All Ships Follow Me

by Mieke Eerkens

  And then a low rumbling begins, a rumbling that swells to fill the corners of the camp, the sound the prisoners have waited for every day of every week, every week of every month, every month of every year. Three years they have waited for it. They have imagined it as they laid on the floor in the dark every night while the bedbugs emerged from the cracks to swarm their bodies. They can hardly believe their ears now as the sound fills the air and vibrates through their bones. Sjeffie looks up and sees not the red circle but the stars, white on blue circles, painted on the wings of an Allied plane as it passes over the camp. Grins stretch across the prisoners’ hollowed faces. They cheer and wave, two arms over their heads, waving and waving, all necks craned skyward, yelling, “We are here! We are here!” The plane circles back, flying low. My father shields his eyes, and he sees that the door of the plane is open. A soldier in an olive-green uniform and a half-globe helmet is standing in the doorway waving back at them, and there are thousands of tiny papers falling like snow from the plane. Sjeffie joins the crowd around a man holding one of the slips of paper. He strains to see. “What does it say?” The slip is printed in Japanese characters on one side, English on the other. The man reads aloud slowly, laboring over the English words.

  To All Allied Prisoners of War:

  The Japanese Forces Have Surrendered

  Unconditionally and the War Is Over.

  We will get supplies to you as soon as is humanly possible, and will make arrangements to get you out, but, owing to the distances involved, it may be some time before we can achieve this. You will help us and yourselves if you act as follows:

  (1) Stay in your camp until you get further orders from us.

  (2) Start preparing nominal rolls of personnel, giving fullest particulars.

  (3) List your most urgent necessities.

  (4) If you have been starved or underfed for long periods, DO NOT eat large quantities of solid food, fruits or vegetables at first. It is dangerous for you to do so. Gifts of food from the local population should be cooked. We want to get you back home quickly, safe and sound, and we do not want to risk your chances from diarrhea, dysentery, and cholera at this last stage.

  (5) Local authorities and/or Allied officers will take charge of your affairs in a very short time. Be guided by their advice.

  Late in the afternoon of August 23, the Japanese officers reappear to erect a platform in the center of the camp. Sjeffie and the other prisoners are called to attention. They stand in rows before the podium. Then a grim-faced commander in full uniform mounts the platform and begins speaking in Japanese, while a translator translates.

  He tells them that the Japanese government officially surrendered on August 15 after the United States dropped two massive bombs on Japan on August 6 and 9, and he has been ordered to release all POWs in this camp. Furthermore, he has been ordered to increase the food supply, including vegetables, and they are free to have as many servings of rice as they like. Sjeffie and his campmates cheer. The officer finishes by telling them that the Red Cross has ordered them to stay in the camp for further instructions. Then he quickly exits the stage, hurrying back to offices where documents are hastily being destroyed to get rid of evidence for the war crimes tribunal that the Japanese know will be coming. The patjol spades vanish, as does all other evidence of forced labor. And then the commander and officers retreat into the shadows, though they’ve been ordered to stay to keep the camp safe until the Red Cross arrives to take over.

  In the camp clearing, Sjeffie and the others initially celebrate, cheering and dancing. From some hiding place, somebody produces a contraband Dutch flag, which is unfurled. They begin to sing the Dutch national anthem. But after they celebrate, they are left feeling stunned. They are free. Now what? They sit down to wait for the Red Cross as instructed.

  Not Sjeffie. Sjeffie finds his cousin Kees.

  “Hey, listen. I’m not staying in this place for one more minute. I’m going to walk back to Lampersari to find Mom. Are you coming?”

  Kees is afraid. “Don’t leave. We are supposed to wait for the Red Cross,” he says. But as my father tells it now, he was sick of being told what to do; he no longer respected authority. He asks other boys in his han to join him. They also are too scared to leave. So ultimately, he leaves by himself. He gathers what possessions he has left, walks over the portion of the gedek that has been torn down, and emerges onto the streets of Semarang, where the people stare at this emaciated, barefoot totok. He asks Indonesians on the street directions to his mother’s camp, though he vaguely remembers the way, walking in reverse from the march of what seems a lifetime earlier. Now that he is finally outside the gedek, he sees the effects of the war on the Indonesian people. While they were free from internment, the war had been difficult for the Indonesians as well, particularly for those of the lower classes who were not given positions in the Japanese-ruled society. People on the street wear tattered clothing, some even passing him in little more than burlap sacks. They too look thinner, and worn down.

  He arrives at Lampersari to find that the gedek there has been torn down in places as well. He walks through a hole and follows the main road toward the kampong house where his mother lived when he left the camp. The little children point at him as he passes. “Mama! Look! A big boy!” they call. He is just fourteen. They have not seen a boy over ten years old in years. When my father walks into the barrack his mother is housed in, a woman’s back is to him. The woman is hunched over a bucket washing her shirt, topless, and he sees the ladder of her vertebrae and her breasts hanging like empty skin from a concave chest. Horrified, he turns to leave just as the woman turns to face him. Her eyes fill with tears when they meet his. It takes moments before he registers with shock that this is in fact his own mother he is looking at.

