by Isabel Wolff
We had been told that we would be working in a mine near the camp. We each had our photo taken, holding a number, and were also fingerprinted, like criminals. We were treated like criminals and were severely punished for breaking any of the many rules. A single misdeed by anyone and the whole camp suffered terribly, including “hunger days,” when men simply died. But I was determined to live so that I could see you and our darling children again.
I keep wondering how much Peter and Klara have grown. Has Peter still got the Spitfire that I made him? If not, tell him I’ll make him another one when we are back at our home, which I pray has survived this terrible war.
In December we started work in the Nioroski mine, which was midway between Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We had to walk there every day, in the snow. They gave us an overall to wear with a miner’s hat that had a little lamp on it. Then you stepped into a mine car and moved down a long deep shaft that was pitch black. Once we’d gone about 400 meters underground, we had to walk in single file for two kilometers. I kept thinking of a book I read when I was a boy, Journey to the Center of the Earth, because it was just like that, with some tunnels going up, and some going deeper down. Finally we came to a tunnel that was a dead end, and this was where we were to work, pickaxing the coal.
The tunnels didn’t have enough props, and several times the ceilings collapsed. One time there was a very bad cave-in and two guards and five prisoners were killed, one of them, I’m very sorry to say, Ralph Dekker, and this will be very hard for Marleen and Herman. But this hellhole is where I toiled for seven months. The rations were so poor that we were getting thinner and thinner. They were just going to work us until our bodies gave out. Then one day we were told to work in another mine, the Ibigizachi, which was nearer to our quarters. I remember on 6 August we felt huge vibrations in the mine, and a lot of shaking and disturbance. We assumed that it had been an earthquake. It wasn’t. It was the first atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima.
The end came a few days afterward when we were called to tenko and a Japanese officer told us that Japan had surrendered. He said that we were free but had to stay in the camp until the U.S. military took over. During the weeks afterward we were fed from the air, as American planes came over and dropped crates of food. Then one day we were taken by truck to Nagasaki. My darling, the sight of that place will haunt me for the rest of my life. It was just a flat, smoking landscape of vast emptiness, with only a few steel columns still standing. We could not imagine the kind of bombs that had been able to do this, and even when we were told that these had been “atomic” bombs, we had no idea what that meant.
And then it was the beginning of the end. Or, as I hope, the beginning of a new beginning. At the harbor we were taken through various buildings that had been erected by the American army. We had to get rid of our clothes and shoes, which were to be burned, and were given military clothing. We were then taken aboard the U.S. warship the Renville, where we got our first civilized meal. It was only ordinary bread, but to us it was like delicious cake!
We were flown here to Manila, where we are being given the treatment necessary to restore us to health. Many of us were half blind because of malnutrition. But we have yeast and eggs every day, and my sight is now improving, enough to be able to write to you at last.
Forgive me, darling, this letter has become a confessional, the words spilling out of me; but I’m so worried because I’ve no idea what has happened to you and the children while I’ve been away. I just hope and pray that you were able to stay at home, in safety. So please write to me, reassuring me that you are all fine, just as soon as you can. Two weeks ago the Red Cross gave us preprinted cards with which we could request information about our families. I lodged a card for you, Peter, and Klara, and these will be sent to Batavia, where any information that they have will be printed on it, and it will then be returned to me. So I hope to get good news of you all before long.
Annie, give both the children a big hug from their daddy and tell them that I love them so much. And you, my dearest wife; I want to hold you in my arms and never let you go. And if I have somehow survived, it was only because I wanted to stay alive in order to make you and our darling children happy.
With tender embraces, your loving husband,
Hans
Twenty-one
Klara
I wept to think of what my father had been through. I regarded it as a miracle that he had survived. My mother wrote back and broke the news about Peter to him. I had asked her not to tell him about my role in what happened, as I wanted to explain this to him face-to-face. She agreed. She gave him a brief account of our life in the camps. She recounted what had happened to the Jochens and to Flora. Finally she told my father that we would wait for him in Tjideng, where our lives were improving daily.
The Americans, who were in a caretaking role until the Dutch could return, supplied us with food and drinking water. They had also brought in a huge open-air cinema screen. One warm evening five hundred children sat cross-legged on Laan Trivelli—Corrie and I each had a twin on our lap—and as night fell, we all watched Snow White. For many of us it was the first film we’d ever seen, and I was enchanted by those magical images, glowing against the starlit sky. We saw other films too—The Wizard of Oz was one that I’ll never forget. This entertainment was a welcome distraction from the increasing stress of the Bersiap uprising, which was now raging on Java. In a bewildering reversal, the Allies had ordered the Japanese to stay where they were and protect the people in the camps from the nationalist rebels.
“So here we are,” Kirsten grumbled one morning, “liberated but not free; in peacetime but still at war, being protected by the very people who, until recently, starved and beat us.” She put an imaginary gun to her temple at the absurdity of our situation.
“Do you think we’ll ever get out of this dump?” Ina asked. “And if so, what will happen to us? Will we be able to go back to tempo doeloe?”
“To the good old days?” Kirsten translated. “I don’t see how we can—those days are gone.”
