by Loet Velmans
Death and illness tended to erase distinctions. In our graveyard bodies were indiscriminately dumped next to each other, without regard to rank or nationality. The sick bay was too small to accommodate the wishes of the dying. My colleague and I were too weak and indifferent to respond to a request by a dying Dutchman who wanted to be moved so that he could be next to a compatriot and old friend. We could not be bothered to drag a dying man out of his bed just a day or two before we would have to carry him to the graveyard anyway.
There was considerably more room in the regular hut now because so many dead and dying had vacated their spots. It was now possible to trade places so friends of different nationalities could bunk next to one another. Only at the daily early-morning roll calls, which also served as the gathering point of the work parties, did we still stand at attention in our Dutch, British, and Australian units. But as soon as that was over, we intermingled freely for the rest of the day and went to sleep in whichever bunk we had selected. I had bunked between George and Mac. After they died, there were two empty spaces next to me.
After the war I learned that 41 percent of H-Force died while in camp or within a year or two after the war. We, for our part, weren’t counting. Somewhat miraculously, over half of us were to survive, and I was to be one of that number.
Spring Camp was my school of death. It taught me that dying is the ultimate moment of loneliness. Well before their final spasms, my friends had detached themselves from the routine around them. Then I, the survivor, would live my own private moment of desolate loneliness.
Paradoxically, at each death the ties that bound me to those others who were still alive seemed to grow weaker. By this time the idea that friendship could bring a measure of comfort seemed ludicrous. No one could remember what it had been like to be well or how a friend’s gesture or kind word might make one feel. Most of the time I lived as if I had no feelings left. I was doing my job as best as I could, but in a mood of utter detachment.
Only George’s death interrupted my apathy. It made me feel even weaker than before, a feeling accompanied by a sense of real mental anguish. I do not recall whether my spell of despair following George’s death lasted a day, a week, a month. But I have a memory of days passed in a mood of senseless survival and nights made restless by the realization that the next day would bring more of the same. Once I had lost my stamina, there was no further hope. My body was heavy with exhaustion, my mind empty. The images of earlier days, of Scheveningen, London, Bandung, and all that had taken place there—images that used to work on me like a tonic, that restored hope after a beating or some other gross humiliation, had gone. Whatever had been in my brain before had been emptied out. I felt no fear and no anger, only the most debilitating listlessness I had ever experienced. Fortunately, the depression (if that is what it was) did not last long.
The despair was gradually replaced by a determination: one way or another, I was going to beat the horrors of this living hell. I grimly decided that I was going to survive. To achieve this goal I decided on a tactic that I believed might work: I would take life one week at a time. From Sunday to Sunday. If I could just get through the week without a beating, a prolonged bout of malaria or other illness, I would have reached another milestone. I played my strategy as an exercise in self-discipline. Every Sunday I would make myself stand rigid in front of our hut. I would stay there for an hour, feet firmly planted in the mud, concentrating on how best to get through the next seven days—how I would chew my food carefully to press every vitamin out of it and into my system, how I would try to get as much sleep as possible to retain the maximum strength, how I would try to joke with and find stimulation in the company of my fellow prisoners. In other words, I tried to separate and then bring together the few positive elements of life in Spring Camp. Accomplishing a week’s goal would get me to the next Sunday. And then we would see.
At mealtimes, I engaged in another mental game. With some imagination, my small unappetizing rations could be turned into a multi-course gourmet repast. The stringy and watery soup and the tiny portion of dirty gray rice were transformed into the smells and colors of the past: from Sundays with Father, white challah bread with aged Gouda; from my school days, open beef and liverwurst sandwiches for lunch, and for dinner, pea soup and steak swimming in melted butter; from my days of freedom in Jakarta, nasi goreng (fried rice with vegetables, shrimp, and meat) with plenty of sate (grilled chicken, pork, or lamb kebabs), or golden omelettes and pancakes with ginger for breakfast. I also recalled from my early POW days the recipes in my Yankee friends’ magazines, especially the juicy steaks and all manner of mouthwatering sundaes and other ice cream concoctions. (I can still recall concentrating intensely on a sumptuous banana split.)
