Long Way Back to the River Kwai

by Loet Velmans

  The one and only copy of Habeemah was widely circulated: besides the fifteen-odd members of our Jewish congregation, many others were interested in it as well, for everybody was famished for reading material.

  Moishe (called Mose), a Dutchman and member of the small coterie surrounding Nussbaum, cut a curious figure. He was tall, stooped, and thin as a reed. His most striking feature was his big nose. A salesman representing a Dutch kitchenware company, he had been on his first visit to the Indies when he was stranded there by the German occupation of Holland. In the Jewish congregation, he functioned as Nussbaum’s hyperactive acolyte, assisting in the preparation for religious services, carrying books and refreshments from the canteen to patients in our sick bay, and ferrying messages between Nussbaum and the command staff. He was a bachelor and acted like an old spinster. He was also a natural caregiver. In a parental frame of mind, he had selected me as one of the favorite targets of his beneficence. That was after he had taken care of Nussbaum. First and foremost he wanted “Nuss,” as he called him, to get the best of whatever he could scrounge: a spoonful of extra rice, a piece of fruit, some stringy vegetables. Most of this could only have come out of his own rations. Although he sometimes seemed to be trying to starve himself to death, his cheerful mien and darting eyes contradicted any such intention. When Nuss was busy—and he usually was, looking after his flock—Mose loped after me, begging me to send him on an errand or to let him wash my threadbare clothing. I firmly rejected his largesse, but Mose kept pushing. If I had not adamantly declined his offers, he would have tried to force all of his own food down my throat. One evening I found him in one of the best seats of our makeshift theater. He had been reserving it for me since late that afternoon and left the theater immediately after he had forced me to occupy it. That day I asked myself the question that had occurred to me before: Had Mose turned into this groveling altruist as a result of his imprisonment and time on the railroad? Or was this simply his fundamental character?

  In Changi, as the months passed, Mose grew into an increasingly lonely figure. He wandered about on his own, muttering to himself. He had amassed a heap of old prison records from the stock of sheets that also served as cigarette paper and for the printing of camp magazines. In the evenings he sat hunched on his bunk, scribbling furiously. “I am writing everything down for Joshua, my only heir,” he said.

  Sitting around in the evening, drinking mugs of weak tea, my friends and I would discuss literature, religion, and politics. I was like a sponge, in a frenzy to learn—through books, the knowledge of my friends, and the exchange of ideas. My pet subject, on which I held a strong and strictly uninformed opinion, was the political structuring of the postwar world. I was still playing with ideas of how to reorganize the postwar world. I would draw diagrams of a new League of Nations, but always with the proviso that the victorious Allies would lord it over the Germans, Italians, and Japanese for a long time to come.

  I didn’t quite realize this at the time, but if prison camp was a microcosm of the Western world, there was not much hope for international cooperation. As a general rule, the Australians, the Americans (a small minority), the British, and the Dutch behaved as if they hated each other’s guts. Where the different nationalities shared kitchens and medical facilities, the rules of national nepotism always came into play. Cooks and medical orderlies were appointed based on the nationality of the ranking POW officer. Further substrata existed. Among the British there were the Scots, the Irish, and the genuine limeys. The Dutch contingent consisted of the Eurasians and a small group of whites who, following the short-lived integration brought about by the misery of the railroad, once again kept themselves aloof from their fellow POWs of mixed Dutch/Indonesian blood. Further divisions along class lines inevitably re-asserted themselves, pitting rank and file against officers. The camaraderie that had prevailed on the railroad was forgotten. Especially disliked were those British officers who carried their swagger sticks with renewed pride.

  I was the exception, I suppose. Like a chameleon, I found myself drifting easily from one ethnic group to another, and felt at home pretty much everywhere.

