I studied the sentences in order to find the least objection-able. I thought that if I used a propaganda sentence the cardwould be more likely to get home. Then I decided that theywere aU so obvious that my people would know they werepropaganda.
I sent the following card:
Seven communications sent. Seven received. Health moderate.George well, energetic, roughneck, reminds me my brother.
250 Three Came Home
Fed-up with war. Hopes deferred.
Borneo is a beautiful place for living, a dreamland where thescenery is beautiful, little birds sing, very delicious fruits grow,we are very happy here.
Agnes, Harry, George
My aunt told me later that she had never felt as down-hearted about my fate as when she received that card. Shesaid that obviously I had lost my mind.
That card, thanks to the propaganda sentence, got home.Many previous cards were later found in stacks in the comerof the Japanese Kuching office.
After the spring rice cut, the sick roll doubled, and therewere deeds of despair and violence amongst the prisoners.One person could hang on while another let go. Perhaps theperson with the greatest emotional capacity for realizing lifefully suffers the greatest when his life sinks to a monotone ofmisery.
In the civilian men’s camp there was a brilliant and high-strung young man who had held an important position in theSarawak government. He was a gifted student of languages,and in addition to Western tongues he spoke Japanese andChinese well.
He had Asiatic attachments in the town of Kuching, whichbrought him into notice of the Japanese Kempi-Tai (themilitary police) a number of times. Again and again he hadbeen questioned, wdth all that questionmg implies, in theattempt to extort information from him about them. Hemust have wondered how long he could remain silent in theface of torture, whether or not he had anything to tell. Hehad said that if he was taken again for questioning he wouldkill himself.
At one morning roll call this young man was ill, and didnot turn out. His absence attracted the attention of LieutenantKubu, who was taking the muster; Kubu remembered that
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this was the man whom he had questioned and beaten sooften before.
Unable to get his dope supply that day, Kubu was in a badmood, fit to take insult at anything. He called the man tothe office, questioned and beat him, then took him outsideto the square and placed him in front of the Japanese sentry,there to stand with his arms above his head until sundown.He was then taken to the guardhouse to await requestioniagby the Kempi-Tai.
The young man asked permission of the guard to go tothe latrine. He did not reappear. The guard went to the la-trine and found him lying in a pool of blood, dying. He hadbroken the water bottle which was used for toilet purposes,and with the broken glass had cut the arteries of his wristsand throat.
Kubu was very angry. He ordered a search of all campsimmediately. A search was always a soporific for upset Japa-nese emotions.
The younger men buried the suicide. The ground in theprison burying plot was hard, the young men were weak andnot well, an empty stomach rattles and pains and aches worsethan a fuU one. It was slow work digging — and nothing togo home to except. Who next?
I had just finished writing the story of this man in my diarythe next morning, when the word “Search” was passed alongthe barrack, and a guard appeared at my door.
We knew the look of search parties: several officers grum-bling, one of them usually Kubu, surrounded by five or sixarmed guards shouting more loudly than usual.' Almost al-ways we saw them coming down the road in the distance,and were warned before they arrived. Today they hadsneaked up on us, unnoticed in the early morning rush.
I had no chance to put my diary back in the tin, crawl un-der the barrack, and re-bury it in its waterproof wrapping.I could just get the papers stuffed inside my shirt when the
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guard looked in. It was safer to have them on me than toleave them m the barrack. . . . Then I followed the guardout to roU call.
We mustered in groups before the barracks. The far endfrom us was the Dutch Sisters’ barrack, usually treated withconsideration by the Japanese. But today guards were shout-ing and blustering, and to our surprise the officer, who wasnot Kubu, was feeling the women’s bodies. Evidently thesuicide had upset them, and they had to relieve themselvesin some way.
