by Loet Velmans
Every day at noon I would climb up to the bridge, from which I’d broadcast the day’s news by bullhorn to the crowd below. As the ship’s only journalist, I had been asked to translate the BBC bulletins into Dutch. The news was received in silence, but a loud cheer would go up when I announced the arrest of a Japanese indicted for war crimes.
On two postwar trips to Indonesia, I tried to find Willem, with little success. Willem had vanished, leaving no trace. The post office, his former employer, had no record of where he had gone. Then, in the early 1950s, a haunting thing happened. Edith and I were living in New York. During rush hour we were on a subway platform at one of Manhattan’s busiest stops: the station at Forty-second Street and Times Square. The doors of the subway car opened, and a crowd of tourists and commuters surged toward us. Beyond them, inside the car we were trying to enter, I found myself looking directly at Willem, my mate, the one with whom I had made hundreds of rock-hauling trips up a hill by the river Kwai! I started to move toward him but was pushed back by a crush of people shoving their way out of the car. I shouted, “Willem!” His arm went straight up in a salute. The doors closed before my nose, and the train moved away. I never saw Willem again.
The sparse contacts I maintained with the few POWs I had found back after the war slowly evaporated. A few years ago I participated in a radio program of the Canadian Broadcasting Company in which tribute was paid to the courage of Chaim Nussbaum, who had emigrated to Toronto shortly after the war. I had seen him when he visited New York, a frail old man who bore only a slight resemblance to the young chaplain who had been such a charismatic preacher. In the mid-1980s, on a business visit to Canberra, Australia, I found an issue of Habeemah in that city’s War Museum. A curator telephoned George Sprod, and two nights later, forty years after the end of the war, George and I met in the bar of my Sydney hotel. On my frequent visits to Amsterdam, I sometimes looked up Lex Noyon, now a retired professor of social science. I do not know what happened to Mose and whether he is still writing to Joshua.
In 1985, forty years after Japan’s surrender, I finally found an opportunity to attend the annual reunion of the Dutch military survivors of the railroad. The reunion was held in a large hall in Utrecht, in the center of Holland. I was surrounded by tanned and wrinkled men in their sixties and seventies, many of whom wore regimental ties, tweeds, or dark blazers. After the formal part of the program—a number of boring and whining speeches—we were to gather in small groups to meet old friends. Veterans of various camps would meet under banners bearing the names of the camps along the railroad where we had lived and worked, and where many of our mates had died.
The man next to me explained that the number of active members of the veterans’ organization was dwindling rapidly.
I went over to the sign that read Spring Camp, clearly painted in bold black letters. I waited for half an hour as people collected under the other banners. No one else showed up.
Epilogue
THE JAPANESE COMMANDING OFFICER of our captivity was convicted as a war criminal and put to death. Two Korean guards were also killed by a mob of angry Allied soldiers roaming the streets of Singapore in the aftermath of our liberation. Yet only a handful of Japanese military leaders and Japanese prison guards were arrested and indicted as war criminals. Less than fifty were convicted, and of those, few were sent to jail and even fewer executed. The officers and men of the Japanese army were quietly reabsorbed into the farms, factories, and offices of the home country. Japan showed neither defiance nor remorse. There was not the slightest concession of guilt. No one apologized, and few were held accountable. I convinced myself that the entire Japanese nation had overlooked, papered over, trivialized, or forgotten the atrocities committed in the name of its emperor. The country quietly embraced its returning soldiers as heroes; the Japanese nation felt victimized. The atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the ultimate injustice. No Japanese seemed able to admit that an enemy might have suffered, too. No blame could be laid at their own door.
On the last day of my ocean voyage home, I gazed for the second time in five years at the cliffs of Dover, only now my ship was headed in the opposite direction, straight for the Dutch coast, from which I had fled in the Zeemans Hoop nearly six years earlier. A gray sky hung over the flat Dutch horizon; I could see the coastal towns strung along the North Sea shore, one of which was Scheveningen, the town where I had spent my youth. I was almost twenty-three now, but I felt like an old man. As the Alcantara entered the canal that connects the North Sea with the port of Amsterdam, every passenger was on deck. Wearing thin tropical clothes, the repatriates were chilled to the bone. I was shivering, not just with the cold but also with trepidation. We were grim and reflective. We were coming home to a country ravaged by war. I think every one of us dreaded the moment when the death of a loved one would be confirmed by a look in the eyes of relatives waiting for us onshore.
As I disembarked, I was conscious of being out of place. The air was not the air of the tropics. It wasn’t the air of prewar Holland, either. The shabbiness of the people’s clothes and the dilapidated buildings brought home how much had happened here while I was away. Nor was I the boy who had left six years ago. The taste of war still hung around me. It had permeated my mind; my skin color was yellow, and my breath smelled of the medicines that had so far failed to have any effect on my chronic malaria.