  In Changi the Japanese paid each POW a pittance. Since the Japanese neither subscribed to nor believed in the Geneva Convention, we assumed that our remuneration followed some Japanese military pay scale, although our pay must have amounted to only a fraction of the minimal wage earned by the Japanese soldiers. A small percentage was taken off the top of our meager earnings by our own internal POW administration for the purchase of supplementary food supplies and medicines. Chaim Nussbaum’s congregation also collected voluntary contributions. In the Singapore camps there was always some cash on hand. I myself had been able to conceal a few banknotes left over from my black-market days. Surrender to the Japanese had not entailed surrendering regimental money reserves; cash had been as cleverly concealed as radio parts. Whenever I could find the luxury of a coconut or a cake of soap, I shared it with Lex, who in his weakened state was not capable of fending for himself. As always in life, money remained a fundamentally indispensable commodity, even within the enforced confines of our captivity.

  Our leisure came to an abrupt end when the Japanese decided to use the POWs for a major new construction project to enlarge the Changi airfield. Once again, we were being shown how expendable we were; nothing was done to make the work efficient or bearable. It seemed as if the bad times had returned. The only redeeming, yet dangerous, feature of our forced labor was that, once again, it offered some of our most daring and ingenious pilferers the opportunity to purloin tools, lightbulbs, canvas, Japanese rations, and whatever else they could lay their hands on. Although I was not selected for the outside work parties, I was put to work, without a break, on repair and maintenance jobs inside our barracks.

  The inevitable happened. An Australian was caught red-handed and was beaten almost to death. The excitement of being back in Changi had worn off, especially now that the Japanese had started to reduce our rations again. In the Japanese view, the less we were given to eat, the harder we would work. Our guards seemed convinced that the lack of a few more scraps of food would make us stronger and restore our health. They administered this message with enthusiastic beatings.

  The reduction in our rations was accompanied, almost simultaneously, by a sudden clamp-down on all entertainment. The Coconut Grove had become an integral part of our lives. The anticipation of distraction through laughter, the excitement of the performances themselves, and their relaxed aftermath—all brought a lift to our morale that could last for days. When they closed down our theater, the Japanese administered a massive dose of communal depression by depriving us of a form of nourishment that we needed just as badly as food.

  The censorship was not directly related to the thievery. It started because of a song composed and performed by my favorite entertainer, Bill Williams, a British singer who accompanied himself on the piano. Williams had a magnetic hold on his audience of emaciated youngsters when he sang “There’ll Be Blue Birds over the White Cliffs of Dover” or “A Nightingale Sang in Leicester Square.” I used to hum those songs for days afterward. And I would daydream how after the war I would turn into a Maurice Chevalier–type boulevardier and sing my way through life.

  The song that gave the Japanese offense was entitled “On Our Return” and was a roaring sentimental success. Its meaning was obvious—we were going home. One night a Japanese general and his staff were in the audience. They were evidently not amused. The place was shut down for good.

  I was convinced, as I had been many times before, that the war was about to end. The Allies would invade continental Europe, the Americans would invade Japan, and the British would recapture Singapore. In May 1945 we celebrated the defeat of the Nazis. Perhaps we were better informed than our Japanese guards; in any event, there wasn’t the slightest change in the way they went about demonstrating their contempt for us. I know now that our senior officers were more worried than I was (in my naïveté) about wha
t might happen to us when the Allies got around to launching an invasion in our part of the world. But I did join in the speculation. Would our captors massacre us all? What else could we expect? Who could second-guess these people who didn’t seem to be tired of war, not even after fifteen years?

  It became difficult to communicate with Mose, who desired increasingly to be left alone. For most of the day he could now be found seated on his bunk, hunched over his writing. As the weeks passed, his eyes no longer glittered; they had turned dull. Every so often he became his old self again, intent on looking after Nuss and me. Yet his enthusiasm had slackened. “There is so much to write,” he said. “I must leave instructions before it is too late.”

  7

  Renascence

  WE HEARD ABOUT HIROSHIMA ON AUGUST 7, the day after the A-bomb blast. We did not understand exactly what had happened, but we were convinced that it would speed up our deliverance. We shouted our joy like corks popping out of a bottle. I have a clear memory of Nussbaum leaning against the western wall of our cell, facing toward Jerusalem, chanting and banging his head softly against solid cement. His small, shrunken figure gently rocked back and forth, head and shoulders covered by his oversize prayer shawl. The Japanese acted as if nothing had happened.