“I think we will,” Mrs. Moonen countered, “once the Dutch come back and reestablish the old order.”
“Well, they’d better hurry up and do it before the pemuda kill us all,” Kirsten groused.
No European now dared venture onto the streets, especially after dark. One night a huge mob armed with bamboo spears and kléwangs—saber-like swords—made their way up Laan Trivelli screaming, “Merdéka! Merdéka!” As we all cowered inside our houses, it sounded like Murder! Murder! Suddenly I heard a splintering sound.
“The gedék!” Corrie screamed. She hugged the twins tighter to her. “They’re tearing down the gedék!”
As the pemuda got closer we huddled together, the women shielding the children with their bodies, crying and whimpering. Many were praying. Then I heard shots and Lieutenant Sakai shouting. He and his soldiers were firing rounds into the air, which finally made the gang disperse. We slowly emerged, shaking with shock.
“To think what we’ve survived these last three years,” Ina said grimly. “And now this!” She shook her fist at the sky. “Haven’t we suffered enough, Lord? I’m losing patience with you here!”
It was little comfort to be told that Batavia was calm compared with the bloodbath that was taking place in East and Central Java. In one atrocity the pemuda slaughtered a hundred Dutch women and children as they tried to leave their camp in Surabaya. The conflict had become an orgy of killing in which all Europeans, Belanda Indos, Chinese, Japanese, and pro-Dutch Indonesians were targeted.
By now the talk was no longer of tempo doeloe but of repatriation.
“But Holland is in ruins,” Ina said as we sat under a tamarind tree. “How can we go back there?”
“Because for most of us there’s nowhere else,” Kirsten remarked.
My mother, who was a little calmer since my father’s letter, agreed with Kirsten. “When we’ve been reunited with Hans we’ll go back to Rotterdam. Ruined or
not, it will have to be our home. In any case, we could never be happy on Java again.”
Irene nodded feelingly. “We’ll go to England. From there we might go to Australia.”
Susan scrambled to her feet, to collect drinking water.
Once she was out of earshot, my mother turned to Irene.
“If you go to England, what will happen to Arif and Susan?”
Irene gave a shrug. “They’re both so young,” she said. “He’s gone back to the plantation now, as you know. He wants to go to technical college, but that will mean a lot of studying and Susan’s missed four years of school. She’ll need to catch up. So they’re going to write to each other and see what happens. But as she’ll be in England and Arif will be on Java, the circumstances are against them staying together.”
“Do you think Wil would object if they did?” my mother asked.
“He wouldn’t mind,” Irene responded. “Not now.” Then she showed us Wil’s most recent letter, and pointed to a paragraph toward the end.
Irene my darling, having lost our beloved Flora, and having myself almost died amid scenes of utter cruelty that I will never forget, I no longer care about artificial barriers of race or class. I care only about the real, everyday things of life—having enough to eat, having shelter, and above all, having the love of family and friends. Nothing else matters.
In early November, Irene and Susan left. The RAF, who were evacuating British subjects, were to fly them to Singapore, where they would be reunited with Wil; from there they would sail to England. They said goodbye to all the women that they’d been with—Kirsten, Ina, and Corrie and the twins. Then they came to say their goodbyes to us. It was a dreadful wrench; my mother and I knew them so well, and we’d been through so much together. But our sadness was lessened by the knowledge that we would soon see my father again.
Finally that day came, in November 1945. Because of the turmoil on Java, families were to be reunited at Balikpapan. That morning I put on the silk dress that I’d saved and my mother put on the one good dress that she had been keeping, then we boarded the tarpaulin-covered truck that would take us to the airfield. We were told to lie on the floor because of snipers. As we raced along, I prayed that the truck wouldn’t be attacked; but we arrived safely and saw the B-25 bomber waiting for us on the runway.
Most of us had never flown before, and everyone was smiling at the excitement of it, and at the fact that we would soon see our loved ones again. The noise and vibration of the plane were tremendous, and I tried not to scream as we rose into the air. As we flew toward Borneo, I looked out the windows at the glittering blue of the Java Sea.
As we stepped off the plane I saw dozens of men waiting. I scanned the crowd for my father and felt a pang of disappointment that he wasn’t there. Then, with a jolt, I realized that I was looking straight at him. When I’d last seen my father, he had been a young man. Now he looked old. His hair, which had been fair, was the color of ash and very short. Where once he’d been big and well built, he was now pitifully thin, his muscles wasted. But as my mother and I ran toward him, his eyes were full of love for us. We held each other tightly, and cried for our years of separation and for what we had suffered. Most of all we cried because Peter wasn’t there.
At the camp there were hundreds of green tents, pitched neatly in long rows. I shared one with my mother because husbands and wives weren’t allowed to cohabit. Her relief at being reunited with my father softened her mood. We had our first shower and were given soap and toothpaste, which we hadn’t seen for so long, and clean towels. Just to have clean running water seemed like a miracle.
For meals we filed into a massive tent where the long tables groaned with food. We would stare at it, overwhelmed. Children were allowed to have whatever they wanted, with as many helpings as they could manage. I sat next to a little boy. He took a hard-boiled egg and ate it; then he anxiously gave the shell to his mother to crush up. She touched his cheek and told him that they didn’t have to do that anymore.
