All Ships Follow Me

by Mieke Eerkens

A day comes when the Japanese post a notice on the bulletin board in the camp. All males over ten years old will be moved into separate barracks up the hill nearer the officers’ quarters, on the other side of the Blimbing Road. The mothers furrow their brows. Why are their sons being separated from them? They aren’t given a choice. After a year in the camp, Sjeffie is now twelve years old. He has to go. The boys pack their few items into their suitcases and are marched up the hill to their new quarters. Every day, Sjeffie and the other boys count off for the officers in charge of them. Ichi, ni, san, shi, go. Roku, shichi, hachi, ku, juu. They learn the drill quickly, because if they don’t say it properly, they are whacked with a stick by John the Whacker.

  The officers who guard them inside the camp quickly get Dutch nicknames. In addition to John the Whacker, the officers include Little Ko; Hockey Stick; Pretty Karl; the Bloodhound; the Easter Egg; Bucket Man; Chubby Baby; and Dick and Jane, who patrol together.

  Seikon Kimura, the man known as John the Whacker, is arguably the most sadistic. He earns his nickname for the way he seems to enjoy striking internees indiscriminately, without warning. When he discovers that a woman in the camp has been hiding money, he confiscates it and punches her in the face. He kicks her in the back until she is unable to stand while her children scream. He has her carried to the center of the camp, where he makes her lay injured in the equatorial sun from morning until evening without water. After the war, the Allied war crimes tribunal will sentence him to death for his human rights violations during the war. He is convicted of “carrying out a systematic reign of terror,” with witnesses at his trial describing his beating of a woman with a piece of wood until her arms broke in several places for sitting down during her work, causing a woman to go permanently deaf after being beaten for thirty minutes for smuggling cigarettes, forcing prisoners to stand in stress positions, withholding water and food, and whipping children until their flesh was in tatters, among other atrocities.

  Hockey Stick earns his name from the wooden hockey stick he carries with him throughout the camp and uses to take the legs out from under a prisoner. Then he makes them stand up so he can do it again, over and over, laughing every time. The Bloodhound is more selective, but he is capable of beating people into a coma when he does lose his temper.

  Sjeffie still comes down the hill for his daily lessons from Aunt Ko, during which he gets to see his mother and siblings, but when the sun sets, he has to say goodbye and return to the barracks for the older boys. One morning, he notices a boy whispering with another boy and gets curious. “What are you whispering about?” he asks. They tell him they’ve discovered a crack in the wall of the storage room where the Japanese officers store the bags of rice. After dark, they stick a sharpened bamboo shoot through the crack to pierce the bag leaning against that wall and siphon the rice. During the day, the boys smuggle it off the hill when they go to see their mothers, who cook it in tin cans. “You can come with us,” they tell Sjeffie, “but you can’t tell anyone, or we’ll get in trouble.”

  At first, Sjeffie doesn’t dare. But after he has seen the boys get away with it a couple of nights, his hunger wins out and he decides to risk it. Three other boys also learn about the secret and start siphoning rice through the hole in the wall. Emboldened, they return to the crack repeatedly over the course of a couple of days, taking a bit more each time. The laws of physics catch up to the boys, and as they drain it, the bag starts to slump over. That’s when the Japanese officers discover it.

  John the Whacker and another officer enter the barracks unexpectedly, holding whips. One of them demands that the rice thieves step forward. Sjeffie’s heart rises into his throat. The blood in his veins curdles. His breath freezes in his lungs. He has seen what these men do to human bodies. When nobody steps forward, John the Whacker says if nobody confesses, they are going to beat all of the boys in the barracks. The other boys start murmuring, “Confess! Don’t make us all get beaten!” One of the thieves steps forward. And then, shaking, so does Sjeffie. He turns to look at the other thieves, waiting for them to step forward too. But they don’t move. They know what comes next, and two sacrificial lambs seem to satisfy the officers. John the Whacker steps in front of Sjeffie, who trembles uncontrollably. He puts his face in Sjeffie’s face and shouts in Japanese as the other officer translates into Bahasa. “Take your shirt off! Turn around and face the group!” Sjeffie pulls his shirt off and faces the other boys. The officer steps back. Then he begins unleashing blows on Sjeffie’s back with audible cracks. Tears run down Sjeffie’s face. He can feel warm blood begin to run down his back. The officer stops, and Sjeffie thinks it’s over, but it isn’t. The officer turns him around and whips his chest until he bleeds. Then he pushes Sjeffie back toward the other boys. The other boy is bloodied too, and the boys encircle them both.

