The reign of terror extended against the men’s camps also,and all along the road the prisoners were strack, bullied, andabused. We women were slapped and smacked, but the menhad bones broken, skulls cracked, and received blows fromwhich they did not recover.
There were so many Nipponese regulations governing
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camp behavior that we could not pursue the round of dailyliving without infringing them, if the guards wished to holdus to the letter of the law.
Sometimes the officers complained to the camp master thatwe were not bowing in good style, and if our bowing formdid not improve, rations would be cut. Then when officersappeared on omr fiurthest horizon, all the unemployed womenin camp sneaked into barracks, kitchen, or latrines, out ofview. The officer entered a deserted compound. For a Japa-nese officer to review an empty chicken run, and closed la-trine doors, is a disappointment. At the next camp meetingthe camp master would be informed that the officers did notlike the attitude of the ladies, who disappeared from sightwhen the officers were kind enough to visit them. This wasnot polite; hereafter the ladies were to emerge from theirquarters and welcome the officers — or rations would be cut.
We could avoid the perimeter guards by sta)ting away fromwire, gate, and sentry box, but there was no escaping fromthose who entered camp looking for trouble. A favorite placefor a belligerent guard to stand was between the mothers’barrack and one of the necessity stops—kitchen, bathhouse,or latrine. Going to and from the kitchen for food we werecaught regularly, as we couldn’t put down our dishes quicklyenough to please. Going to and from the bathhouse and car-rying a child, we couldn’t deposit child, soap, towel, clothing,on the ground in time.
Going to the latrines was equally difficult. Most people haddiarrhea most of the time now due to a diet of rice, weeds,and germs; a guard between us and the lats was the height ofdiscomfort. In addition to delay we had to throw away ourcigarettes, and the loss of a cigarette was important, andequally so the loss of a light, as we had no matches but hadto go to the fire in the kitchen, which was never allowed togo out. The alternative to throwing away a cigarette was tohold it in closed hand or mouth until it burned you.
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Minor persecutions now made life almost unbearable. TheNipponese accused us of not being serious, and we maddenedthem because we laughed, when they wanted us to weep —but had we not laughed, we must have killed ourselves, oreach other. Laughter was our only outlet, our only relief foremotion. Our laughter was pain, passion, love, hate, occasion-ally humor; it was horrible, high, hysterical, grim — becausethe joke was grim — but it was better than tears.
There were four weeks of petty persecution after the guardbecame enraged at us for the discipline which my complainthad brought on them. Then the peak came.
It is Sunday afternoon, five women are in the communitykitchen preparing Sunday dinner of potato greens and ricesweepings. Mrs. B has a bright scarf wound around her headto stop the sweat which otherwise would drip into the food.She bends over the large iron caldron and stirs the rice with along-handled wooden paddle. To move the heavy mass of ricewhich she is preparing for one hundred and twenty persons,she must exert aU her strength, and bear down with aU herweight upon the paddle.
A guard, known to us as the Wife Beater because he wasthe kind of man who would, comes tearing into camp. Hishoarse shouts are heard on the road, even before he enters thegate, and it is evident that he is looking for a victim. Thewarning goes swiftly around, and those who do not have busi-ness in the compound retreat silently inside latrine, bathshed, or barrack.
The Wife Beater heads for the kitchen and calls the womento attention. Mrs. B, stooped over the rice caldron, is slow incoming to attention and bowing, and when she does so, hasnot removed her headband. Although the wearing of a head-band has been permitted by office regulation, individualguards take umbrage, if feeling unpleasant.
The Wife Beater shouts at Mrs. B to take off her scarf,
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striking her heavily in the face as he does so, and then con-tinuing to slap and strike her ’while she struggles to removethe scarf. Mrs. B tries to protect herself with raised hand andarm; and then, reacting instinctively to the attack, she strikesback at him. At this sign of resistance, the guard’s hysteria in-creases; shouting and bellowing, he strikes and slaps her onface and head until she falls to the kitchen floor, insensible.