  The next day they were gone. Was it a trap? We did not dare venture outside the perimeter of our jail. Twenty-four hours later the guards were back again. But this time they were carrying small sidearms only; they had left their rifles and bayonets behind. Meanwhile, Allied planes were dropping leaflets on us, advising us to remain put until the arrival of the British troops. Throughout the first week of our suspended liberation our mood swung wildly from euphoria to fear, from hysterical laughter to tearful prayer.

  During those first tense days—from the moment the first bomb fell on Hiroshima until the day Japan surrendered—we remained cooped up. We watched our guards anxiously. They no longer took roll call, but nothing else in our daily routine changed. Yet we could not stop celebrating: we slapped each other on the back, shook hands over and over, cheered each other on, and broke into song. It was a bit of an anticlimax when we were finally told that the war had officially ended. We hadn’t been very good at handling so much tension. Occasionally, we lost our cool. The news that the war was truly over took time to sink in.

  The Japanese surrender was on August 15, 1945. It was only later that I learned that the Japanese general in charge of our part of Southeast Asia, headquartered in Saigon, had been ready to disregard his emperor’s orders and to defend every inch of territory under his command to the bitter end. When he had refused to lay down arms, the emperor’s brother flew from Tokyo to Saigon to enforce Hirohito’s order to surrender. If he had not done so, an order to kill all POWs would have remained in effect. Clear instructions had been issued: all POWs were to be massacred on the day the first Allied soldier set foot on any spot of land that was under control of the Saigon command. The Allies, for their part, also had a firm timetable: an invasion north of Singapore had been ordered and was scheduled for early September. Fortunately for us, Japan’s capitulation came just in time, a month before we would likely all have been killed. This was my last lucky escape.

  By the end of August, the Kempetai—the previously dreaded military police—had replaced our regular guards. Suddenly, the Japanese were on their best behavior—they treated us well, almost obsequiously. Suddenly Red Cross parcels arrived by the truckloads. On August 30, the first British troops landed, and we were visited by medical units that established radio contact with their headquarters offshore. The next day British bombers flew over the Changi area and dropped canisters containing food supplies, vitamin pills, Ovaltine, and cigarettes. We cheered each parachute as it came down. The Kempetai were ordered to surrender their sidearms. They were now only armed with homemade wooden toy rifles. They looked ridiculous. But we were still too browbeaten to take revenge or demonstrate our anger. We had other things on our minds: how to get in touch with parents, wives, children, and girlfriends. I remember watching a lone English ex-POW giving a Japanese guard a piece of his mind. He was standing nose to nose with his foe and was screaming with fury. I looked on with indifference. There was no visible reaction from the Japanese soldier either.

  We were told that we would each be allowed to send one telegram to our loved ones. I thought long and hard about how to word my one precious missive to my parents. We compared notes among ourselves. A Dutch architect who had worked with the team that designed the Dutch pavilion at New York’s 1939 World’s Fair wired one single sentence to his young bride: “Still studying the gentle art of becoming a better husband.” That message had a nice ring to it. I have always kept it in mind.

  The Kempetai remained on guard outside our gate. Whoever issued their orders must have been under the mistaken impression that we needed protection from the native population. The people of Singapore, however, seemed solidly on our side. Small groups of native Chinese came up to our gate, smiling and waving. When we ventured outside the camp, walking along the perimeter fence, they cheered and threw fruit and other edibles in our direction.

  The newly arrived British troops assigned to our welfare wore armbands with the letters RAPWI (Recovery Allied POWs and Internees). A Dutch delegation, wearing the same insignia, arrived to look after the 2,000 Dutch exPOWs in Singapore.