  As soon as the officers leave, Sjeffie runs. Scared, he can think of only one thing: Mama. He arrives at the Manggaweg house covered in welts and blood. But Mama isn’t there. Aunt Ko is there. In ragged bursts, he tells her what happened. But instead of comfort, he finds her Calvinistic anger. “You shouldn’t have stolen! Stealing is a sin!” she scolds. “You could have been killed.” As punishment for stealing, she sends him outside with a can. “Dig holes in the ground as penance,” she says, not able to think of anything else. So he does. He digs holes while his blood dries in the sun, then runs again with sweat. When Sjeffie’s mother returns, she finds him there, on his hands and knees, digging, and asks him what’s happened. Aunt Ko appears in the doorway and explains that she’s punished him for being a thief. My grandmother says, “You shouldn’t have stolen. Don’t do it again. But you’ve dug enough holes now.”

  This could be the gravest trauma my father suffered in the camps. Not the beating, not the starvation, but the moment he realized that when he was injured and needed to be soothed, there was no mother to take him in her arms, and he was truly all alone. In every boy’s diary I read at the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, there is a forced hardening, a pivot from describing the overwhelming homesickness for Mother to describing the practical things the boys do to survive. Mentions of parents in these diaries become less prevalent as the war continues. It’s a palpable resignation. It breaks my heart more than anything else my father endured, more than the abuse or malnutrition. Loss of tribe. Every man for himself.

  In September 1944, the Japanese officers announce that the boys on the hill will be transferred out of Lampersari and tell the mothers to say goodbye to their sons, those scab-kneed, lizard-catching children now considered mature enough to do hard labor in a separate camp. The phrase the Japanese use is “men over ten.” As in, “All of the men over ten are hereby reassigned to new camps.” And so with a change of one word, with a relabeling, they justify the transfer.

  The women clutch at their sons and weep. They whisper words into their ears as they hug them goodbye, hasty insufficient summaries of all the things that they would have taught them in the remaining years of childhoods that now have to be condensed into a few minutes. Sjeffie’s mother tries to remember things to tell him. Wash whenever you can, check for lice and ticks, find a buddy and work as a team, don’t fight, keep practicing your equations, whatever you do just don’t do anything to anger the officers, that’s very important, OK, you have to promise me, can you promise me that?

  Aunt Ko says, “Say your prayers every day.” Sjeffie’s little sister Doortje hugs him and gives him some coffee. Fien, his youngest sister, hugs his legs, and my father kisses the top of his baby brother Kees’s head. Through the agitated buzz of the Dutch mothers, camp officers shout angry words in Japanese, words like iikagennishiro and teiryuu and shuutai and hikihanasu, words that tumble into one another and mean nothing to the women until the guards start whacking them with their batons and whips, pulling son from mother and mother from son like starfish from wet rock.

  The boys are marched out of Camp Lampersari as their mothers wail and their younger siblings watch wide-eyed. The cr
ies of Mammie, Mammie rise repeatedly from their midst as they pass through the camp gates, heads swiveling for their last looks back.

  The newly branded “men” march with their little suitcases banging against their knobby knees for what Sjeffie believes is many hours, along the banana trees and the warungs and the kopi carts. A rumor spreads in low tones through the group as they walk.

  “I heard they’re taking us to Bangkok.”

  “Yep, they definitely said they’re taking us to Bangkok. I heard the Jap say it.”

  “Psst, hey, word is we’re going to Bangkok.”

  “Bangkok! That’s not even in the Indies! I won’t ever see my family again!”

  “Well, that’s where we’re going. Bangkok.”

  Within what is in all likelihood less than one hour, they arrive at the front gate of a convent, and the officers leading them stop. This is Camp Bangkong, their new home.