Father and Mother were waiting for me at the dock. Father’s hand was raised in a frozen welcoming gesture. Mother clutched a handkerchief, tears in her eyes. They both were bundled up in warm coats. Before even kissing or hugging me, Mother immediately helped me into a heavy overcoat that enveloped me like a badly wrapped parcel. I must have looked even worse to them than I had during our brief reunion in the harbor of Singapore. I was a scrawny, yellow, sickly-looking youngster, only a shadow of my former self.
Life in postwar Holland, as I had already gathered from the radio and the newspaper clippings Father sent to me in Singapore, was depressing and gloomy. After the relative abundance of food in Singapore and the plentiful meals aboard ship, I was about to experience rationing: not only of food, but of clothing, shoes, and just about every other commodity. We had no home to return to. My parents and our other surviving relatives lived together in close quarters in the modest-sized house of my cousin Lies, her husband Max, and their two young children. The desperate housing shortage meant I was not going to get the privacy I so longed for after five years of prison and army life.
At six o’clock in the evening you would always find me near a radio for the BBC news. I was anxious to know when the war crimes trials would start, so that my captors might be brought to trial. The lack of progress in arresting or indicting my oppressors was frustrating. I didn’t want to listen to the endless arguments about how best to bring war criminals to justice, and about which ones should be prosecuted and which ones allowed to go free. I felt the seething rage that had taken hold of me on the night march out of Bangpong, when our Japanese guards committed the gross injustice of shortening our rest period. This time there was nothing to stop me from venting my anger; I could kick and punch the walls and curse to my heart’s content. Not that it made any difference.
I began a new life. At the University of Amsterdam I met Edith van Hessen, the younger sister of my old schoolmate Jules, one of my many prewar friends who had not survived. Jules had gone underground in 1942 to flee the Nazis. He found work as a farmhand, moving from one farm to the next, and was preparing to escape to England by boat when he was arrested and sent to a concentration camp. When I bumped into Edith at the university (we were both taking the same oversubscribed course, given by a popular philosopher, Professor Henk Pos), I asked her what had happened to Jules. She told me that he had died in Auschwitz-Birkenau after two botched escape attempts.
I met her again at the wedding of a mutual friend in Rotterdam. We danced and fell in love. A year later, Edith left for the United States to do graduate work in psychology at Columbia Un
iversity. I was impatient, and cajoled and begged her to return to Holland so that we might get married. When she finally relented and returned to Amsterdam (after what seemed an interminable absence but had actually been only nine months!), I promised to take her back to America at the earliest opportunity.
Life in the Netherlands in the late 1940s was difficult both physically and psychologically. Almost the entire population carried the burden of the war’s memory, collectively and individually. Apart from the mental wounds that had not yet healed, our standard of living bore no resemblance to what we had been used to in our comfortable bourgeois prewar existence. So the idea of emigrating to the United States held considerable appeal. It took several months before we obtained our visas, settled our Dutch taxes, and finished saying our long good-byes to my parents and our friends. But finally, fifteen months after our wedding, the proud parents of twin girls, we disembarked in Hoboken to start a new life. We were determined to leave the past behind on the other side of the Atlantic.
Waiting at the dock to welcome us to New York was Guus, Edith’s elder brother. He had been sent to the United States shortly before the German invasion to learn the lumber trade. He had enlisted in the U.S. Army and had been one of the first soldiers to liberate Maastricht, Holland’s southernmost city. After the war he had returned to the United States, where he bought a lumber mill in Maryland.
It was a hot and humid day. The oppressive heat, so different from the moderate climate of Holland, brought back memories of my sweaty years in Southeast Asia. Hundreds of people were milling around in the moist, tearful, and emotionally charged atmosphere. We called out our final good-byes to our shipboard friends and fellow immigrants, at the same time trying to hug Guus and his wife while struggling with two restless and unhappy babies. In the confusion, as I put my jacket back on while balancing one of the twins on my hip, I suddenly noticed that my wallet with our passports and travelers checks was missing. After a panicky half hour, an employee of the Holland America Line brought our lost documents back. It was not a very auspicious beginning to our new life in America.
