Long Way Back to the River Kwai

by Loet Velmans

  I had received word that my parents were alive, in a civilian prison camp in Jakarta. Chaim Nussbaum was given a pass to fly to Jakarta to be reunited with his wife and three children. He was only granted a few days’ leave but went out of his way to hand-deliver a long letter from me to my parents. The news he brought back was grim. The Dutch civilian population had taken its share of suffering. At the time of liberation, they too were near the point of starvation, and had been cowed, beaten, and tortured. Theirs had been three years of tough and pitiless internment. (Some 15 percent of all civilian internees had perished.)

  Once I got used to my newfound freedom, I became bored with the life of a liberated prisoner of war. I felt stifled and restless. There was a new life to be lived somewhere out there. I found the daily routine dreary: a relaxed early-morning roll call, followed by a leisurely breakfast; a little later, a nourishing lunch, topped off by a splendidly elaborate high tea (at least, that was the way food tasted to us after three years of the monotony of our Japanese diet). The problem was how to fill the hours between mealtimes. Of course, there was always chess or bridge to fall back on, but to me, games now seemed a flight from reality—challenging and enjoyable only when one was a prisoner living behind a bamboo fence. We were free to take a stroll around the neighborhood, or take a nap at any time. But the novelty and luxury of so much leisure time soon wore off. The emptiness of our evenings was taken up with wishful speculation about our chances for a speedy repatriation to Holland—or, at least for me, the less welcome prospect of being pressed into active military service in Indonesia, where renewed civil unrest threatened to escalate into a full-scale uprising against colonial rule.

  After about a month of this, I decided that I’d had enough of military life and walked out the gate of Changi. On strictly legal grounds I was a deserter. Under normal circumstances I would have been in serious trouble. Fortunately for me, our administration was in such disarray that I felt reasonably confident that going AWOL carried little risk. Not only did my departure from the barracks lead to no negative consequences, it didn’t seem to have been noticed at all. It never crossed my mind that I could have been arrested, thrown into jail, and court-martialed.

  The escape from my military straitjacket proved to be well worth it. I could breathe freely and be myself again in ways that were impossible in the army. It felt good to return to being a happy-go-lucky adolescent. From now on, I felt, things would be looking up. I craved new adventures. I walked into what looked like an empty office building and found myself a rent-free room with a bed in it. A Chinese porter told me that, during the Japanese occupation, one floor of the building had been the sleeping quarters of a select caste of high-ranking Japanese officers. The rest of the building had been used for storage. Now that the Japanese were gone, it was an ideal place for me to live. A few other “deserters” joined me. We used a small communal kitchen. The building was on the docks and owned by KPM, a Dutch shipping company that had not yet resumed its Singapore operations or reclaimed its building.

  I immediately struck up an acquaintance with two of my neighbors, both Hungarian émigrés, serving as doctors in the British army as members of the liberating forces. They had discovered the KPM building on the day that I moved in.

  I also found myself a job. Among our liberators was a Mr. Aardewerk, a man about ten years my senior. True to my Dutch upbringing, it never occurred to me to address him by his first name. Mr. Aardewerk was a Dutch army information officer and a Jew. Before the war he had lived in Antwerp, where he had been the publisher of a magazine. When he heard of my interest in journalism, he invited me to accompany him to the offices and printing plant of the Straits Times, Singapore’s leading newspaper. There we met the editor of SEAC, the daily paper named for the British South East Asia Command, which it served. The editor was a hard-drinking Fleet Street veteran who readily agreed that the Dutch, too, were entitled to have their own daily newspaper and invited us to share his presses as well as his premises. He was less generous with the bottle of Scotch on his desk. We named our paper Oranje (orange being the Dutch national color, in honor of the House of Orange, the royal family). Aardewerk appointed me deputy editor—an important-sounding title that compensated for the fact that the entire editorial staff consisted of the editor (Aardewerk) and myself.