It may have been the sound of trumpeting elephants that finally shook me out of my lethargy after George’s death. The big beasts had been brought in to clear some trees that had fallen across the track after a particularly violent storm, making the service road almost completely inaccessible to vehicles. The elephants were the railroad’s best friend. They were more reliable as workers than the prisoners; they could stand the heat and still remain healthy. The Japanese staff had worked out that the productivity of one elephant equaled that of eight men. The problem with the men was that so few were up to their task, and often they even had the nerve to die on the job.
The Japanese were hard on themselves too. I remember seeing armed infantry regiments with heavy backpacks, on their way to the Burma front, trudging by like medieval foot soldiers. They formed one long and silent line—an eerily soundless spectacle. They were either instructed not to talk or, more likely, simply exhausted. Behind them came the artillery pieces on long flatbed vehicles pulled by two or three dozen Japanese conscripts. An NCO walking alongside, carrying a whip with which he lashed out at any men who appeared to be dragging their feet. Another day it was a smaller contingent of Japanese, carting their belongings on wheelbarrows.
They looked healthy but tired. I wondered whether any of the Japanese soldiers ever fell ill—or whether they were allowed to be sick. After the war I came across a quote from a Japanese general who had assumed command in Thailand in mid-1943. It demonstrated that the Japanese could not abide illness in the military. “Health follows will” was the holistic-sounding expression he used. “Lack of health is considered a most shameful deed,” he continued. “Devotion until death is good.”
By this time quite a number of our Japanese sentries had been replaced by Koreans who, having suffered for generations under Japan’s colonial exploitation, were now eager to impress their Japanese employers with how cruelly they could treat the POWs.
Our guards, including the Koreans, had been keeping a pig in a cage. One evening we were ordered to attend a spectacle—the pig’s execution. We were to be witnesses to some sort of sacrificial ritual, enacted like a game: our captors, shrieking with laughter, aimed their bayonets at the squealing animal, which ran from one end of its cage to the other. Finally, bleeding and exhausted, the pig sank to the ground, panting heavily. The coup de grace was delayed for one more round of jabs, aimed this time at its snout. Finally the pig, drowning in its own blood, whimpered and died. We went to sleep with the smell of pork barbecue in our nostrils. Not a scrap, not a bone, was thrown to us.
Although the calendar of 1943—one humid month following upon the other—has blurred in my memory as a timeless stretch, I associate the ordeal of the pig with another story we heard, which was about humans. It must have happened around the same time. The shanghaied Asian workers were apparently suffering from the same diseases as the POWs, and in equally great numbers. The rumor was that the Japanese took pleasure in driving those Tamils, Malays, and Indonesians who were too feverish from malaria to work into the river Kwai, where they were forced to stand with the water coming up to their necks. With the guards joking about their generosity in allowing the slaves to cool off, some drowned right then and there; others who tried to crawl back ashore were shot.
/>
One day we received a surprise visit: a Japanese field officer, unaccompanied by any guards or other military personnel, stopped by to visit. He spent more than an hour in our sick bay and entertained us with the story of his life. He had lived in America and conversed with us amiably in English. He described the San Francisco apartment in which he had lived with pride. It almost sounded as if he wanted us to share in his happy memories of the good old days in California. “I never had so much space,” he said. He had no doubt as to the outcome of the war. “We are going to win,” he said. Not once did he direct a question to us, but his monologue did pose an intriguing question: Was there a “different” and more humane type of Japanese? After he left I wondered whether he had noticed the sickly stench of our living, or dying, quarters. A few hours later he returned for a quick handshake. He did not speak, but left a large box filled with medicines for our dispensary.