The whispering chorus carried proceedings down to us:“He’s furious! He’s feeling them all over, he’s feeling underthen skirts. He’s looking . . . ! Ohhhh — He’s found some-thing! Ooooooh! Now the Mother is explaining — Oh, heslapped her! He’s furious today! Now he’s on our women.He’s talking to somebody. He’s called Dr. L out of line.Oh, she had a cigarette behind her! She would! He’s goingto slap her! . . . Oooooh! She doesn’t give a damn! Gosh!She can take it, can’t she! He’s getting madder and madder.. . , Now here he comes. . .
This was not a good time for me to have a diary in myshirt front. I waved a hand at the guard like a schoolchild athome, and said apologetically, “Benjo?” (Latrine.) While hewas grumbling at me I broke ranks and ran back to the lats.There I reached high above my head and stuffed the papersbetween the pahn leaves which formed the roof, and thenreturned to roll call again.
The sergeant major was there before me . . . but he’d got-ten tired of feeling the females. He’d taken it out on the &stgroups, he’d felt ’em and smacked ’em and put ’em to bed!Now he looked at us dumbly, boredly, frustratedly; what aheU of a war, when a Jap patriot had nothing braver to dothan feel under women’s petticoats. For what? He didn’treally know for what. . . .
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So he told us to go and sit in the shade, while he went in-side the barrack and searched our things.
In April 1945, when food was shortest, and drugs were nil,Colonel Suga called Dorie Adams, myself, and George to hisoffice to a coffee party.
We had the usual biscuits, fruit, very sweet coffee, andtea. George lit into everything in such a ravenous manner thatthere was no need to mention that he was hungry. I could al-ways rely on George to prove my point. The orderly couldnot keep up with his appetite: he had three cups of coffee,and gobbled everything from his own plate, and from theplates in the center of the table, and then began to look atmine, where I was saving my banana which I intended totake home for him.
Suga looked at me and said, “Why do you not eat yourbanana?”
I said, “I am going to take it home for George.”
“You eat it now. I shall give you more for George.” . . .Which was what I had hoped.
Fallen Enemy
Daily aU through that spring the Allies bombed and machine-gunned Kuching, and the river, and the airdrome, and theroads and fields around us; fragments of bombs and debrisdescended in camp; we alternately hurried for shelter, andstood outside and gloated over Allied supremacy. And allthis time, those two little puttering Poached Egg planesarose from the bushes in Kuching half an hour before theAllied planes came, and buzzed home again half an hour afterour planes left. We always listened hopefully, thinking thistime the Poached Eggs’ landing field would be destroyed andthey couldn’t land. But always they*found a pocket hand-kerchief somewhere to flutter down upon. They, in theirown small way, were as invincible as our huge planes.
At first we all went to the trenches, as we were orderedto do by the Japanese. The children liked going, and werebetter organized than anyone else. When the signal came,George would race for home, get his grass hat, look forsomething to eat on principle, take the water bottle, get hiswaterproof cape (cut down from a soldier’s), put his litdestool on his back, and trot down the road to the children’strench, regardless of whether or not I was with him.
The Japanese ordered us to disguise the fact that we werefemales; if the Allies knew we were women and childrenthey would most certainly bomb us! To this end of conceal-
mg our sex, we were forbidden to hang out our washing,and were supposed to keep out of sight, in the barrack ifnot
in the trenches. Soon few people went to the trenches.Instead we sat inside in the shade of the barracks, happilyfree from the guards, who were hiding under the trees.
After the first six weeks of daily air raids, the exhilarationwas gone. Obviously the appearance of planes had nothingto do with quick release. It was aU right for the airmen up inthe air, where it was a matter of a brave life or a speedy death,and meanwhile a full stomach to keep cheery on. But for us,asking ourselves every morning. Can we get through thisday? . . . and every night. Can we get up tomorrow? . . .for us, those planes in their swiftness and freedom were bycontrast most annoying.
The weather that summer was frightfully hot, the waterpipes had been disconnected by the Japs, and we had tocarry water for some distance from wells in buckets. Foodwas starvation level.
