Penkie stays locked up for three days, guarded by a camp officer with a bayonet. He is under orders not to receive food or water, but by the second day, one of the Korean officers begins to take pity as the boy becomes dehydrated, and looks the other way as someone slips him a can of water through the bars, saving his life. But the Japanese officers haven’t finished making Penkie an example for the others. After three days, two Kempeitai officers arrive, just as the patjolers return from the fields. They sit at a table in the center of the camp, and Penkie is brought before them. They sentence him to a water torture, which is carried out immediately in front of hundreds of horrified boys and men. Penkie is tied, writhing and screaming, to a baleh-baleh, a bamboo cot. A hose is inserted into his mouth and turned on while they hold his nose shut. His belly swells. The officers turn the baleh-baleh upside down, then begin to beat his distended belly with a rod until he vomits the water out. The twelve-year-old Penkie survives the torture, but nobody dares attempt an escape after that.
The officers and Kempeitai are not the only enemies inside the camp. The older prisoners can be just as bad. Power corrupts, even when power comes in the form of a prisoner given the task of watching over a group of children weaker than he is. The komicho of Sjeffie’s han has a mosquito net over his kesilir, unlike most of the prisoners. He sleeps with Sjeffie on one side of him and an eleven-year-old boy named Hans on the other side. Sjeffie hears the komicho whisper to Hans in the dark, “Come under my mosquito net so you won’t be stung.” Sjeffie, while naive, knows something isn’t right with this. In the night, he hears Hans sobbing from under the mosquito net and the komicho whispering angrily for him to stay quiet, covering his mouth. Sjeffie thinks about telling someone, but he keeps quiet, afraid the komicho will turn to his other side in the night and reach for him instead. One night, Hans becomes very ill with a sudden fever, moaning softly on his mat. In the morning, his body is cold and stiffening, just feet away from Sjeffie. This memory still gnaws at my father, who wonders if the komicho had anything to do with Hans’s death. He knows that he himself dodged something very bad, and he feels guilt for having done so.
I read other vague references to molestation by the older prisoners in some of the diaries of the boys in my father’s camp and realize again how the threat of this possibility shapes life philosophies in young, formative minds: self-preservation at all costs, even if it means sacrificing someone else. As with food, where survival depends on each boy getting as much as he can for himself and not helping out his neighbor, the sexual abuse forces each of them into an impossible role of betrayer. If they speak up about what they see, they may become targets. So they keep quiet but feel enormous guilt about their decision: I’m glad it’s him, because otherwise it would be me.
In the camp, there is a makeshift medical facility and a pharmacy, run by prisoners who were doctors. There isn’t enough medicine, however, so the pharmacist is left to improvise, grinding up papaya leaves as a cure-all for any number of ailments. With the lack of proper nutrition and oral hygiene, the boys’ teeth start to develop abscesses. Sjeffie too develops a tooth abscess. There is no dentist in the camp. He goes to the medical room and the doctor pulls the tooth without anesthetic, then sends him to the pharmacy for some ground-up papaya leaves. When the pharmacist sees Sjeffie’s last name, he asks, “Do you happen to be Dr. Eerkens’s son? I worked with him in the hospital here in Semarang, before your family moved to Madiun.” And so Sjeffie lands a coveted job as the pharmacist’s assistant, and no longer has to work in the fields every day with the other patjolers. Instead, he spends his days in the tiny pharmacist’s room grinding papaya leaves with a stone mortar and pestle, something that causes an enormous amount of jealousy in the other boys.
Amoebic dysentery spreads through the camp because of unsterile water, and soon the latrines, open toilets with a curtain separating each cubicle, are filled with boys who feel their bowels turned inside out, and those waiting cannot hold it. The ground in front of the latrines and the stairs to the latrines are covered in diarrhea each morning, to be cleaned up by the boys with that unfortunate duty, and the disease spreads further. Many succumb, and there are more dead bodies than usual those weeks. Themes of mortality and survival replace the theme of homesickness in the boys’ diaries by this point in their internment.
Sjeffie has thought about where he can hide if the Japanese begin to shoot them. These are the thoughts of a thirteen-year-old boy, based on rumors murmured through the camp. Initially, he thinks the latrines are his only option. Once those become a sea of feces, however, he begins to look for other options. He roams the hallways, scanning the buildings for possibilities. When he notices a place on the upper floor with a ceiling access panel that can be reached via a railing, he decides that this is where he will hide when they begin to shoot.
