by Loet Velmans
The zealous officer who speechified to us that day could not have foreseen the ironic fate in store for the Railway of Death. Almost immediately after its completion, the Allies launched intense bombing raids aimed at destroying the two main rail bridges. Soon the Allied air attacks wreaked so much havoc that when the Japanese finally withdrew from Burma, the railroad was practically useless in repatriating even the remnants of a severely beaten Japanese army on the run. But even before the bombs began to fall, the railroad proved a total strategic fiasco: the transport system turned out to be far less efficient than planned, able to provide only one-quarter of the daily supply requirements of the Burma front. After the war, Japanese military apologists tried to build a case that the railroad had met its goals. Yet even they admitted that the project could have been completed in a shorter time and with far less loss of life. In the end, the mammoth project turned out to have been a total waste of energy, at a cost of tens of thousands of lives, snuffed out in an ugly death devoid of all dignity.
6
Recovery
REPATRIATED TO SINGAPORE, we found that our destination was not Changi but Syme Road Jail, a small, colonialera penitentiary composed of solid wooden huts.
The conditions in our new prison camp were naturally and infinitely better than those on the railroad. While our daily rations of rice and vegetables remained paltry, our diet was now supplemented by protein in a soup made of soybeans. We also received our first, and it turned out, our last Red Cross parcels, or rather half of one. Two prisoners had to share one box containing necessities and luxuries we had gone without for two years. I remember a can of Spam, a chocolate bar, some soup concentrate, and a cake of soap. It was only after our liberation that we were finally provided with an abundance of the boxes marked with a red cross.
I had suspected all along that the Japanese were helping themselves to the Red Cross supplies to which we were entitled under the Geneva Convention. My suspicions were confirmed after the war, when it was revealed that the Japanese had simply stolen the large supplies of food and medicines collected by the Allied governments and sent to the International Red Cross for distribution to the POWs throughout the Pacific region.
After our improved food rations—both in quantity and in quality—the most startling aspect of Syme Road was its cleanliness: the buildings were spotless. We could keep ourselves clean—we could wash, shower, and shave with clear water. There were proper latrines. Between dusk and blackout, electric lights could be switched on. To me, being able to read at night truly meant I was back in civilization.
A few days after our arrival, the Japanese officer in command addressed us, as customary. His harangue, however, differed from what we were used to. He shouted repeatedly, “Singapore Camp good!” implying that he was aware that conditions at the camps along the railroad had been below par. It sounded as if he was happy to see us back and felt a need to apologize for the bad treatment we had received in Thailand. I concluded that the end of the war must be in sight and that he wanted to distance himself from what had been going on along the Railway of Death. I also understood that he considered us his property—he, the Supremo or Japanese warlord of Singapore, owned everything and everybody on the island. He wished us to understand that he could not be held accountable for our treatment by his colleagues: we had been returned as damaged goods after having been loaned out temporarily. It was confirmed after the war that the general in command in Singapore had been at odds with the general in Thailand who supervised the construction of the railway. And I also learned that our Singapore general had been less charitable than I first assumed. His real motive for fattening us up was that he needed our manpower for his own construction projects in Singapore and that he did not want us to look too skeletal. The work to be done at the airport and in other locations required the POWs to walk through parts of town where the Chinese population would see us. There were already signs of unrest among the local population. It seemed therefore advisable to prevent any possible expression of sympathy for the emaciated POWs.
Syme Road had a regular season of theatrical performances. The Barn Theatre, staged in one of the barracks, featured productions of Cinderella and the Magic Soya Bean and Rag Bag Revue to great acclaim. Shows ran for five consecutive nights, followed by two or three days of rehearsals before the next offering opened.
Although there was at least one straight comedy, most of the productions featured stand-up comedians and female impersonators appearing in an entertaining number of cabaret sketches. Our actors were dressed in costumes ingeniously stitched together from rags and tent material. The decor, designed by the cartoonists Ronald Searle and George Sprod, always received an ovation. We greeted the many bawdy jokes and our lissome Eurasian transvestite with loud wolf whistles. Our female impersonator, having survived the railroad, had expanded his repertoire from the hula to the belly dance. At one of the first performances, attended by several Japanese officers, a samurai went backstage and ordered our feminine star to lift up his skirt. The officer, apparently a man of suspicious nature, wanted to make certain that no female had sneaked into the camp.
At the end of 1943 the news out of Europe was a little more encouraging—the invasion of Italy, the capture of Mussolini, and the reversal of Germany’s fortunes at Stalingrad all lifted our spirits. By contrast, the slow pace of our military progress in the Pacific was agonizing. Though the Americans had managed to recapture Guadalcanal and the Solomon Islands, they were still a very long way from Singapore.
Several months later, in early May 1944, we were once again ordered to pack our belongings in a hurry. As I had worn out, lost, or sold everything that was not absolutely essential, my sole possessions consisted of one tin plate, a mug, a fork and spoon, a torn and patched mosquito net, one spare pair of socks and underpants, one tattered extra shirt, wooden clogs, and a small cake of soap (my treasured puttees had finally disintegrated). Our destination this time was not far, and its name had a familiar ring—Changi Gaol.