As my father sat, smiling at us but saying little, I tried to imagine him pickaxing coal in the darkness and heat, then freezing above ground. I imagined him lying in the hold of a ship, with two thousand other men, in tumultuous seas. I imagined him feeling the shock of the bombs.
“What are atomic bombs?” I asked him now.
He shook his head. “I still don’t really know. But I’m glad I was in the mine when it happened, as many of the prisoners were above ground and heard the terrible explosion and saw the lightning flashes and strange clouds.”
One evening I told my father the truth about Peter. As his eyes filled with tears, I panicked that he’d also say that I’d done the wrong thing, made the wrong choice, betrayed Peter. But he took my hands in his, enclosing them.
“Poor Klara,” he murmured. “What agony for you.”
“I wish they’d pushed pins under my nails instead,” I told him. “Or hung me up by my wrists. I could have coped with that, but I can’t cope with this! Mummy feels that I took Peter away from her. She said that I made the decision selfishly, because I didn’t want anything to happen to her.”
“She won’t feel like this forever,” my father assured me. “She needs time, Klara. We’ll all need time. It won’t be easy. Be patient with her.” A few days later my father was discharged, fit, so we traveled down to the port of Balikpapan. During the battle for Borneo, two of the quays had been reduced to rubble; there was a slick of oil on the sea, and an acrid smell hung in the air. On the beach, among the shredded palm trees that littered the sand, were the burnt-out carcasses of Japanese tanks.
We boarded the SS Noordam, which would take us to Holland. It stopped first at Batavia, now renamed Jakarta, and we took on hundreds more evacuees. Because of the conflict we weren’t allowed to disembark, so we said our farewell to Java from the ship. As I looked at the bustling dock, I suddenly remembered the joy on my father’s face that day when Mum, Peter, and I arrived. I remembered the drive up to the plantation, when I’d first seen the curved terraces of rice fields, rippling like waves across the mountains, and the jungle-clad volcanoes with their deck of cloud.
As I heard the long blast of the ship’s horn we leaned on the rails and watched the island recede. As it grew smaller, I cried, not for the loss of our home, or for what we had suffered.
I’d never leave Daddy on Java …
I cried because we were leaving Peter there.
We stopped in Colombo, Ceylon, then sailed on to Ataka in the Red Sea, where we were taken to a Red Cross clothing depot that had been set up to equip East Indies evacuees for a European winter. We traveled by train through the desert to a huge warehouse surrounded by sand that had been whipped up into dunes. Inside the building, a band was playing, made up of German and Italian prisoners of war, in shabby uniforms, with numbers stenciled on their backs. There were long tables laden with soft drinks and piles of sandwiches. I still couldn’t get used to the idea that food could be there for the taking. After years of deprivation, abundance felt wrong.
The racks of clothes seemed to stretch for miles and gave off a strong whiff of camphor. It felt so strange, trying on these thick garments in the desert heat, but we each selected a winter coat, and my father chose a tweed suit, some shirts, a hat, and leather brogues, as well as long johns, vests, and ties. My mother and I selected worsted jackets, long-sleeved dresses, cardigans, hats, some underwear, and a handbag each. These garments had all been donated, and the idea that they could just be ours, without having to trade for them, let alone risk being shaved or beaten, seemed miraculous.
We returned to the ship with our new wardrobe, and our journey continued. We reached Port Said, where the boat was refueled for the final lap of the voyage, then went through the Suez Canal and into the Mediterranean, past Portugal and the west coast of France. Going through the English Channel, I gazed at the white cliffs and thought of the Jochens, who would be in Kent by now; then we entered the North Sea, where the ship pitched and tossed
in the swell. Finally, on the evening of 19 February, we saw the glimmering lights of the Dutch coast. The Noordam was piloted into Amsterdam Harbor, and in the morning we all gathered on the decks to disembark.
A welcoming party had gathered; a band was playing the national anthem as the evacuees walked down the gangplanks and stepped onto Dutch soil. For the many Belanda Indos, it was the first time they had ever been to the “mother” country, which they had been brought up to think of as “home.”
My parents and I took a bus to Rotterdam, three hours away. As I traveled over cratered, rubble-strewn roads, past buildings with no fronts and churches without spires, I realized these were the scars of a war that I hadn’t known. This had been their war. Our war had been the war of tenko and dysentery, of gedekking and barbed wire, of bayonets and beriberi and head shavings.
We stayed with my grandmother, Oma, for a few nights. My mother was sad that she would never see her father again—he’d died, with thousands of others, during “the Hunger Winter,” when northern Holland was blockaded. My grandmother had barely survived. They had burned their kitchen cupboards to keep warm, and their tables and chairs. She had very little left. But she had kept the photo albums that she’d compiled from the many pictures that my mother had sent home before the war. When my mother opened one I saw her eyes fill with tears, and I thought she must be looking at a photo of Peter. But then I went closer. I saw that it was the photo of me, dressed as Cinderella, barefoot and in rags. My grandmother gently shut the album, then put them all away. It would be a long time before they were opened again.