The other occupants of the kitchen stand silent, helpless.This is an armed guard on official duty, and for us to strikeor resist him is a death offense. He is so crazed now that tooffer further annoyance or resistance will only expose moreof us to his violence. At one time we could not have remainedpassive; now we have learned.
As Mrs. B falls to the floor. Dr. Gibson enters the kitchen.Fearlessly she goes through the ranks of motionless women,and takes her stand over Mrs. B. She points to her Red Crossemblem, and'orders the soldier, in the name of the Red Cross,to leave Mrs. B alone. The Wife Beater hesitates, surprised byher daring. Faced with the Red Cross emblem, one of the fewsymbols which seem to mean anything to the Japanese sol-diers, he allows Mrs. B to be carried away by friends to thehospital ward.
Then he dashes from camp, to report a brutal attack madeupon himself by a female prisoner. Soon he is back again,bringing with him another guard and an order from the officeto arrest his assailant, and bring her to the office immediately.
Meanwhile Mrs. B has revived to a state of semihysteria inthe hospital ward. As the office order cannot be disregarded,she is placed on a hospital stretcher, and six women prepareto carry her up the road to the office.
I was not one of those women; but Bonita, my friend,whose brisk words always tried to deny the humanity of heractions, was one of them. She told me what followed.
As they move up the road the Wife Beater trots by the
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litter, panting and shouting. The women, who carry thestretcher move grimly forward with inscrutable faces; theirmouths, when they open them, speak almost inaudible wordswhich they did not use before captivity.
On the way to the ofSce, the procession must pass fourother camps — those of the British soldiers, the Dutch officers,the civilian men, and the priests. The litter and its escort arenoted in these camps, and anxious glances follow.
At the office, the officer in charge looks rather abashedly atthis small-boned, delicate-looking, middle-aged woman lyingon a stretcher before him, accused of attacking an armedNipponese soldier on duty. However, he recites the chargeagainst her, and listens to a storm of Japanese from the guard.Then he says to Mrs. B that this is a very serious chargebrought against her; to attack a guard on duty is an offensepunishable with death. What excuse has she?
Mrs. B’s answer has been practised all the way up the road.Mrs. B says that she was not resisting the guard, did not strikethe guard, only raised her arm instinctively to protect herface, while he was striking her. This gesture was mistakenlyinterpreted by the guard as one of attack; Mrs. B had no ideaof striking him, would not think of such insubordination, andthe whole occurrence is a misunderstanding. The six womenwith Mrs. B bear witness with her.
The officer and guard then shout at each other in Japanese.The guard declares that the prisoners are lying, as of coursethey are, but the six women stick to their story, and the vic-tim’s condition is a mute plea for mercy. The officer rulesthat Mrs. B is to apologize to the guard for her action whichoccasioned a misunderstanding, and to be careful in futureto avoid misunderstandings. Mrs. B apologizes, the guard mut-ters angrily, and the female bodyguard bows its way out ofthe office — defeated but victorious — and proceeds back tocamp. The British soldiers are waiting close to their barbed
wire as the procession passes down the road again. Obviouslythey are anxious to learn what the trouble is, and impatient atbeing powerless to help.
The following day the weekly liaison meeti
ng was held be-tween the Nipponese representatives and the Allied campmasters from the eight prison camps. The representative forthe British officers lodged a protest against the physical abuseof the women by the Japanese guards, stating that the officerscould not be responsible for maintaining discipline amongstthe Allied prisoners if such mistreatment continued. TheBritish sergeant major, camp master of the British soldiers’camp, warned the Japanese that the soldiers could not be re-strained further if the guards continued to strike the women.The civilian men internees’ representative lodged a similarprotest against our mistreatment.
The next day the camp masters asked for an interview withColonel Suga, who had by then returned to Kuching, and theprotests were made to him in person. He was apologetic inhis attitude to the prisoners’ representatives, and said that theguards would be forbidden to strike the women in future.“But,” he said, “if the women disobey orders — the soldiersmust of course enforce discipline!” He did not say how. Itsounded to us as if the man with the gun was stiU right.