The prison of Changi was now bursting at the seams. More than 5,000 POWs were held in the old prison building, and another 12,000 in the encampment surrounding the jail. All were holdovers from various Singapore camps or recalled workers from the railroad. Many lived in makeshift huts, built around the central courtyard. Changi Square had grown into what could almost be seen as a homey, old-fashioned village green. The new huts that filled the courtyard had been cleverly constructed from rubber trees and bamboo poles, fastened together with barbed wire and covered in palm fronds. The men who stayed behind had applied their ingenuity and skills in a variety of other ways. They had planted small gardens; converted oil-fired water heaters for use with wood; fashioned showers out of pieces of stolen piping; concocted soap from palm oil and potash; tinkered together artificial limbs for the amputees out of wood and scrap metal; and tailored shorts and shirts out of tent canvas. The engraving machine that stamped “Rolex Waterproof” on the few remaining old metal watches was symbolic of how ingenious the POWs had become. The reconditioned timepieces fetched an exorbitant price on the black market.
If a stray dog or cat happened to wander into our prison, the poor animal would not last long. I recall one meal of roasted dog and of being furious when a group of old English friends from Syme Road failed to invite me to their repast of boiled cat.
With time to think, my thoughts returned to my parents. I envied my British and Australian mates because most of them had received at least one letter from home. Some mail from occupied Holland also managed to get through, via the Red Cross. But for some reason the Japanese were not allowing any communication to come through from the internees on Java. As time went on I was increasingly bothered by the lack of mail from the Dutch East Indies. When the others read their letters and postcards, I would watch them hungrily. Some held their letters close to their eyes, reading them over and over again. Just before leaving the port of Tandjong Priok for the crossing to Singapore, I had learned that Father and Mother were interne
d in a civilian camp near Jakarta. Since then we had lost all contact: there had been no news whatsoever about the fate of the civilians.
When I wasn’t trying to bring back a picture from the past, I dreamed of the future.
I had fanciful ambitions and developed a scenario in which I would change the world. I had a vague notion about my own future career: in my last years at school I had thought about studying economics at the University of Rotterdam. But in prison camp it boosted my spirits to daydream about larger concepts: a better world and the abolishment of all armies. I fantasized about a political superstructure in which the Allies controlled life inside the borders of Germany and Japan. All German and Japanese military personnel would be sent to work in the factories and the fields of the countries they had occupied. They would become our prisoners and suffer a collective penalty for the harm they had inflicted. Each year a new generation of eighteen-year-old Germans and Japanese would be drafted and sent far away from home. I wanted to see them pay. As for the Japanese, I wanted us to prove that our cultures were poles apart. The price we would extract as punishment would be high, yet our conduct would always remain humane and fundamentally more honorable and compassionate than their treatment of us had been.
In my dreams I saw Churchill and Roosevelt at the moment of victory declare all wars abolished and all weapons banned. With unanimous approval all nations would stop the silly game of dressing their men up in uniform and pinning rows of medals on their chests. My dream world was gloriously utopic. Yet in mapping it out, I always retained a small empty reservoir in the back of my mind. It was as if I did not wish the dream to be complete. I needed to be able to look forward to doing more fine-tuning, to think through every detail, to sort out every option of how to deal with our defeated foes so that they could never become a tyrannical threat to their neighbors again.
Changi too had a theater, the Coconut Grove, with its own female impersonator, billed as “Judy Garland.” It is hardly surprising that in many reports of POW survival, one factor is often overlooked: wit, humor, and the capacity to laugh were indispensable to survival. Often the most miserable looking Tommies and the most misanthropic intellectuals would turn out to be the funniest men in the camp. To stay alive it helped, of course, not to contract a deadly disease and to stay far away from the places where cholera was rampant; but the joke, the quip, and the funny sketch all worked like powerful tonics. They played a key part in the pursuit of survival.
By the time I returned from the railroad, my original circle of friends had evaporated. Almost all my old buddies from Java, from the Flying Dutchman canteen, and from Spring Camp had died on the railroad. I had outlived George, the gloomy botanist who had become my slaapie and who had died of multiple ailments; Frans, the bartender with the irresistible grin, who had been beaten to a pulp and contracted amoebic dysentery early on; Mac, raging with malaria-induced dementia at the end; and Colin, the Englishman. Colin had been the last of our group to go, swollen with edema, clutching a picture of his wife and child. Only Willem, the Dutch Eurasian, with his vast and indispensable knowledge of jungle vegetation, and I, the group’s wiry Benjamin, were left.
Working on the railroad had brought officers and rank and file a little closer together. In Spring Camp, joint work parties had included Dutch lieutenants and captains. Their laboring alongside enlisted men had boosted everyone’s morale. (By contrast, the British officers had not shared in the workload. In some camps, including Spring Camp, the Japanese had excused them from hard labor, although in other camps the Japanese, who had never signed the Geneva Convention, compelled all officers to participate in hard labor) Generally, the rank and file perceived that in Thailand and Burma the officers had been treated badly too. They too had been treated like slaves. They too had been beaten, punched, and kicked; no one had received meaningful preferential treatment. Although in Singapore, under better conditions, some measure of discipline was restored, we never again regarded our officers in quite the same hostile light as before our joint ordeal on the railroad.
