation about what it felt like to be humiliated, deprived, and degraded.
The next day I was not able to go back to work. I was sick with grief. There were so many memories of George. Under other, more normal circumstances, there would have been a proper funeral—not this bagging of the body and dropping it indifferently in a shallow rain-soaked ditch. Someone—myself perhaps—would have spoken of his courage, his concern for others, his help in identifying the edible plants that saved lives. Perhaps there would have been other reminiscences as well. Of his happy times as manager of a large tea plantation and of his student days at the agricultural university in Wageningen, Holland. And those of us who knew him might well have thought back to his difficult early youth on his father’s plantation. He had adored his long-suffering mother and detested the autocratic father who, after the Sunday rijsttafel, would load his family into a horse and buggy and drive them to the house of his native Javanese concubine. While he was conducting his business in his mistress’s bed, the family had to sit and wait in the carriage in the heat and humidity of the tropical afternoon.
But there was no time and little opportunity to mourn George. For a moment I lingered next to his grave. That day too I got drenched by the soaking rain. The earth of our cemetery was intersected by dozens of rivulets that had no place to go.
Mac, a Scot with a British stammer and a cheerful disposition, was the second of my circle to go. I don’t recall all his exact maladies or symptoms, but they must have been similar to those of so many others who had sampled every entree on Spring Camp’s menu of illnesses. Bodies riddled with diseases were slowly but steadily withering away. They would have made prize specimens at any research hospital. Beriberi had bloated stomachs and enlarged livers to elephantine proportions; knee joints were partially gone; arms and legs had lost most of their flesh, and what remained was eaten away, leaving a mass of gaping and stinking holes in which maggots were working away at the putrid remains of blood, sinews, and flesh. On top of that all, skin and eyes often used to turn yellow, the result of a catarrhal jaundice.
Victims of malignant tertiary malaria like Mac
would drift from periods of complete lucidity into a phase of barking out statements that had a rational tone to them but bordered on madness, like “My potatoes are burnt,” or “The sand on this beach is hot.” Next would come a prolonged state of delirium—no words, only shrieks and cries, and then, shortly before the end, one single fierce and agonized howl. When it was one of my mates lying there, I did not dare to tear myself away from his bedside. I would stand there at his bedside, paralyzed, powerless, and sweating it out.
Mac was lucky: he was allowed to die in the sick bay, which also served as morgue and funeral chamber. Corpses passed through it quickly on their way to the graveyard. As the patients lay dying in the “recovery room” of our makeshift hospital, a little more attention was paid to them than to those who died in their own bunks in a hut deserted since the work parties had left it at the crack of dawn. Yet no one who entered the sick bay ever received more than minimal care. As much as the doctors and orderlies might have liked to give under other circumstances, there just wasn’t enough compassion to go around. And as far as time and attention devoted to the dying by their healthier friends, there wasn’t enough of that either. In his own attempt to survive, each man needed every precious free moment to look after his own body and his own state of mind. Each man remained wrapped in his own solitude. Exhaustion carried its own reward. Sick as we might be, at night we crept deep inside our own skins and sank into a bottomless sleep. I succeeded in getting deeper into my way of insulating myself from my illnesses and from my mates, burying myself in my small individual space. Instinctively, we felt that sleep was therapeutic; each of us tried to gulp it like a tonic.
We were too numb to consider suicide. When I walked through the hut of the dying, the emaciated arms stretched out to me were begging for water, medicine, a kind human gesture. All that anyone still on his feet could sometimes offer the near-dead was a crumb of rice, a wedge of cooked half-rotten fruit, half a mug of boiled water, or a wet rag to wipe off the sweat and the pus. No thought was ever given to a glass of hemlock or a final deadly injection. There was none of that: any wish to die had long since been dulled through pain and misery, and we had long run out of morphine or any other form of painkiller.