But the protests had their effect, for the Japanese officials inKuching were stiU afraid of the potential power of theirunderfed, unarmed, naked, ill-treated, half-starved prisoners,if some final outrage should drive them, against judgment, torebel. But one of the tortures of our situation was its ines-capability; escape into Borneo was useless, and escape fromit, almost impossible.
Many hotheads in the men’s camps constantly urged large-scale rebeUion. Had they rebelled they could have killed someJapanese soldiers, and a large number of local Asiatic non-combatants, but they would have been massacred themselves
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sdmost immediately. And for the two hundred and eightywomen and children, the fate would have been certain. Lifewas not sweet in prison, but it was sweeter than meeting deathby mutilation and torture, which was the Japanese answer towomen and children who resisted captivity.
The first time I saw Colonel Suga after my trouble withNekata was at a propaganda newsreel appearance. News filmswere being made of a Japanese general who was visitingKuching Camp and inspecting our prison unit, and of thecamps.
A few chosen prisoners were again ordered to “Dressneatly and be clean,” and come to the Colonel’s office, thereto be photographed against a picturesque background offlowers, trees, shrubs, and the pig pond. Then they weretaken to the city of Kuching to the onetime White Rajah’sgarden, where they were photographed standing smiling andpicking flowers. The newsreel photographers were never al-lowed inside our prison grounds.
This afternoon, dressed in clean dresses at Japanese com-mand, instead of our old ragged camp shorts, Doric Adamsand I went up the hill to Suga’s office. Our dresses wereseldom worn inside the camp as they were too fragile for ourlife, but they were requested by the Japanese for ofiice visits.Ajrrived at the ofiice we found there about a dozen repre-sentatives from the men’s camps, all looking unnaturally re-spectable in whatever “neat and clean” dress they could ac-quire in their communities, for to appear in habitual campnakedness would have been to precipitate punishment. As wehad to wait an hour before the general was ready to revealhimself, the guard allowed us to sit in the shade of the near-bygarage, in order to maintain our neat and clean appearanceuntil the newsreel could record it.
In the garage under temporarily relaxed discipline I wasable to talk quietly with Le Gros Clarke, former GovernmentUnder Secretary for Sarawak, now head of the civilian men’s
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camp. He asked me if I knew the reason for the period ofpersecution we were going through, for he had heard rumorsconnecting me with it, and he said that Harry was wor-ried. I told him I had been the unwitting cause, because I hadcomplained of the misbehavior of a soldier to me, and this hadprecipitated punishment upon the guards, who had in turnretaliated against all of us. I said that I believed I was right inreporting the incident, but would not do so again — right orwrong —for every day I was learning more surely that acaptive had no rights.
Le Gros was too kind to be quite honest with me in whathe said, but I was sure from the fact that he did not say, “Ohno, you were right to report such conduct!” that he agreedwith my second judgment that I might better have kept still.Sex made little difference now; misery, danger, and death hadneutralized us.
It was good to talk with a man again, an intelligent, gentle,courteous one. Harry was in the group in the garage too, butbecause the guard Imew he was my husband, he was not al-lowed near me, while Le Gros and I were permitted to talkundisturbed. Le Gros promised to tell Harry aU I said, andthat all was well with me now, and the trouble finished.
I never talked with him again. Some months later he wasremoved from the men’s camp with Henry Cho, the ChineseConsul; was accused of conspiracy, and was taken away fromKuching.
Now the prisoners line up on the road at attention. ColonelSuga takes the Conquering Hero stance on the office veranda,cameramen pant expectandy at their reels, the motor carclanks up the drive, and the general is revealed. Is it a big one,or a littie one? It must be a big one, by the noises of theguard. But a captive never sees a Japanese general; a captiveis always bowing, and a general is lost in his uniform andmotor car, which are always too big for him.
