All Ships Follow Me

by Mieke Eerkens

  Sjeffie doesn’t live in the cottage very long—two months. Then the Japanese officers come to take the women and children away, like the men before them. Before they arrive, my grandmother gives her most important possessions to the Indonesian Dr. Sajidiman for safekeeping, a foresight that means our family has photographs and films of the family’s life before the war, unlike so many other families who leave everything behind with the naive belief that they’ll be returning to untouched homes after this bit of trouble blows over. My grandmother does keep a few special family photos and her jewelry, sewing it inside her clothing. She brings cans of sugar and coffee too. But most of the family’s belongings must be left behind. Each of them can bring one suitcase with them. Taking a deep breath and hoping she’s taken the right things, she closes the clasps and walks out of the little cottage. The officers have arrived, shouting commands. The women and children, along with hundreds of Dutch people from the region, are taken on flatbed trucks to the train station, where they are loaded onto waiting steam trains.

  “I actually thought it was kind of an adventure,” my dad says now about the transport. “There were a lot of families at the train station. We didn’t know where they were going to take us. We had no idea it was going to be bad. But one thing I knew pretty quickly was that I didn’t like the Japs very much.” He always uses the term Japs, the term they all used then, and I always feel uncomfortable because I know this is a slur. But I don’t correct him anymore because he doesn’t stop. I’ve read how the Japanese officers would beat the prisoners if they heard them refer to the officers as the Japs in the camp. Yet people still did it and risked a beating, a small demonstration of defiance and disrespect toward captors who insisted on respect. I know this is stuck in my father’s psyche, this term he uses solely for the Japanese forces that captured him rather than a catchall term for Japanese people. In the camps, it became the internees’ way of fighting back against their own subjugation. I am not sure how possible it would be for me to uncouple the slur “Jap” and the Japanese military forces in his mind, or to insist on political correctness from my father when he is referring to the officers who insisted on his obedience in this regard. “The Japs were already swinging their whips at the train station. I made sure to stay out of their way,” he says.

  My father’s train is going to Semarang, in Central Java. They travel all day, watching the lush green rice paddies and banana trees flow past, disappearing behind them. When they arrive in Semarang, they are loaded into trucks that take them from the station to the gates of their new home, which is surrounded by fencing and, in some places, loops of barbed wire. The gates open, and the trucks pass under the arches. Across the top is written “Lampersari.” Camp Lampersari. Outside the camp, guards patrol the perimeter. The gates shut behind the new camp residents and two Japanese officers stand in front of them. The detainees are now officially prisoners of war.

  3

  POWs

  Semarang, Indonesia, 2014

  I have booked us into a hotel in the green hills above Semarang that was described as a magnificent example of a colonial hotel, thinking it would trigger some nostalgia in my father. But it becomes clear upon arrival that while the skeleton of the hotel betrays a certain former status, its flesh has wasted away over the years. Our rooms, once made grand by their high ceilings, now feel cavernous with a single dim lightbulb hanging high above our heads, dingy walls, blinds too small for their windows, and beds dwarfed by a dearth of other furniture. The following day, I book us into a skyscraping hotel in the city, with modern amenities. The tallest building in Central Java, it has a rooftop infinity pool and spectacular views across Semarang. In the evening, we go for a swim and have dinner at the elaborate gourmet buffet, overseen by three chefs.

  The next morning, Joko picks us up to take us to the site of the former internment camp Lampersari, where my father was first brought with his mother and siblings. He drives two blocks, then pulls his van over. “What’s wrong?” we ask. “Nothing wrong. This is Lampersari,” he says. Our hotel is still in view, towering over this neighborhood. We could have walked here.

  It looks like a working-class neighborhood now. Very little remains the same, outside of the narrow pedestrian lanes and slokans running down the side of them. The lanes branching off the main roads are named the same, but numbered: The Main Manggaweg and Manggaweg 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; The Blimbingweg and its four offshoots. My father stands before a tiny stucco house with a tile roof on the spot of the house he once shared with several other families. These were kampong houses, shacks with thatched roofs, when he was here. We walk down the narrow lanes as I videotape. We find one leaning, abandoned shack that appears to be original. “This is close to how it was,” my father says. Residents stare at us as we pass. A woman emerges from her house and asks why we are filming. We explain that this entire neighborhood was once a prison camp for nearly eight thousand women and children, surrounded by a fence. “Really?” she asks. She has not heard anything about it before. She shakes my father’s hand.

  The homes that stand in this neighborhood today are filled with people who have no knowledge of their neighborhood’s dark past. It seems difficult to believe that people could not know that their homes were part of an internment camp during World War II. However, it also makes sense that the Indonesians, who fought for and won their independence from the Dutch, failed to memorialize the wartime experiences of the Dutch colonials. Everywhere we look in Indonesia, there are memorials to the Indonesian independence fighters. But aside from the memorial cemetery maintained by the Dutch government and a tiny plaque installed by Dutch visitors in one or two places, the Dutch have been erased from the war landscape entirely, as though they were never there for it at all. In some ways, for the local Indonesians, they weren’t. The Japanese erected gedek, which literally means “coverage,” to shield the Dutch prisoners from view of the Indonesian locals during the duration of the war. It was made of woven mats attached to the fencing, so the Indonesians outside the camps couldn’t witness their conditions and no longer interact with the colonial Dutch who had been among them before the Japanese invasion.