But the daily misery in the camp also amplifies the smallest joys. Just as there is a daily reminder of the human capacity for cruelty, so too is there evidence of the human drive to connect and find points of light. Sjeffie and the boys find moments of levity, along with moments of human kindness in the Japanese and Korean officers. I read in a journal of a boy crying in a corner of the camp and an officer who, unexpectedly, sits beside him and confesses that he misses his family too, patting the boy on the shoulder. I hold on to these rare moments in the relentless and depressing succession of stories, not only as a writer trying to find some variation and movement in a dark narrative, but as a human being who imagines her father and these scared boys all alone in horrendous circumstances. I wish for them the promise of a kinder world than they live in.
Little Ko is one of the Korean officers. He is rumored to be homosexual by many of the boys because of his soft demeanor and his mannerisms, but he never behaves inappropriately with the young men. He doesn’t beat the boys for sport like some of the other officers, and he actually smiles at them from time to time. Little Ko loves music. He often hums when the other guards aren’t looking. On Christmas Eve, he is left behind to oversee the camp while the other officers go into the city for their own event. Swearing the camp prisoners to secrecy, Little Ko disappears into the officers’ quarters, asking two men to come with him. Amazingly, they emerge from the officers’ quarters rolling an upright piano, which they place in the center of the camp. Sjeffie and the boys crowd around. Little Ko asks for a volunteer, and a boy who is very good at playing the piano steps forward. He begins to play, ragtime and jazz and Dutch Christmas songs. Little Ko beams, delighted by the boys’ happiness. He gestures to the boys. Sing! Sing! They sing and dance the jitterbug with each other. One boy starts a soft-shoe tap dance. They haven’t heard music or been allowed to dance in years. It’s the best Christmas party most of them have ever had, simply for the sheer surprise of it. The boy playing the piano looks at Little Ko, who is dancing and smiling. He takes a calculated risk. He begins playing the “Wilhelmus,” the Dutch national anthem, and the other boys sing along, though the anthem is explicitly banned by the Japanese. Little Ko doesn’t know the anthem, and he sways along obliviously, beaming. After a couple of hours, Little Ko drags the piano back into the officers’ quarters, before the other officers can return to discover what he’s done. Unfortunately, somebody appears to have snitched, because a few days later, Little Ko is taken away, and never returns to their camp. But my father still remembers this night, and his face lights up with the memory. He wonders how harshly Little Ko was punished, and whether he knew how significant his act of kindness was. “He was not a bad guy. He disappeared. They said that the Kempeitai got after him and put him in jail for it. He was not supposed to fraternize with the enemy, which is what they considered us to be,” my father says.
The cruelty of the Japanese forces during World War II is well documented, and yet it is difficult to understand the reasoning behind the officers’ cruelty toward my father and the other boys. Most of the officers were enlisted in the military involuntarily, so it isn’t clear why they felt it necessary to be harsh to
ward their prisoners, especially when those prisoners were children. Little Ko brought some happiness into the lives of the prisoners he was charged with watching. It made them more agreeable. He could have been an example, but instead he was punished and removed as an officer. I think about this a lot. Perhaps it comes back to the human defense mechanism of compartmentalization. For many of the officers, I imagine, it would be impossible for them to do their jobs and imprison other human beings if they did not vilify them. West vs. East. White vs. Asian. Dehumanizing the prisoners was integral to maintaining the rules and order. Little Ko had to be punished for his act of compassion.
Sjeffie still has contraband copies of Don Quixote and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea that he snuck into the camp and hid in a spot under the rafters. He uses them to curry favor with the other boys, promising some temporary distraction after their days of silently plowing and planting rows of Japanese eggplant, spinach, and cucumbers in the heat. The boys gather around and read out loud, savoring the words. Words are a desired commodity in the camp, far more valuable than they ever had been outside of the barbed wire. The imagination-inflaming adventures of sea monsters and Spanish wanderers are a reminder of when they were boys, or a reminder with each giggle and whisper as they huddle around the pages that perhaps they are still boys, and only pretending to be men.