  When my father tells me this story during my interviews for this book, it is the second and only other time I have seen him cry. For several moments he cannot speak, shaking his head and clearing his throat. “My mother. She was so emaciated, I couldn’t recognize her. That image, I’ll never forget it.” He covers his face, overcome with the memory. In the barrack that day, my grandmother takes him in her matchstick arms. His sisters and toddler brother come running in and gather around, hugging their brother. Sjeffie is back. Alive.

  Across the island in Eastern Java, Sjeffie’s father is freed from the camp in Bandung, but as a military doctor, he is immediately enlisted in the rescue effort by the Dutch government to tend to the nearly sixty thousand surviving civilian prisoners in the dozens of camps throughout the island of Java alone who are malnourished and suffering from a variety of illnesses such as malaria, dysentery, and beriberi and other vitamin-deficiency diseases. He writes increasingly panicked letters to my grandmother during this time, sent through the Red Cross.

  Dear Bep,

  I do not know if you received the two postcards I sent a few days ago. Although I’ve made every effort to reach you, I have heard nothing back so far, which makes me worry, especially as the rumors are that it has been particularly bad in your camps in Central Java. Thank God the misery has come to an end, although there may be more difficulties ahead. Stay for the time being in Semarang, where I hope to come and get you. Where we are going is not certain. I am doing OK. Have been ill during the internment in Banjoebiroe, where we did not have it easy. I’ve had influenza-like fevers a few times and once a hunger edema that passed. As a doctor in the camp, I always had something of a privileged position and got something extra in the worst hunger periods. Kesilir was the best in comparison with the other camps, Banjoebiroe bad, here moderate, though we have had it pretty good lately. Yet there have also been a lot of hunger edema and dysentery deaths here … I long to see you again and will praise the day that we are together again, I hope all of us are still healthy. Goodbye, my dear, keep your chin up. God bless you. Many kisses, also to the children and Ko from your Pep.

  Dear Bep,

  This is the seventh letter I have written to you since the cap
itulation, but I still have received no answer. The news arriving here from Central Java is very bad and I really am very worried about you. I am trying to reach you through all possible channels. Are you trying it vice versa too? It would be a great reassurance for me if I knew you were still alive and healthy. I cannot leave here yet. Officially we cannot leave the camp. In addition, I work in the hospital and therefore cannot abandon my post. So I have to wait until an official arrangement has been made. You stay in Semarang. I hope to find you there. I am looking forward to seeing you all again. I am doing fine. A bit older and thinner maybe, but not bad.

  Dear Bep,

  Just now I received a telegram from Pastor de Quay for which I am extremely grateful. Thank God that you are all still alive. The Red Cross has just been here and I have asked them to send me to Central Java. Five doctors have to go there and I will very likely be one of them. Either we will be divided among various camps, and then I will try to come to Semarang, or we have to open a hospital in Magelang. In any case, I will be closer to you and the connection easier. Mail still hasn’t arrived from Central Java and people are very worried about this. Batavia has been allowed to write. Ruschtk is here with me and asks how his wife is. Maastricht is also very worried. Well, goodbye my dearest, I hope to see you soon.

  In the end, my father’s family is one of the first families to be fully reunited, as most internees are still waiting to be evacuated from camps spread out across Java. However, there have been losses that Sjeffie and his father only now hear about. They learn about the death of Aunt Lien, one of my grandmother’s closest friends, leaving her two children to be taken care of by my grandmother and Aunt Ko. After a week, Cousin Kees arrives in Lampersari, having finally left Bangkong with the permission of the Red Cross. My grandfather is permitted to send a Red Cross message to the family in Bolivia and my grandmother’s brother in The Hague that they are safe and alive.

  Sjeffie’s mother and sister Doortje are both extremely malnourished and close to death. My grandmother has developed beriberi. The lack of food in the last months of the war has been particularly bad in Lampersari, even worse than in Bangkong. Sjeffie’s sister tells him that their mother, on one occasion, was so weak that she fell while carrying the family’s rations back to their quarters, and the broth and rice spilled out on the ground. Sjeffie’s father says that my grandmother and Doortje won’t survive two more weeks without treatment, and he gives both injections and “liver pills” to reverse vitamin deficiencies that are destroying their organs. Food, plentiful now, is nonetheless introduced cautiously, as many discover their bodies can no longer digest anything more than rice and become extremely ill after their first meals of meat and vegetables. Flour and eggs come back into the camp, and Sjeffie is put in charge of making a fire to bake the bread in. He feels like a man.

  One imagines that when prisoners are liberated, they immediately flee the confines of camps where they’ve been tortured and imprisoned to pick up their lives, but this is not the case. While conditions improve, the former internees still have no homes to go to, having lost everything when they were interned years earlier. The Red Cross rations arrive in the camps. The doctors’ medical facilities are in the camps. The administrators who take down their details are in the camps. So in the camps they have to stay. In that respect, little changes. People are also still dying, their organs now too damaged from malnutrition to be saved, even with vitamin injections. Every day, my grandfather returns to his family with tears in his eyes as he tells them that an internee he fought valiantly to save succumbed anyway, surviving to see the end of the war but too broken by it to recover. I cannot help but think of how in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, similar scenes play out as lives flicker out on pillows, in burn wards, with family gathered around. The war is over on both sides, but it is not over for these victims still succumbing to starvation or dysentery, burns or radiation poisoning. For their loved ones, just as for those on the Allied side, the war is never over.