  I enjoyed the work—translating into Dutch the international news and features carried by our British sister publication. I learned to do layouts, and was given the job of broadcasting news bulletins on Singapore Radio aimed at the liberated Dutch in Indonesia. I also wrote up for Oranje the news reports that we received from the wire services’ correspondents on Java. The news from there was not very reassuring. We feared for our families and did not relish the likelihood that we would soon be reoutfitted, rearmed, and repatriated over there to battle the Indonesian insurgents. In some of Java’s major cities, armed local gangs had taken hostages and killed Dutch civilians. In the power vacuum created after the Japanese capitulation, law and order had vanished, and chaos was rife.

  I soon forgot I had ever been hungry. I didn’t even take notice of the fact that I belonged to the ranks of the well-fed once more. Apart from the unshakable bouts of malaria, the only thing that made me suffer was the heat. In Spring Camp and all along the railroad I had become inured to the tropical climate. Now, back in civilized clothes (and still living in a pre-air-conditioning era), the sweat dripped from my forehead into my neck and soaked my armpits.

  The Dutch government, back in Holland after five years of exile in England, was determined to reestablish its control over its colonies. Few Dutch politicians had the foresight to understand that European colonialism was at an end. Neither the government nor the public was prepared to relinquish its most precious possession. We insisted, as a nation, on reclaiming our patrimony. Meanwhile a small but vocal group of Indonesian politicians, headed by Sukarno, a skilled and opportunistic demagogue, declared independence and founded the Republic of Indonesia. This historic event took place on August 17, 1945, two days after Japan’s surrender. The Dutch authorities, having only limited military resources and manpower at their disposal, were eager to press all liberated POWs into service, despite their less-than-sturdy physical condition. The former prisoners would be a useful addition to new contingents of Dutch soldiers arriving from Britain, Australia, and the home country. The POWs were seen as experienced, well-disciplined veterans who would form the backbone of an army that would put the ragtag bands of Indonesian rebels in their place. The Indonesians, viewed by the Dutch as a bunch of ungrateful traitors, were holding a tidy arsenal of weaponry left behind by the Japanese.

  Even if it meant going back to a war zone, many of my ex-POW compatriots were eager to return to Java. They were the professional soldiers, planters, businessmen, postal clerks, teachers, and shopkeepers who wanted to see their homes and families. I feared going back there; it was the last thing I wanted. Holland was my home. Besides, I knew that my parents would soon be repatriated.

  Although my days were full, I continued to be addicted to an hour’s bedtime reading before going to sleep (this developed into a lifelong habit). I had stumbled upon the works of Multatuli, the nineteenth-century Dutch author who, in his day, had been at the center of a political storm. Multatuli was the pen name of the solidly Dutch Eduard Douwes Dekker, one of the first to draw attention to the inequities of the colonial system. In protest against the appalling conditions in which the Javanese lived, and their exploitation by the colonial masters, Dekker resigned his post in the civil service and returned to Holland to devote the rest of his life to writing and lecturing. I was fascinated by Multatuli’s novel Max Havelaar, which I had bought at a bookstall near the newspaper and which came in a tattered eight-volume set. I wrote down on a piece of paper the words of “Saidah’s Song,” a poem in the book about a Javanese man contemplating the moment of his death. The first line at the start of each stanza went: “I don’t know where I’ll die…” I had no idea why I carried it
around in my pocket, for I truly believed that I did not want to be reminded of Spring Camp.

  Being obliged to print statements issued by the Dutch government about the situation in Indonesia on “my” front page, and meeting inexperienced Dutch officers and bureaucrats en route to (what they still considered to be) the Dutch East Indies, I was prompted to vent my own frustration on the people back home. I wrote a letter to the editor of the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, a leading newspaper in Holland, saying that it was my impression that the current authorities in Holland and their Indonesia-bound emissaries were wholly unequipped to cope with an entirely new set of conditions: large segments of the Indonesian population expressing their wish to throw off colonial rule and claiming their country’s right to independence. To my surprise, the letter was quoted in a front-page editorial and sparked off a flood of angry letters asking what right a young whippersnapper like me had, sticking his nose into matters of state and undermining a righteous cause.