Night after tropical moonlight night I lay awake listening.Would the besieging Americans come up the river to rescueus? Or would the Nipponese soldiers in Kuching, who hatedthe POW camps, come up the road to murder us? Or would theNipponese rabble across the pond, shouting and singingdrunkenly every night, come across the pond to massacreus? Or would the slow breaking of dawn, the anticipated timefor air landings, bring us the sound and sight of our planes?If so, would we be massacred before the rescuers arrived?
On those hot, black-shadowed, steeping nights, while wewomen and children lay in one camp and the men lay alonein another, we asked ourselves wonderingly why, in thissterile life, our bodies struggled so hard to live.
And yet, in those nights of lonely and widowed waiting,it wasn’t passion and desire fulfilled that we wanted. It wasthe touch of the hand, the word of comfort, the laughter
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shared, the saving from utter loneliness by the existence, nearyou, of the person you loved. It was that our bodies achedfor, and our hearts broke at not having.
Month followed month without release. All night welay and listened for something in the sky; aU day we ploddedand dug in the earth beneath it. Again we ceased looking up.We ceased expecting release. We ceased expecting. We justexisted.
The first week of August came. I knew that victory wouldcome. I knew that Christmas would come. I knew that deathwould come. But which would come fibrst? And did it makeany difference?
Aside from any importance which might attach to the dateAugust 15 in the world outside our barbed wire, we had forthree years celebrated that day under Japanese command. Itwas the anniversary of the grand opening of the Batu Lin-tang Encampment, the Kuching prison camps. In 1942Colonel Suga had been made commander in chief of all thePOWs and internees here, and by his order we yearly cele-brated the event of our captivity. He saw no irony in this.Sometimes we got an extra banana, sometimes an egg orsome sweets, on that day. But food was short in 1945, sothey gave us instead a half-hour meeting with our husbands,on the third anniversary of Prison Camp Day.
Harry and George and I met under the trees outside thebarbed wire. George dashed off to the field to play by thestream, while Harry and I sat and talked. No longer, now,about winning the war, or victory plans, or Allied planes,but about simple things that counted.
Just before it was time to part Harry said, “Here’s some-thing m teU you, for what it’s worth. You won’t believe it,but you can laugh at it. A drunken Tommy from the soldiers’camp sneaked through the wire into our kitchen last night,and the men caught him trying to steal food. They were go-
ing to beat him up, and he said that if they’d let him off he’dtell them something that would make them feel so good theywouldn’t want to beat him. He said word had come to themover the hidden wireless in their camp that night that anarmistice was going to be signed today, between the Alliesand the Japanese.”
I said, “Well, I’ll believe the war is over when I see Amer-ican sailors in Kuching Square!”
The British soldiers’ camp stretched along the side of ourroad. I was walking up that road on the way to Colonel Suga’soffice one day, when something caught my attention- AUover the soldiers’ camp I saw small campfires glowing, withlittle pots of various sorts smoking over them. And I thoughtI smelled . . . chicken! I stopped and stared and sniffed. TheJap sentry near by me said nothing. All this was unusual —fires, food, and silent sentries.
A miserably thin-looking soldier in a loincloth, so close tothe barbed wire that I could see him wink at me, sang outrecklessly, “Happy days are here again!” A boy near himshouted, “It won’t be long now, lady!” Two others bellowedout the familiar camp phrase, “They’ll be coming up theriver when they come!” Somebody else chanted the soldiers’favorite:
Let the Chinese and Dyaks and the Dutchmen fight about it.
They can have their Borneo. We can do without it. . . .
and aU over the camp I could hear snatches of “Yankee DoodleDandy.” I saw then that every British soldier within sight wassmiling at me, and waggling thumbs up, and the Jap sentrynear by, instead of shouting and shaking his gun, just glaredwith gummy eyes and did nothing.
I remembered what Harry had told me. I walked on, think-ing. None of the scraggly Indonesian chickens that usuallyfluttered about on the road between camps were visible today.
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Slowly I began to see the connection between the road with-out chickens, and the soldiers’ campfires with. It had beenchicken that I smelled all right!