Sometimes we had other Japanese visitors at the hospital. There were no adequate medical facilities for the Japanese in Spring Camp, or anywhere else in the neighborhood. Since health, according to Japanese military doctrine, seemed to be only a matter of self-discipline, they would come to our doctors for treatment, shyly and stealthily. They usually brought us only minor injuries needing attention—a dab of iodine (the only medicine amply available) for an open cut. The Japanese brought their own bandages, since we had none to spare. They showed us how stoical they were: the stinging iodine did not make them flinch. None of us ever saw any of our guards show any outward sign of pain or weakness.
Often, these patients sought out our doctors in the night. They were usually suffering from chronic gonorrhea and insisted on being injected with a yellow dye that was supposed to be a cure. The myth of the miracle dye seemed to have spread by word of mouth throughout the Japanese armies in Southeast Asia. Presumably started in Java, over the years it had been canonized as a cure for venereal disease. It was obvious that the gonorrhea patients felt they could not report their illness to their superiors.
Our doctors doubted the treatment would work. Their Japanese patients had a chronic condition, too far advanced for an easy cure. We were nonetheless prepared to cooperate. It gave us the opportunity to exercise a little leverage. In return for the shots, the Japanese would bring a couple of eggs or a small bottle of aspirin.
One day, in September 1944, a month or two before the completion of the new railroad, there was some unwonted excitement in the camp. We speculated what news had been signaled to our captors. Another victory, or similar bit of propaganda? Our guards had come running, gesticulating wildly. They finally made themselves understood: a train—the first one to make it through—was on its way. Then the first steam locomotive to reach Spring Camp promptly ran off the rails. Somehow the locomotive’s wheels had left the tracks when it reached our sector, and the engine landed in the underbrush. We wondered whether it had been sabotage. We hoped that it was. This happened around noon. Within a few hours the elephants were back; a total mobilization was ordered. Not just every available POW, including officers and kitchen personnel, but also the Japanese daytime and nighttime sentries, the Japanese engineering unit, and the infantry units in transit—all were to report to the area where the locomotive lay toppled over in a ditch. By the time we got there, trucks had arrived, delivering large poles that were to be used to jack the locomotive back onto the tracks. Together, victors and vanquished put their shoulders to the task. For once, we were not supervised as closely as usual. A group of POWs assigned to hold the steel bars used to support two of the poles decided that now was the time to try a little sabotage of their own. They dropped their bars; the poles gave way, and the locomotive toppled back into the ditch.
A Japanese officer blamed a Thai elephant driver for the mishap and began beating him. Since the elephant driver was indispensable to the operation, however, he got off lightly. In the general disorder, our guards rained blows on our backs. But our morale was lifted by our success in delaying the completion of the railroad, if only by one hour. Our elation was short-lived; an hour or two later we learned that, a little farther down the road, an elephant had trampled a POW to death.
Over the next few weeks, trains fully loaded with men and supplies roared past Spring Camp; the railroad was nearly completed. We were apprehensive, fearing we might be taken farther up the line into Burma, where we had heard that cholera had nearly wiped out several encampments. We thought we might be assigned to work on the very last bit of the line, replacing the many POWs who had died there. To our relief, when the trucks came to fetch us, they carried us east, in the opposite direction, to Kanchanaburi, a large transit facility on the way back to Bangpong.
In the transit camp we found ourselves better off on several counts: we didn’t have to work, food was slightly better and there was more of it, and there was music and theater. Furthermore, Kanchanaburi, an ancient walled city and the most populated area in this region of Thailand, was nearby. We went back to our old habits: smuggling was rife. Some of us still had some money left, since we had not been able to spend any in Spring Camp. While we could not hope to sell any of our clothes, which were in tatters, a blanket, a small shovel stolen in Spring Camp, a belt, and other similar items would fetch enough to buy a few pieces of fruit. It was a time of recovery, and the end of my career as a medical orderly.
At twenty I must have looked like one of the walking skeletons in the photographs of Bergen-Belsen or in the more recent television images of the starving Africans. But at least in Kanchanaburi we had no mirrors, and no vanity. Compared to some, I was well off. I was lucky to be alive.