  4

  MEN OVER TEN

  Camp Bangkong, Dutch East Indies, September 1944

  Camp Bangkong is a former Catholic convent with an attached school. When my father arrives with the other boys from Lampersari, the classrooms have been cleared of their desks and chairs and the chapel has been cleared of its pews, to be turned into housing for prisoners. Inside, there are hundreds of men, old and young. As the boys arrive, female prisoners leave the camp through the back gate. They are headed to Lampersari or Camp Halmaheira, swapped for the new “men over ten.” The only women left in the camp are a handful of nuns whom the Japanese keep to work as nurses for them. Sjeffie recognizes the same officers from Lampersari, who rotate between the camps. John the Whacker, Hockey Stick, Little Ko. His pulse quickens as he passes the officers who beat him for the rice incident. The boys haven’t managed to leave these officers behind.

  Sjeffie’s friend Peter is not doing well with the transfer. A few weeks earlier, his mother had died in Lampersari, and his teenage sister had taken over caring for him. Peter was still in mourning, sobbing daily, when he was ordered to leave for Bangkong. Whereas some of the boys are mature for their age, he is a young eleven. His sister and the other women had begged the officers to let him stay with them in Lampersari, given his recent loss. The officers refused, shouted that he had to get in line with the other men over ten. As Peter stood there, tears running down his cheeks, his sister ran to him again to tell him to be brave. A conscripted Korean heiho, or camp guard, watching this immediately stormed up to them and hit the girl in the lower back with the blunt end of his bayonet-tipped rifle. As he did so, the bayonet end caught Peter’s thigh, causing a gash. So this is how they parted, the sister knocked to the ground, her little brother limping and bleeding out of the camp while sobbing and looking over his shoulder until he could not see her anymore.

  As he left his sister behind, something in Peter cracked, and all the children saw it. On the walk to the new camp, he stared ahead, expressionless. “Peter, it’s going to be OK,” Sjeffie whispered, but Peter didn’t look at him. He limped with his injured leg, struggling to keep up, falling back to the end of the line. Like a zombie, he plodded on, silent, dragging his injured leg.

  When the boys arrived in Camp Bangkong, they were told to get in formation and say their names, to count off. But Peter didn’t say his name or count off. Catatonic, he stared straight ahead. The officer in charge interpreted this as insolence and decided to make Peter an example for the others. He motioned two other officers over. They dragged Peter out in front of the rows of boys. Sjeffie’s heart drilled against his chest. He willed his friend to speak. “Name! Count!” Peter did not answer. The officer in charge pulled out a bamboo rod and brought it down on Peter’s shoulder. He stumbled but didn’t speak. “Name! Count!” He was beaten to the ground with a rod each time he failed to respond, then pulled back onto his feet by the other two officers for another round. “Name! Count!” “Name! Count!” Despite Sjeffie’s silent pleading, Peter did not open his mouth. Bleeding from open cuts on his face and back, he didn’t cry, and he didn’t talk. This seemed only to make the officer more angry, and he beat him harder. Ultimately, when Peter couldn’t stand on his feet anymore, two officers carried his bloody body to the sick bay.

  There he lies, staring straight ahead. He refuses to drink water or eat rice. The nuns are at a loss. One of them asks around and learns that Sjeffie is his friend. She asks Sjeffie to come talk to him; he has to drink and eat. Sjeffie stands by his bed and says, “Come on, Peter. This is a terrible situation, but you have to snap out of it to get better. I’ll help you. We have to get through it.” Peter finally speaks. Mammie. It’s the only word he repeats every time anyone pleads with him. The nurses give Peter’s untouched portion of rice to Sjeffie, who swallows it down gladly, despite the flies that have been sitting on it for a few hours. Then they send him out.

  Sjeffie learns of Peter’s death when the nuns give him his friend’s suitcase a few days later. Unlike Sjeffie’s suitcase, which is filled with clothes and practical items, Peter’s suitcase contains mainly toys, including an erector set. It’s a special treat for the boys, something to play with. Anything to distract them.

  * * *

  My father concedes that watching his friend die of a broken heart at a young age affected him in a profound way. I articulate it for him and he nods. Feel too much, and you could die. Yes, maybe that’s true. It’s something understood implicitly in the camps. The boys in the camp don’t show their soft underbellies when they can help it. They go into the latrines to shed their tears if they feel them come during the day, and as soon as the sun sets and their sleeping quarters go dark, echoing back from the walls and ceiling are the sounds of anonymous phlegmy sniffles and muffled sobs. The dark also masks older men, who hunch over the more vulnerable boys in the black night. My father observes all this, the tangible consequences of weakness, and he carries the knowledge with him for the rest of his life.