  Regularly recurring bouts of malaria kept me out of the office for three to four days each month. My new friends, the Anglo-Hungarian physicians, prescribed various pills. Nothing worked. I was immune even to the newest antimalarial drugs. It was as if for each step forward, I took two backward. During the days that I ran a high temperature, sweat covered my face as if I was holding it under a showerhead. I was sternly told that the only way in which I could get rid of my feeling of illness and yellow-colored appearance was to return to Holland’s temperate climate. I rejected the advice. I didn’t care how I felt or looked. Life in Singapore was just too exciting.

  In the fall of 1945 the Dutch liner New Amsterdam, en route to repatriating the first batch of Dutch civilians from Java, dropped anchor outside Singapore Harbor. Having received a message that my parents were aboard, I managed to talk my way onto a small boat (formerly a British customs vessel) that was taking a group of officials to the ship. Mother was overwhelmed with emotion when she saw me. She cried for most of the two hours I spent with her and Father on board the ship. Father remained composed but held my hand in both of his for a long time. I was taken aback by the way they looked: both now in their fifties, they acted old, far beyond their years. Mother’s hair had turned completely white. They were as skinny and sickly as the survivors of the railroad. Father had not only lost a lot of weight; his eyes were watery and hollow. The three of us put up a brave front. Each said that we had come through well and that our imprisonment had not been that bad. I asked them if they knew any of the courageous Eurasian women who had been beheaded for trying to smuggle messages into the POW camps. I asked them if they had been beaten. But they did not want to talk about it. The only thing that Mother complained about was the lack of soap. (Later, when we were reunited in Holland, the subject never came up again. I must confess that I never pressed them very hard, for during their lifetime I was as reluctant to volunteer information as they were).

  We just stared at each other, at a loss for words. But when I said to Father that my game of bridge had improved, he smiled for the first time. Mother wanted me to go back to Holland with them, right then and there. I promised that I would follow at the very earliest opportunity.

  I seriously intended to keep my promise, but living the good life in Singapore, I kept procrastinating, even though the recurring attacks of malaria continued to sap my strength. Singapore had reassumed its multicolored, cosmopolitan hue; in addition to its native Chinese, there were thousands of Malays who had come down the causeway from Johore, along with thousands more Indian, British, and Australian troops, as well as the ex-POWs, still emaciated but now neatly uniformed. As I moved among different groups of friends, it became even harder to think of leaving. There was glamour in the journalists’ world: most British, American, Australian, and French war correspondents stopped off at the Straits Times offices, and often I was invited to join them for a drink or a meal or a party.

  On Friday nights I returned to Nussbaum, whose swelling congregation included newly arrived members of British and Dutch military personnel. My new Anglo-Hungarian doctor friends accompanied me to the services. The rest of the week, they and others in our building kept me up late, filling me in on what had been happening in the world at large during my three and a half years of isolation, when all information I received had been based as much on rumor as on the occasional clandestine summary of radio bulletins.

  Some of my new British army friends had participated in the battles of North Africa and Italy; others had landed in Normandy shortly after D day; but most were fresh recruits on their first military mission outside their native country. The newcomers all took the position that a POW should be constantly on the lookout for an opportunity to escape. The veteran ex-prisoners and I listened warily when one of these greenhorns, a bright-eyed kid, only a few years younger in age but decades younger in experience than myself, argued passionately that it was better to die than to give up one’s freedom. I kept quiet, remembering how idealistic I too had been at the outbreak of war in May 1940. My ordeal on the railroad had made me grow up. I now knew that wartime heroics were nothing but an abstract theory that had little to do with the physical and psychological realities I had been forced to face.

  In Singapore I was no longer confronted with the seriously injured and the deadly sick ex-POWs. The one-armed, one-legged, scurvied, and otherwise maimed victims of Japanese mistreatment had been evacuated to their home countries as quickly as possible. What I did not realize was that some of the worst scars were mental, and therefore invisible. Two British medical studies published in 1990 reported that even after forty-five years, former prisoners had above-average levels of psychiatric illness and significantly higher rates of admission to hospitals. Thousands were suffering from psychological disorders from which they would never recover. A British magazine wrote that “it is widely felt that, even amongst the body of men who exhibit no clinical symptoms, their quality of life and indeed their longevity have been drastically reduced by their wartime experiences.”