These moments of levity last until the day the Japanese officers announce that any remaining papers that hold or might hold Western words will be collected in an offer of temporary amnesty, and thereafter any prisoner found with reading material will be severely punished. My father is given the job, along with another boy, of pushing a handcart through the camp to collect the books, and Don Quixote is among the first to go onto the bed of the cart. The books are heaped in piles and taken to the officers for burning. The boys stand solemnly along the path, watching Don Quixote make his way past them and out of sight on his way to the fire.
Without their books, distraction becomes more and more important, because after many months of dwindling food, the prisoners are fading. They will do anything to stop thinking about the twisting in their guts. Sjeffie looks at his ribs slash across his skin like zebra stripes. He thinks only of food. When my sister asks him what they did, what they felt, how they got through the days, he says, “We were hungry. We couldn’t think about anything else but food.” That is reflected in the camp diaries I read. What is remarkable about them is how reliably every one of them becomes less and less about missing family or feeling lonely or the fear of being shot and more and more about the diary writer’s starving body, until that is almost without fail the dominant topic on every page.
With the sanitation problem in the camp come a lot of flies. The officers’ way of dealing with this is to exploit the boys’ hunger. They promise a spoonful of sugar for every two hundred flies the boys can kill. The boys bring the belly-up insects to the officers’ quarters to be counted. A spoonful of sugar is extremely valuable. It has calories. You can eat it or trade it. When the boys are given some coffee brought in from the plantations, they mix it with the sugar to take away their hunger pains. They call this “doef-daf,” for the sound it made when they beat the mixture in their cups. I read about their fly counts in their diaries, the ledgers of flies and spoonfuls of sugar as meticulously recorded as tax documents.
It’s an epiphany when I read this, as a strange behavioral tic of my father’s falls into place. When I was a child, my father always went into an all-out assault on any flying insect that deigned to enter our house. We had a flyswatter hanging in every room. My father seemed to relish inordinately the act of killing flies, dancing wildly across the room as if possessed, smacking the swatter onto objects until he exclaimed, “Got him! Ha-haaaa! Bastard!” It was a running joke to my siblings and me. “Oh, Dad and his flies.” When I moved into a new apartment as an adult, my father was there to help me. He called a time-out in the middle of unloading the U-Haul to drive to the hardware store down the road, and returned with not one but three flyswatters, because he had spotted a fly in my new apartment. He embarked on his usual flyswatting dance immediately. I always viewed my father’s weird obsession with flies as amusing and quirky, but I never understood its source until I read those diaries and asked him about this dead-fly reward system in the camp. The next Christmas, I bought him an electric flyswatter called “the Executioner.” I’ve never seen him more pleased with a gift.
In the last six months of their internment, the internees barely get anything to eat, outside of a two-by-three-inch cube of starch paste mixed with sawdust, which they are instructed to break in half and consume for breakfast and dinner, as well as half a cup of rice. Only an occasional bit of protein from the patjol fields, where creatures scurry, now supplements their diets. The kepitings, small crabs that occasionally crawl into the fields, are a particularly rare treat to catch. The boys call the skinniest kids in the camp “birdcage,” teasing them for their rows of ribs. In one diary, I read of a boy who was so emaciated that the diary writer had mocked, “Whoo-hoo, look at you, birdcage!” “Hey, I’m not that bad,” the boy responded. “I’m not a birdcage yet!” But in the morning, he didn’t wake up. Some of the boys’ stomachs grow round, distended from the protein deficiency kwashiorkor. Many of them see their feet and legs swell with edema from the vitamin B deficiency beriberi. Malnutrition can make people go mad, and the boys become aware of this as they start to feel their minds fade along with their bodies. Every day now, a cold corpse remains on its mat in the morning when the others rise for roll call. Boys carry their friends out on stretchers made of bamboo, covered with thatched grass. “Shlepping corpses” is the least-desired job in the camp to be tapped for. Sjeffie tries to look busy in the pharmacy when he sees a body brought into the storage shed, but he too is tapped a few times to carry bodies out. In the tropical heat, the stretchers drip bodily fluids onto the boys’ feet as they struggle to carry the dead across the camp and out through the front gate, where they are placed onto a cart to be brought to mass graves. Shlepping corpses gives boys the willies, but they don’t dare admit it. They have to use these crude words and make light of what is becoming abundantly clear—the fact that they are starving to death—because if they look it in the eye and acknowledge it, they may lose their sanity altogether. “Damn. I got tapped by the Bloodhound to shlep a corpse tomorrow,” they say, yawning. Acknowledging weakness is like opening the door to their own mortality. So they scoff and deny and pretend they are superhuman, unaffected.