  Close to the Lampersari camp, in the Tjandi Hills, there is a former Dutch school that the Red Cross commissions as a temporary orphanage and school for the children whose parents have died during their internment. They ask my grandfather to become the director of the school. Two widowed teachers are asked to become caretakers and teachers. A month after the war ends, Sjeffie’s family, Aunt Ko, Aunt Lien’s two children, and Cousin Kees all move into the Van Deventer School along with one hundred orphans, the two teachers, and several widowers who work in the kitchen and garden. Amazingly, they are brought there in Jeeps driven by Japanese soldiers, who are now under orders of the Red Cross and the Allied forces to help in the postwar recovery effort, because they have an administrative infrastructure in place, with essential vehicles and supplies. These Japanese soldiers bear little resemblance to the Japanese soldiers of a few months prior. These Japanese soldiers are courteous and polite. They don’t strike anyone or make Sjeffie and his family bow to them and say “Kere! Kiotske! Naore!” whenever they pass. There are two houses and a dormitory at the Van Deventer School, and Sjeffie and his family move into one of the houses, near the front of the school along a circular drive. While caring for the orphans, my grandfather continues to work half days treating patients in the Lampersari camp, being picked up in the morning by a Japanese soldier in a military vehicle and brought back in the afternoon.

  It seems that things are finally getting better. By the fall of 1945, the family has been living in the Van Deventer School for about two weeks, and the orphans have started their classes, along with Sjeffie and his siblings. All of them are quickly gaining weight, growing stronger each day. They know that the Indonesian leaders Sukarno and Hatta declared independence on August 17, two days after Japan’s surrender, and that the Dutch government has not accepted the declaration, insisting on holding on to its prewar rule of the country. My grandparents know there is civil unrest, with freedom fighters protesting and rioting in some places near Batavia, but like most Dutch who have been isolated inside the camps for years, they naively believe that everything will go back to the way it was before the war and don’t fully grasp how the flames of revolt are catching and building, moving quickly from village to village. The uprising feels far away. They receive mail back from my grandmother’s brother in The Hague, addressed to “Sis” and “Pep,” my grandparents, and the rest of the family:

  How overjoyed we were with your short message that relieved our worry over your fate. What a nightmare you must have experienced. If only you survive the period of unrest that Java is currently in. Try to come to Holland as quickly as possible. It’s safe here again, though not everything is ideal. Did my sister recover from the beriberi all right? It’s impossible to explain in a short letter (I have to finish it quickly, because it will be taken with someone from the Red Cross) everything that we experienced here with the Germans. The main thing is that we survived. Even Mother and Father are doing OK, although they lost almost everything. They are living back in Arnhem. During the assault on Arnhem in Sept. ’44 they fled on foot with only one suitcase. Unfortunately the evacuation was too much for Pa Eerkens. He had been operated on twice in the winter, and was very weak. In October 1944 he passed away in the emergency hospital in Nijkerk … Sad for you, Pep, that you won’t be able to see your father again.

  Although the family in Holland worries about them in an escalating revolution, my grandfather cannot just leave even if he wants to. He is still a doctor employed by the Dutch military, and is tasked with the care of the thousands of former POWs who are slowly recovering from malnutrition and diseases in the makeshift Red Cross hospitals. My grandparents don’t feel it is too dangerous to stay.

  But the working-class local Indonesians see their chance to upend a system that has kept them down economically while the Dutch colonialists, Sultans, Chinese merchants, and wealthy Indonesians in business with the colonial ruling class all prospered. They begin to attack these different groups with the rallying cry of independence. This ha
ppens within the relative chaos of the postwar recovery period. The Dutch civilians have not been present in Indonesian society for years at this point and are oblivious to the level of anger that has been growing in members of the community, who have been fed continuous anti-Western literature and films by the Japanese troops throughout the war. For years, the Indonesians have heard that Asia is for Asians and that the Dutch are using them. Now that the Dutch are emerging from the camps, many of the Indonesians aren’t interested in a return to the way things were. Japan, meanwhile, had begun manipulating and mistreating the Indonesian people as well during the war, causing resentment against all occupiers, Dutch and Japanese. Things have not gotten better for the Indonesians under Japanese rule, as they had been promised, but have only gotten worse. The Indonesians are tired of being ruled by outsiders. When the British troops arrive to help restore order, to organize the rescue of the interned Dutch, the transport of Japanese soldiers back to Japan, and the arrest of Japanese officers, there is a vacuum of leadership. The British are there only temporarily and are solely focused on getting all subjects back to their respective homes. They don’t know that when they tell Japanese soldiers to lay down their arms, many of them give their weapons to local Indonesian independence fighters, either voluntarily or under pressure. In short, there is a lot of naiveté, a lack of order, much suffering, and a lot of resentment—the perfect cocktail for an uprising.