  The Japanese used the conflicted feelings native Indonesians had about the colonial power structure to try to gain their trust and foment solidarity with the Japanese forces. Asia for the Asians, they chanted. They hung posters in the shops: “Japan—Asia’s Light, Asia’s Protector, Asia’s Leader.” “Fight to rebuild Grand Asia! Be willing to suffer together with Japan!” They stoked the anti-Dutch sentiment and encouraged the indigenous Indonesian population to help them in their cause, appointing Indonesians to local governmental positions. If they could appeal to a sense of racial loyalty as Asians, they would be seen as liberators rather than invaders, at least initially. As a result, the Indos, people with mixed Dutch and Indonesian blood who were made to choose with which side they identified, often had it harder when they chose to stay outside of the camps than they did inside the camps, as anti-white rhetoric was spread and encouraged by the Japanese regime, and these people with white blood were labeled as tainted. The racism now came at mixed-family Indonesians from both sides.

  * * *

  Camp Lampersari, Semarang, Dutch East Indies, December 28, 1942

  Authority in Lampersari is established immediately. As they enter the camp, some women are pulled from the line and their suitcases opened to be searched for contraband: money, Dutch or English printed material, radios, and more. Sjeffie, now eleven years old, watches wide-eyed as the Japanese officers hit mothers with their batons to make them move when they get off the trucks. They shout orders in a language none of the prisoners understand, and when these orders aren’t followed, the flat ends of their sabers come down hard on whomever they happen to reach, sometime splitting flesh and drawing blood. It’s a new violence for most of these children, and a cacophony of cries adds to the chaos. Luckily, Sjeffie’s mother is toward the back of the group of arriving prisoners and escapes injury, though later in the
year she will not be so lucky, and her children will have to watch her being beaten to the ground because she doesn’t notice an officer approaching and therefore fails to bow to him in time.

  In the camp, the internees cannot avoid the constant bowing to officers. Crouched in front of the houses next to tubs, arms deep in water to try to wash some of the dirt out of their few items of clothing, they must drop what they are doing and stand. As the officer passes, they must shout, “Kiotske!” Then they shout, “Kere!” and they fold at the waist to ninety degrees, hands to knees. Standing straight again, they shout, “Naore!” Only when the officer has passed can they go back to what they were doing.

  Sjeffie and his mother and little sisters and brother are assigned to a small house on the Hoofd Manggaweg, the Main Mango Road. There are already three families living in the two-bedroom house when they arrive, and they shrink themselves into the corners, hanging a sheet up for privacy. Soon more women and children arrive, truckload after truckload, and Sjeffie and his family contract their spaces repeatedly, compressing more tightly with each new family until there are thirty people living in the house, crammed into every square inch. Children sleep in drawers, on and under tables, piled in sweaty heaps in the tropical heat. Snoring bodies lie shoulder to shoulder on mats on the floor. One toilet without running water serves all thirty of them in the house, and it soon overflows with human waste. They try to fend off malaria by hanging up klamboes over their sleeping bodies, a necessity in the Indonesian tropics, so that the house at night fills with ethereal clouds of hazy mosquito netting from wall to wall. My grandmother keeps a secret diary in the camp, penciled onto onionskin paper hidden in the pages of her Bible. She addresses her entries to my grandfather throughout her internment:

  I am sleeping with the boys in what was once a kitchen … The children are very sweet. Sjeffie seeks me out more than he used to and offers to help, though he sometimes falls back into old bad behavior … On February 2 the first group arrived [of the 2,000 new internees] … 860 people. Until this point, they had been housed in nice, large homes where they had taken care of themselves. There was a lot of hustling and the empty places streamed full. They had no sleeping rolls with them. Still, some of them managed to find a bed or sleeping roll. They have a lot of adjusting to do … Exactly a week later, the second group came. There were a lot of German women in that group. We got two kind women and five children in with us. We were able to lend them a few things … It was a lot of work for the officers and very difficult to find everyone a spot. In the chapel, it is very full. Tomorrow we’ll get another 250 from Soerabaya.