Changi was well run, in large part because the Japanese kept themselves in the background, although they sometimes looked in at our theatricals and Sunday services. These services were generally well attended, for Changi had an active religious life. For many POWs, to go to church was also a convenient excuse not to have to join a Sunday work party.
Out of curiosity and in spite of my avowed agnosticism, I had started attending Jewish services conducted by Chaim Nussbaum, a Dutch Orthodox Jew who spoke both Dutch and English with a slight Yiddish accent and who was an ordained rabbi. Nussbaum was a broadly educated and self-taught intellectual: he held a doctorate in physics and had a profound knowledge of philosophy. Charismatic and gutsy, he had gathered together a group of British, Australian, and Dutch Jews, who had knitted themselves into a tight family, despite the differences in language, nationality, background, and profession. We counted among us a dentist, a copywriter, a jeweler, a corporate executive, a traveling salesman, and a lawyer who was to become a prime minister of Malaya after the war.
Being a secular Jew, I was the only member of Nussbaum’s circle who failed to comprehend the significance of Nussbaum’s strictly orthodox observance of the Sabbath and holiday rituals. But I experienced a new sensation: the warm feeling of belonging to a community.
I shared a prison cell built for one person with Chaim Nussbaum and a third cellmate, a young Dutch Gentile named Lex who had fallen seriously ill on the railroad with several jungle diseases. Chaim lorded it over us, since he was enthroned on the elevated concrete slab in the center of the cell that was the only bed. Lex and I lay on the floor on either side of Nussbaum’s perch. Although it was cramped, we had so few possessions that we managed not to be too much in each other’s way. Going to the latrines at night was another matter. Three men now occupied our dungeon, designed for the housing of one prisoner. And other prisoners had installed themselves in the corridor outside our cell. It was hazardous going. I would often stumble and sometimes fall over some prone emaciated body in the dark, causing him to wake up and curse me for my clumsiness. Everyone in our cell block was suffering from at least one illness, and we were all seriously undernourished. And yet we were the strong ones—the ones who had survived so far.
Lex came to some of Chaim’s lectures on Judaism, which were attended by a number of other interested non-Jews. He was an easygoing, pleasant, shy-mannered, unpretentious intellectual. Artistically talented, he had a strong sense of social responsibility. He showed little interest in the mundane aspects of our prison existence, but he would wax enthusiastic about Mozart, his life’s great love. He also worried that he might not regain the strength to play the piano again. Fifty years later, when Lex and I finally found each other again in Amsterdam, he had retired as a highly respected professor of social work. He wistfully recalled his dream of becoming a professional pianist, which had been torpedoed by the war. He also told me about the POW memories that would haunt him for the rest of his life. One day, in a POW camp on Java—one that I had the good fortune to miss—his camp commandant had ordered Lex to kneel before him. With all the other prisoners looking on, the commandant had drawn his sword and laid it across Lex’s clean-shorn skull and neck, moving it back and forth in a sawing motion. Lex had no idea why he had been singled out. He held himself rigid, sensing intuitively that the slightest move on his part would provoke the blow that would decapitate him. Nothing happened. After what seemed an eternity, Lex was allowed to rejoin the ranks. Half a century later, he still had no clue what it was that the Japanese officer had in mind. Nor did he understand what he had done to deserve the deadly game that had been played with him. Lex also witnessed an execution similar to others that occurred in several camps in the early days of our imprisonment on Java. It was in Lex’s camp that three Eurasian soldiers had crept under the barbed wire, night after night, to visit their wives or girlfriends, returning in the same way the next morning before daybreak. During several weeks,
the Japanese guards observed and good-naturedly tolerated these nightly excursions—until the day the Japanese camp commander changed his mind or received an order to impose a stricter regimen. The three lovers were bayoneted to death against the barbed wire. Lex had stood nearby, in the front row.
Everything being relative, that second stint in Changi was not an unhappy period for me. It became a time of creative overdrive. Several handwritten magazines were making the rounds in the camp. Nussbaum decided to try his hand at one, and I became its editor. We called it Habeemah: The Changi Jewish Forum. I translated articles by Nussbaum and others from Dutch into English, wrote a short story, and edited and typed the lot onto the back of recycled prison records. Several budding cartoonists from Holland, Britain, and Australia—among them Ronald Searle and George Sprod, neither of them Jewish, both of them destined for fame after the war—supplied the illustrations.
Searle and Sprod were our Tweedledum and Tweedledee: both spent the whole day sketching; both were extremely talented; both had a dry sense of humor and, of course, both were extremely thin—as we all were.
Habeemah was not the only camp magazine. The Exile was Changi’s general circulation vehicle—one copy was available for distribution among a potential audience of more than 10,000. It was a miracle that Ronald Searle and his fellow editors managed to put out no less than ten editions of the magazine within a period of six months.