The cameras wind, the prisoners bow. Colonel Suga smarkg
Suga Babies at Play 179
his sword, the general ascends the steps, the military partyenters the office, and the veranda trembles under the foot-steps of patriots. The bamboos outside sway humbly over theNipponese memorial to the dead, and the Red Poached Eggflies proudly and eggily overhead. Inside the office, the mili-tary party sits down to tea, coffee, saki, tapioca chips, sagobiscuits, sweets, gelatine, pomeloes, pineapple, and bananas,for they are delicate feeders. Their round, well-fleshed facesare bright with well-being; all is well with the Nipponeseworld.
Outside the office the prisoners bow and smile politely forthe newsreel photo^aphers, knowing that a swift kick or ablow is not far behind, if they do not. The newsreel will beentitled “Happy Prisoners of War Are Grateful to the RinrIJapnese for Their Humanitarian Treatment.” The happyprisoners then hurry back to their camps, to rice and potatotops.
One month later the reign of terror wanes, the guard for-gets, the winds change, and the rams come later every day.The soldiers loll on their guns again, sit on our steps, talk oftheir homes, play with our children, and smuggling revives.
But me they do not forget. In their minds I am the friendof Colonel Suga; I am not to be trusted.
I never referred again to any part of this incident to Colo-nel Suga. I am convinced that he knew what methods of per-suasion were used on me to try to obtain a confession, forphysical abuse and torture were routine procedure in thequestioning of prisoners; in order to avoid being witness tothis unpleasant scene Colonel Suga had absented himself fromKuching.
In meeting him later, knowledge of this scene was betweenus; yet neither of us would ever refer to it. We were bothhelpless before the violence of war: we were enemies.
Children of Captivity
It was the fall of 1943. A Japanese lorry drove into camp. Onit were thirty-seven European women and children, peoplewe had not seen for eighteen months, some of whom wethought were dead. We embraced, touched hands, cheered,wept.
They were glad to be imprisoned, they said, because theywere with us — with their own kind. Their words brought usrealization of our own soHdarity, and feeling of ourselves as ahomogeneous group. They brought back to us a little pridein our kind, and a warmth for each other that we had notbefore felt.
Here were the wives of the two Sandakan doctors, CeliaTaylor and Mary Wands. Dr. Wands was in the men’s camp,but Dr. Taylor was held by the military pohce on the chargeof having assisted Australian POWs to escape. Here also wasMary Mavor, whose husband was held with Dr. Taylor onthe same charge. She told me that my friend Dr. Laband,who had helped me in the Sandakan hospital, was held withthe other two men on the same charge.
Dr. Alison Stookes, Val St
ookes’s sister, who had been doc-toring all the time under the Japanese in Lahad Datu, arrived.Her brother was imprisoned now in the men’s camp.
Five more children came, and twenty nursing Sisters fromthe Kuching hospital.
There was a drawing-together. This was the final assem-
blage. This was the European nucleus in this Asiatic countryfor victory, or defeat, or death.
We had met with tears. But we were determiued not toshed them again — unless they were tears of joy.
The mothers were much criticized in Kuching. Peoplesaid that we should not have been there at all, with our chil-dren. But no one had as terrible doubts about this as did we.
The women without children used to say to the mothers,I don t see how you stand it! It must be hell being a motherin this camp!” It was hell, but it was heaven too. In thatwallow of captivity known as Kuching Internment Camp,there were just thirty-four good reasons for staying alive, andthose were our thirty-four children. We brought them allthrough.
One of those babies was bom in internment, and one cameinto prison camp when she was only two months old. Threewere under six months of age and still nursing when they andtheir mothers were imprisoned. Seven were the same age asGeorge, two years old when imprisoned. The eldest child inKuching entered camp when she was seven.
The children were mischievous, wicked, naughty, profane.They learned deceit, they smuggled, and sometimes I fearthey stole, but never from each other. They fought and theykicked; they were tough. They had to be.
They learned to be hungry, that hunger was the naturalcondition of life. They learned that a meal was a big event,and eggs better than gold, a piece of rotting fish was a luxury,a banana was a treasure. And that all of these articles werecontraband, and only to be spoken of in whispers.
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