My dysentery had cleared up; my malaria persisted. With the regularity of a menstrual cycle, the fever returned every four weeks. But luckily I was at an age when nature’s recuperating powers are at their strongest. My mind was constantly racing, plotting short stories and the outline of a play, thinking about Mother and Father, my cousin Dick, and the rest of the family. Once again I would recall the taste and smells of my favorite foods: challah bread with sharp Gouda cheese, ginger bolus, strawberries and oranges, roast beef with mustard. When a friend gave me a banana, the rare taste of it made me hum with pleasure.
Even here, however, the Japanese guards seemed to get a kick out of beating and yelling at us. I never got used to it; the feeling of raw humiliation would come back every time. It was not so bad when the Japanese went on a rampage and beat up a whole group of us. Then we could collectively laugh off the whole incident and blow off steam by inventing new insults. But an individual beating was different—that really hurt.
One night in our Thailand camp we were discussing our captors, and wondering what kinds of jobs these people had held before the war. Where did they come from? we would ask ourselves. Since we knew nothing about Japan, we speculated that some of our guards might have been rickshaw-pulling coolies (like the ones I had seen in Singapore and on Java, even though those were of a different Asian origin). We speculated that our guards came from the lowest classes, reveling in finally being given the opportunity of getting their own back at somebody. Were they farmhands or policemen? We knew nothing about them—whether they came from Tokyo, a small town, or the countryside. Once or twice one of them, in a rare, slightly sentimental mood, told us about a wife, a child, or named a town or village that was home. From those spare confidences we drew the conclusion that our guardians had been selected at random for guard duty from the large pool of mobilized Japanese men. We Westerners finally reached a consensus: no matter what their background, these monsters were truly typical representatives of their nation as a whole. But how an entire nation could get its kicks from beating and torturing its prisoners was beyond us. It was as if each Japanese we encountered was a cog in a single monolithic wheel whose job it was to put us in our place. We should have known better than to oppose the emperor. Brutalizing us prisoners seemed to give the Japanese soldier an extra dimension of satisfaction. Sitting around and comparing my own emaciated arms and legs to the wasted bon
es of a half dozen of my mates, I got into a heated argument. Could there be any other side to the Japanese? I asked. Were they hiding a facet of their characters that it was not in their interest to reveal to us? I was indignantly shouted down. It’s their religion, we finally concluded bitterly. It’s all about devotion to an emperor who is a god. But will change never come? I asked. Perhaps, one day, one of my friends said. But only when the country renounces its faith in its deity.
After a month or two in Kanchanaburi, we were shipped back to Singapore. On the day before our departure, we were ordered to participate in an elaborate ceremony celebrating the official inauguration of the railroad. We stood and watched the Japanese troops parading, cheering, and shouting. We marveled at a section in spotless uniforms who goose-stepped past their commanding officer. For our part, we received an extra ration of food and had to listen to a Japanese general as he extolled the virtues of his emperor. It was a fervent expression of faith. By now we had learned to recognize the import of such harangues—the Japanese wanted to demonstrate to us (scum of the earth) that their emperor was more than the symbol of the nation—he was a god, if not God himself. The completion of the railroad was the end of an important phase of the divine mission.
The speech over, we milled around. I had just left the line, where the POWs had received an additional festive bonus: a mug of weak tea and a tasteless piece of rice cake. I suddenly found myself face to face with the dapper little Japanese guard who had used his hammer on me in Spring Camp.
He stopped. We glared at each other. It was unmistakably him, although he looked different—squeaky clean and all buttoned up in parade dress. For a moment I stood there with my mouth open, stunned. Then he started to bark at me: I was expected to salute. I shook myself and saluted him, correctly. He lingered for another moment. I saw him shrug, then he smiled and waved, bringing his own hand smartly to his cap. It all happened within a couple of seconds. Next thing I knew, he had vanished around a corner. I stood still, frozen in place for a while, staring after him. I fervently hoped that we would never meet again.