There are two infamous brothers in the camp, the Schuyer brothers. As they lose weight, they begin to lose their minds too. With a bit of wire, they meticulously cut their grains of rice into three or four pieces, spending an hour or more hunched over this task every day. Then they eat each rice piece one by one to make the meal last longer. They inspire a new insult in the camp: “Schuyering,” a verb that means to show cracks in one’s sanity with obsessive-compulsive behavior. “Stop Schuyering” is a common taunt heard in the camp whenever a boy begins measuring or counting his food.
* * *
Some days, the women from Lampersari are brought to work in an adjacent field to the patjolers, and while they aren’t allowed to speak, the mothers can scan the boys for their sons or the sons of others, and vice versa. These days are a psychological lifeline for the boys, and in diary after diary I saw the excited announcement, “I saw Mama today! She’s alive and she waved to me.” When Sjeffie hears that the women have been in the patjol fields for several days in a row, he asks another boy to switch places with him in the pharmacy, and he joins his cousin Kees and the patjolers for a day. Sure enough, he looks across the field and in the distance, he sees his own thin mother, shovel in hand, staring across the field back at him under the stern watch of an officer, her message unspoken but understood: Stay strong. I love you.
In her diary during this period, my grandmother writes to her absent husband:
This paper has been in my Bible for more than a year now. Li
fe is getting increasingly difficult. The boys have been in Camp Bangkong since September 13. Last Wednesday I went to pull weeds in the fields, and saw both of them; wasn’t allowed to speak to them. Thankfully, they looked OK. There are more and more people dying in our group, and over there as well. If this lasts much longer, the hatred will only grow stronger. I long and pray so hard that I will get to see you again. To be able to begin again and recover together. But God’s will be done … I hope so much to be able to give you this letter in person, as a diary. But if that doesn’t come to pass, I am grateful for everything I experienced in this life. Don’t be bitter. The children are in God’s hand.
Her loneliness is palpable. She makes a tiny brooch out of some embroidery thread and photos of my grandfather, my father, and her nephew Kees, the men who have been sent away to other camps. She pins their images inside her clothing to keep them close to her.
Tension and irritability increase on the part of all parties in the camps. The months plod on relentlessly with no sign of the situation ending. Hope begins to dwindle. The hanchos become more like their captors every day, drunk with their power. Two of the hanchos in Camp Bangkong are especially sadistic: the Dernier brothers. Increasingly, they beat up the younger boys, one losing his cool and taking it out on their charges in a rage, until the other brother steps in to pull his sibling away, afraid the victim will die. Not only the prisoners show signs of mental decline. Hockey Stick, one of the more dreaded officers, has a complete breakdown one day, according to one diary. He has found a puppy in the street outside the camp, and ties the animal to a rope to walk it around the camp as his new pet. Initially, this amuses the boys, of course, though at that stage of starvation they would just as soon have made a meal of the puppy to save their lives. According to the diary, the puppy, being just a puppy, will not walk next to Hockey Stick obediently. He demands that the puppy sit, pushing its bottom down. But the puppy pops back up and pulls at its leash. Hockey Stick barks orders at it in Japanese. Then he suddenly flies into a rage, swinging the puppy like a tetherball in a circle around his head violently, snapping its neck. He immediately collapses and begins weeping when he realizes that he’s killed it, talking to the dead puppy and trying to get its lifeless body to stand again. The boys also get in trouble more and more often as mental stability begins to break down in the camp. They are beaten and told to stand in the sun as punishment for increasingly minor infractions. This entails standing under the clock for many hours with a bare torso, turning so the hot sun is always at one’s blistered back as it moves across the sky. The Japanese post some news about the world outside the camp and the war, though it is always filtered through their propaganda machine. They announce glorious victories for the Nippon Empire, but the prisoners notice that these victorious battles with the Allies are happening closer and closer to Indonesia, implying a decided Allied advance. Communication, or the prevention of communication, becomes a major theme in the camps.
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