  One day, Willem and I got a lift out of Changi. A British officer drove us in his jeep to the busy port. We strolled along the docks to watch the British warships at anchor and the hustle and bustle on deck. A naval officer invited us aboard his warship. We were led to the mess, where we gorged ourselves on tea with a generous quantity of milk and sugar, and white bread thickly spread with butter and marmalade—delicacies that we had neither seen nor tasted for years. I promptly threw it all back up.

  The next day, back in Changi, Willem and I baked a cake from a special festive ration that had been distributed to each inmate: half a dozen eggs, a few spoonfuls of flour, and lots of sugar. An unusual recipe that resulted in a surprisingly delicious cake—but we couldn’t keep that down either.

  The Kempetai guards posted outside our barracks stood at attention all the time. They saluted us when we passed through the gates. We ignored them. Then, one day, they too were gone, as if they had evaporated into thin air.

  In the liberated camp, our euphoria reached its zenith when Admiral Mountbatten, commander in chief of the Allied forces in Southeast Asia, came for a visit and stepped up on a wooden soapbox just inside the main gate. Dressed in an immaculate white uniform, he gave a charismatic performance, praising our (presumed) courage and assuring us that the world would forget neither our suffering nor the atrocities committed by the Japanese. We cheered and whistled and felt good about ourselves. For a moment, I relaxed the wariness and suspicion that had become my second nature. I had learned from bitter experience to take statements and promises made by military authorities with more than a few grains of salt. Mine was a deep-seated cynicism, a POW mentality that, once acquired, would never wear off. It made each setback and each disappointment easier to accept. After all, what was so bad about the unfulfilled promise, the unscotched rumor, the hypocritical pep talk? In the end there was only one reality: death. Death was the ultimate broken promise.

  Yet even for the toughest of survivors, there were times when we could not help but let our guard down. I was anything but tough and unemotional when I first heard about the Nazi extermination camps. One of the first British officers flown in from Australia turned out to be a Jew who, at a gathering of the Nussbaum congregation, told us about the death camps of Europe and the execution and extermination of millions. We, who had considered ourselves hardened veterans and who thought that we had seen and lived through the worst, had great difficulty controlling our emotions. Most could not hold back their tears.

  I was unable to cry. I wanted to, but could not. Instead a storm of anger raged inside me. After a day or two the fury calmed down. I was left with a dull sense of m
ourning. At that Friday night’s services, Nussbaum’s liturgical lamentations tore at my heart. I still did not understand the Hebrew text, but I recognized that his wailing had now acquired an additional contemporary meaning. A horrifying one at that: chants both grave and relevant, and deeply disturbing. My attention wandered to my grandparents and their little rooms in the walk-up on the Rechtboomsloot. I saw the whole family before me. Although all four of my grandparents had died a natural death before the war, theirs was the community that had brought forth my aunts, uncles, and nieces, who were likely to have perished.

  Only a few weeks later, the Holocaust had already become an abstract and remote concept to me. I simply refused to allow it to penetrate my thoughts, fearful that it would overwhelm me. I shut the dead of Europe, like the dead of Asia, out of my life. I did not know how to mourn—not even my own relatives and the school friends I had left behind in Scheveningen, most of whom, I felt certain, must have been murdered.

  There was one eye-opening moment of truth for me, which I managed to sweep under the carpet almost immediately. Shortly after receiving the first news from Europe, I told one of our liberators, an English Jew in captain’s uniform, that I had escaped from Holland before ending up on the railroad. He frowned. “Well, then, poor sod, you missed a double whammy,” he said. Much later, I realized that, bad as Spring Camp and my whole period of imprisonment had been, it had saved me from Auschwitz.

  One Friday evening in Changi, on my way to have a chat with Nussbaum, I passed Mose, who had found a table to write on more comfortably. “No one in my family has survived,” he said mournfully. “I know it. I feel it in my bones. None of us here has been told what has happened to our families. I am the first of all of you who knows.” He turned away from me. “Now I have to write it down for Joshua.” It took me a moment before I grasped the meaning of his biblical allusion.