  Many years later, shortly after the end of the Gulf War in 1990, I met one of these seriously traumatized ex-POWs at a business lunch in Holland. After exchanging pleasantries, we discovered that both of us had been in Changi. My neighbor suddenly brought his napkin to his eyes. “I often burst into tears,” he said. “It happens at the drop of a hat; there’s no way to stop it, and it usually occurs at an awkward moment.” Recently, he said, he had been watching TV with his family when some footage came on of a handful of Iraqi soldiers captured by the Americans. It showed the Iraqis stretching out their arms toward the victorious American soldiers in a gesture of fear and despondency. “When I saw those Iraqis, I started to sob,” my companion said, “much to my own embarrassment.”

  For a while I kept in touch with Willem, my old friend from camp. He had fallen in love with a Singapore woman whose husband had been killed in a Japanese massacre. He decided to take her and her child back to Java at the earliest opportunity. He wasn’t too eager to go back to his old job as postal clerk in Bandung, however. “If matters settle down over there, I’ll take my bride back to Java,” he said. “But if Indonesia goes independent, I’ll look you up in Holland.”

  My parents were back home, staying with a niece in Zandvoort, a resort town on the coast. The niece and her husband—Max and Lies Maarssen—had lost their parents and other relatives in the Holocaust. During the war, the young couple and their two children had gone into hiding. But now the whole family had picked up the pieces again. Father’s letters spoke of happy gatherings. Cousin Dick, with whom I had begun my adventures, was also staying there, reunited with Ro, his mother. Dick had spent the war years as a Japanese prisoner of war on Sumatra; Ro had been in the same civilian camp as Mother. John, her husband, had died in the camp.

  The news about the rest of Father’s family was not good. Three aunts, sisters of Father’s, their husbands, and all their children, with one lonely exception, had perished in the gas chambers. I realized that my grandparents had
been lucky to have died a natural death before the war. Jaap, one of my companions in the plane-spotting days of May 1940, had also been killed. Many other friends also failed to return from the concentration camps. Among them was Jules van Hessen, who had sat next to me in school. Edith, his little sister (who was to become my wife) had survived by living under a false identity with a family of courageous anti-Nazis.

  Father described Mother’s birthday party, with the family all gathered around the piano. Max had a strong baritone and sang some of Father’s favorite arias by Rossini and Verdi; Lies charmed her audience with French chansons. I pictured a refuge—warm and full of happy togetherness. Father’s letters urged me to consider my various options for a field of study. He asked whether I was still interested in applying to Rotterdam’s School of Economics. He enclosed a newspaper clipping about a new department at the University of Amsterdam offering a degree in the social and political sciences. It was to be called the Seventh Faculty. “This might be right up your alley,” he wrote. He made it quite clear that he expected me to go to university. I was not so sure—I believed that the world was changing and that years of study might be a waste of time.

  Meanwhile, the novelty of working at the newspaper had begun to wear off. My job had become routine, the parties were no longer as exciting, and I was still suffering from malaria. I looked like a yellow skeleton, unable to put on more weight no matter how hard I tried. And try I did—wolfing down three hearty meals each day, supplemented by food stall snacks of fried bananas or grilled chicken satay.

  Finally I made my decision. I put in a request to be repatriated to Holland. On February 8, 1946, I boarded the Alcantara, a Dutch troop carrier that was transporting Dutch soldiers and civilians back to Holland.

  When she sailed from Singapore Harbor, the Alcantara was on a northerly course, hugging the west coast of Malaysia. We proceeded in the same direction as the railroad tracks along which the Japanese had transported H-Force to Thailand. I looked back at the city where I had been a prisoner and at the coastline, my route to the Railway to Death. I felt a keen regret for the lost years of my life, but also a perverse pride—I had survived.