  The first month at Bangkong is very difficult for the boys. One boy with diabetes dies within a week because there is no insulin in the camp. When I begin to research the camps, I find dozens of journals kept by POWs, including boys in my father’s camp, donated to the archives of the Netherlands Institute of War Documentation. The entries in the beginning of these journals reveal profound heartache and loneliness, children missing their mothers. But even for these children, more immediate physical discomforts quickly take the place of these soul pains. Initially, Sjeffie sleeps in the chapel at the center of the camp. The boys sleep on two-by-four-foot kesilirs, thin mats on the floor. At night, bedbugs crawl over their bodies, the camp being completely infested with them, and many of the boys’ journals describe the stench of the bedbugs that hangs perpetually in the air. The welts pepper their skin. But the boys’ bodies are exhausted, and eventually, despite the biting bugs, they sleep the sleep of the fatigued, having come home from a day in the patjol field to one cup of rice or half of a three-inch square of rubbery tapioca. Everyone in the camp, approximately fifteen hundred men and boys, washes themselves under two primitive cold water showers or at an elevated concrete mandi basin containing buckets of water. Each person tries to bathe once or twice a week.

  Like the men in the camp, each boy gets a white armband with a Japanese number written on it that corresponds to his han, his living quarters. The boys learn the alert signals for roll call, air strikes, meals, and lights-out. Sjeffie moves into the end room on the top floor in the north wing of the cloister, with thirty boys per room. Three rooms form a han, which is headed by a hancho, or section head, and an assistant head, called a komicho. The European hanchos and komichos are selected from the older male POWs in the camp and assigned to watch over the boys. Every night, on a rotating basis, two boys have to walk back and forth in front of the han, to make sure order is kept. If a Japanese officer approaches, the boys must repeat the words they have been taught. My father recites them for me: “Dai go han, fushinban, fuku mudju, ijo arimasen.” He says this means, “This is Han Five, I am the night watch, ther
e is nothing unusual to report.” They never learn the words to say if there is something unusual to report.

  This becomes clear when one night, a boy they’ve nicknamed Penkie goes missing. Penkie is in Han Five with Sjeffie. Like a few other children of internees, Penkie is an Indo boy, half Dutch, half Indonesian. This means that unlike the blond, blue-eyed boys in the camp, he can slip undetected into the Indonesian population outside the fence, something he figures out how to do. In the dark, Penkie sneaks out of the camp when the officers are distracted, and goes to the nearby kampongs. The Indonesians give him a chicken and fruit, and Penkie smuggles the food back into the camp. He does this for several nights, until one night his luck runs out. He’s captured by a patrolling officer, and the camp sirens wail through the halls at 3:00 a.m. The boys and men have five minutes to file into the center of the camp. Eyes blinking with sleep, hearts pounding, they rush down the stairs and get in formation for roll call.

  In the black of night, a Japanese officer walks down the rows. He stops in front of each hancho, asking for a head count and the number of sick in the han, as is customary at roll call. The officer stops in front of the hancho for Sjeffie’s han, an older man from Luxembourg. The man states the number of boys in the han, to the best of his knowledge, having been woken only moments earlier. The officer asks him to repeat the number, then asks him again. The hancho falters, confused. The number comes out as a question the third time. Sjeffie’s breath catches in his throat. What is going on? Suddenly, the officer removes his belt and begins to beat the hancho in the head with the buckle end, until the hancho falls, covering himself. “Lies! How dare you lie to me!” the officer yells as the blows fall. Stunned and bleeding from the cut in his head, the hancho looks up, confused. The officer calls out and some officers lead a handcuffed Penkie into the clearing. The officer shines a flashlight into Penkie’s bloody, swollen face. He’s held up by the officers, unable to stand. “Who was on night watch when this boy escaped?!” the officer demands. Two terrified boys are produced from within the rows. These boys are also beaten. Then the whole camp is subjected to an hour-long rant in Japanese, translated into Indonesian, about the severe consequences of attempted escapes. There will be zero tolerance. Finally, they are allowed to return to their sleeping quarters, except for Penkie, who is locked into a storage room with bars over the open windows so everyone can see him as an example.