  Like many children, Sjeffie is remarkable in his adaptability. As a fearless eleven-year-old who wants to know everything about everything, he sees this all as a great adventure. Like a hamster in a new cage, he immediately scurries around the maze of the camp to discover the parameters of his environment while his mother busies herself with practical matters, foremost being how to bathe and feed her children and maintain some sort of daily structure for them. Sjeffie’s engineering proclivity is already evident, and in the first few days, while exploring his new quarters, he discovers some tubes protruding from the kitchen wall: gas lines where stoves must once have stood. He pulls off the end caps and looks into the black depth of the tubes, smells them. There is a faint whiff of gas. He sucks on the ends of the tubes, just as he had done to siphon gasoline out of cars back in Madiun. Suddenly, he gets a mouthful of gritty old water, which he spits on the floor. Water runs from the tube for a moment and then … a hissing sound. Natural gas. The Japanese haven’t shut off the gas valves that run into the houses, they’ve simply filled them with water, as the main gas line also feeds their officers’ quarters up the hill. Sjeffie lets out a yelp and plugs his finger in the tube to stop the gas flow. “Mama! Mamaaaa! Gas! There’s gas!” The house’s thirty residents crowd around. “Verrekt! The kid’s found gas!” The implications aren’t lost on them. It means they can sterilize water, cook rice and any food they find or catch, make tea and coffee. Sjeffie finds the connection hose of the stove in a cabinet and reconnects it quickly. Word spreads through the camp quickly: A boy in the house at Manggaweg 50 knows how to hook up the gas! Other internees begin to knock on the door and ask for Sjeffie. He sets up a little business, trading tablespoons of sugar, coffee, or tea for setting up gas service in other houses. My father. Always finding the way forward in a situation where most see only a dead end.

  This survival instinct seems innate in his family. Almost immediately after they arrive in Lampersari, Aunt Ko begins covertly teaching Sjeffie, his siblings, and other boys and girls in the camp from contraband Dutch language textbooks she has smuggled in. Every day, she sets up a little schoolroom in the tiny kampong house while the others clear out and stand watch in case an officer passes and hears them. Sjeffie gets to practice his numbers again. He gets to read, sucking up the words, reading the same books again and again. In one of the houses across the road, he and some other boys have set up a little hidden library under the thatched roof, where they collect their books—Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days, Chris van Abkoude’s The Adventures of Pietje Bell, Hector Malot’s Nobody’s Boy, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and other books with wide appeal to young boys. Most of the children or their parents have brought pencils and notepads, but very quickly they realize how scarce these things are. “Sjeffie, make sure you write small. Save room on your paper,” Aunt Ko says sternly during class. Aunt Ko is very strict. She’s a religious woman who does not approve of waste or idleness. Sometimes she draws on the dirt floor with a stick so she doesn’t have to waste paper or pencil.

  Meals during the first month in the camp are meager but sufficient. The prisoners get small portions, mostly of rice but also of some vegetables and meat in the beginning. The meat lasts only a short time. The vegetables last longer, but they too dwindle after several months. After that, all meals consist of a cup of rice or tapioca porridge twice a day, sometimes once a day. Sjeffie lines up with his mother and siblings with all the other prisoners, holding their tin cups. When they get to the front of the line, their cups are filled from giant pots that the kitchen workers have cooked the rice or porridge in. One measured portion per person. Being assigned to work in the kitchen is a coveted job because there are chances to tuck food under one’s shirt, swipe a finger inside the rim of the pot when the officers look away, or sneak a second helping. But the job is dangerous; the rice or porridge is cooked over open fires in massive cauldrons, and more than once, a woman trips and is badly burned. They also have to carry the cauldrons two by two suspended on bamboo rods. One misstep and the boiling mush will sear skin clean off.

  Most of the women are sent to work in the fields or to feed and care for the livestock that the Japanese are raising for themselves. A half hour’s walk from the camp, at the foot of the Tjandi Hills, there are pigsties and fields that the women sow full of Japanese eggplant, broccoli, cucumbers, and tomatoes while the officers watch them. Lampersari is one of the first camps in Indonesia to be targeted for the infamous “comfort women,” the women specifically selected to be raped by the Japanese officers. A recruiter is sent to Lampersari for this task. However, the women hear the rumor about what is about to happen and gather en masse to fight back. They block access and fight fiercely to protect the young mothers and teenage daughters that the Japanese officers prey upon, forcing the Japanese to abandon Lampersari as a suitable source for comfort women, not worth the trouble after repeated violent beatings only seem to strengthen the prisoners’ resolve to fight back. The Japanese have set up two hundred internment camps throughout the Dutch East Indies, and prisoners at these smaller camps are easier to overpower. In Java, Lampersari and three other camps are the only ones where the prisoners fight back.

  Sjeffie’s inherent perseverance is his best asset in the camp. When the meals begin to dwindle and the prisoners’ bellies begin to learn the gnawing twist that will become t
heir daily reality, he patrols the narrow paths of the camp, looking for snakes, lizards, rats, or bird’s nests with eggs or baby birds. Despite the lack of food, everyone drinks coffee, still rather plentiful in the Dutch East Indies. The caffeine keeps them awake as their bodies, drained of nutrients, rapidly shrink with their forced labor in the sun.

  My grandmother continues to write my grandfather letters in her secret diary throughout their internment, but the worry creeps into her language as her optimism begins to wane:

  Sept. 12, 1943

  It has been so long since I have heard anything from you. I am going to try to write you every day … We all long so much to live together with you again. I’m writing this on my bed, the only place where you can be alone here.

  Sept. 21, 1943

  This week we’ve had to do roll call twice a day … Turned in all our books, besides Bibles … This is especially unfortunate for the children, especially now that the school is closed. Now they play in their fort the whole day; make masks, “bow and arrows,” etc. and have scavenger hunts … The newspaper doesn’t appear anymore since 10+/- days ago and the radio has been taken away. Now we are completely deprived of news. No news is good news, we have to believe.