The soldiers would not have been killing the chickensfrom which they occasionally got stray eggs if they did nothave good reason to beheve that peace had come, nor would
the Nipponese sentries have been allowing them to buildcampfires. That smell of chicken cooking will always in mymind be the first harbinger of peace.
The next day the Nipponese sent us a double ration of riceand sago flour. We had already received our August rations,complained at their scarcity, and been answered, “There isno more rice in Kuching.” When the double ration arrivedwe knew something had happened.
Meanwhile the Japanese officers denied the rapidly spread-ing rumors of peace, and the Japanese guards believed theirofficers, so convinced had they always been of their own in-vincibility.
Then for us in Kuching began the most nerve-destroyingperiod of the war. After peace had come to the outside world,we came nearest to being destroyed.
On August 20, at 2 p.m., pamphlets were dropped to us inthe women’s camp by Allied planes. We picked them up andread them before the guards could snatch them from us.
HQ 9TH AUSTRALIAN DIVISIONBRITISH BORNEO
iSth Aug. ’45
To: All Allied prisoners of war. in British Borneo
From: the General Commanding 9TH Australian Division AIF
At last the Allies have defeated completely the Japanese, andthe Japanese Emperor, on behalf of the Japanese Nation, has ac-cepted unconditional surrender. The necessary arrangements forthe implementation of the surrender are now being made betweenthe High Commands of the Allied and Japanese Forces.
Be of good cheer.
I know that you will realize that on account of your location,it will be difficult to get aid to you immediately, but you can restassmred that we wiU do everything within our power to releaseand care for you as soon as possible.
G. F. WOOTTEN(G. F. Waotten) Major GeneralCommanding pth Australian Division
Two hours later I was called up to Colonel Suga’s office.Before going I sewed my hidden pamphlet inside my shirt. Ithought the interview must have something to do with thisnews. Suga, however, greeted me as usual with small talk andtea. Finally I could bear it no longer and I asked him if therewas any change in the war situation in the East.
He answered that the Allies were fighting in Borneo andthey would soon try to take Kuching. Here they wouldconverge with the Japanese forces at the site of the POWcamps, where the final battle for supremacy would be heldover our captive bodies. At this point in the conversation.
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with my peace pamphlet against my skin, I wondered whichof us was crazy — Suga
or I.
Suga then showed me a typewritten order to all the prisonerof war camps, commanding them to move their camps, “Forthe sake of your own safety,” to an undesignated location.This order, Suga said, was to be given shortly. I saw thatit was dated September.
I said, “If you move us again you will kill us.”
Suga replied grimly, “That is my responsibility,” and hiseyes glittered and the tone of his voice warned me not tocontinue. In place of the university graduate I saw the Japa-nese fanatic.
I asked him if there was any change in the situation inEurope, as we could usually discuss Europe without excite-ment. He answered that Germany had suffered complete de-feat and had accepted peace terms, leaving Japan to fightalone. The Allies had recently used a new atom bomb overJapan, the most destructive and inhumane bomb ever used.The first bomb had destroyed an entire city. He believedthat his own family, resident in that city, had been killedby it.
This talk was on August 20. I felt as I talked with Sugathat day that there was little protection in a peace pamphletwhile the enemy still held the guns.
After the dropping of the pamphlets we became recklessof Nipponese rules. It wasn’t that we felt safe, but, shoot usor not, we didn’t care. As our captors were more hystericalthan we at that stage, it is a wonder they didn’t shoot, ifonly by accident. Officers and guards threatened one mo-ment, placated the next. No one knew who was in a positionto kick whom. I knew how the Japanese must be feeling, witheverything good behind them, and everything bad in front.It was the identical position we had occupied three and atalf years before.
During these days of uncertainty we tried to keep the facts
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from the children, for fear of what they might say to theguards. But they knew that “the Japs were licked,” as theolder boys, John, Jimmy, and Vicki, freely expressed it, andGeorge so confided to me. Already their attitude was veeringtowards that of conquerors, and they were swinging theirlittle shoulders proudly; already George and Eddie wereshouting to each other about “the dirty Japs”!
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