On our way to Baltimore, where my in-laws lived, we stopped off at a Howard Johnson’s, the first child-friendly restaurant we had ever encountered. I was dazzled by the menu, but Edith claimed to be disappointed: the number of ice cream flavors on offer had been reduced by half since her last visit in 1948. After a few months in Baltimore to get acclimatized, we moved to an apartment in Queens because I had decided that New York was the place to be. It took me at least half a year to get accustomed to the sounds, smells, and sights of the city. I was overwhelmed by the contrasts—the bustling metropolis compared to which Amsterdam now seemed to me downright provincial; the tall, gleaming buildings contrasted to the medieval canal houses; the prosperity of the New World, so different from the postwar shabbiness of the Old World; the heartiness and openness of the people compared with the cowed, dour mood of the war-scarred Dutch. We had been liberated; but this was truly the land of the free.
In Amsterdam I had been working as senior editor and supervisor of the art department for a publishing company that specialized in industrial house organs. In that capacity, I worked closely with some of Holland’s largest printers, who, when it became known that I was emigrating to the United States, offered to appoint me as their American sales representative. In making the rounds of New York publishers, I learned to my chagrin that no one in the publishing world seemed to be aware of the Dutch claim that a certain Laurens Janszoon Koster had invented the printing press in the fifteenth century! New Yorkers, it seemed, only recognized Johannes Gutenberg, on whom the Germans had bestowed the title of inventor and founder of the printing industry. They had never even heard of Koster!
It occurred to me that to improve the Dutch printing industry’s chances in the States, it would be useful to publicize its historical origins. I went in search of a venue like the Library of Congress, to mount an exhibition vaunting the Dutch presses’ long and illustrious history. While in this pursuit, I stumbled upon the American concept of “public relations,” a term unknown not only in Holland but in the rest of Europe as well. When John Hill, the founder of the PR firm Hill and Knowlton and my future boss, visited Paris in 1952 on behalf of a U.S. client and went looking for a local office to work with, he was amazed to find out that PR consultancies did not exist in France.
My entry to Hill and Knowlton was as much of a fluke as many other events in my life. Over supper one night in New York, I had a discussion with Leon Lipson, a young lawyer and one of my closest friends, about the dispute between the Netherlands and Indonesia over the status of Irian Jaya, the western half of New Guinea, which the Indonesians claimed as an integral part of their archipelago and the Dutch proposed as an independent state (more or less under Holland’s tutelage). The following day Leon introduced me to George Ball, a senior partner in his law firm (Ball later joined the government and ended his career as secretary of state in the Johnson administration).
“Leon tells me that you think you know why the Dutch lost their case on Irian before the Security Council,” Mr. Ball said. “Tell me about it.” I suggested that if the Dutch had done a better PR job, it might have helped their case. “The Dutch government did not understand much about American public opinion,” I said, as if I had great insight into such matters. Ball encouraged me to continue. “Americans favor the underdog,” I further pontificated. “They have a great deal of sympathy for the Indonesians who want their country’s independence, whereas they hold no great affection for those old colonial Dutch who want to lord it over the poor and oppressed.” I ended by saying, “The Dutch should have tried to gain the American public’s understanding and sympathy in a major public relations campaign. They were wrong in thinking that by merely having their ambassador put forward some legal and historic arguments before the United Nations Security Council, they would win their case.”
The next major debate at the United Nations happened to be on Morocco (a jewel in France’s colonial crown). Ball’s firm represented the French government in its efforts to scuttle that country’s attempt to gain independence from France. “Write up what you just told me,” Ball said. “We’ll pay you two hundred dollars.” And so I had my first paying PR assignment. As it turned out, my analysis was sent on to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs but was never acted upon—a fate only too common in the consulting business! (For the record, France, like the Netherlands, lost its case before the UN.)
While in Paris, looking for a European PR counsel, Hill happened to meet the resident partner of Ball’s firm. “There’s a young Dutchman living in New York who is doing some kind of PR work for our firm,” he informed Hill. Several months later Hill called and invited me to see him. “What do you know about PR?” he asked me. “Nothing,” I said. “Good,” said Hill. “You’re hired.”
I was excited to join Hill and Knowlton, at that time (and for years to come) the largest and most influential PR firm in America. I liked living in America; I was embarking on a new career, I had regained my strength and no longer suffered from the sweats brought on by malaria. Life was good. I tried not to give the war years another thought. That was easier said than done, however. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, visualizing the graveyard of Spring Camp and vividly remembering the corpse that I had dropped because it had been too heavy to carry. Then I would walk over to the cots of my two children, watch them breathe and smack their lips in their sleep, and feel restored. But the full force of my past came back to haunt me sooner than I expected.
A few months after joining the firm, I was thrown into the deep end when I was told I was being sent on the firm’s first overseas assignment. I was to be part of a twoman team sent to the Middle and Far East to conduct a three-month survey of the public relations needs of Caltex, the international oil company, in Bahrain, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, and… Japan.
When I learned that the Caltex assignment would include Tokyo, I
asked to speak to Hill. “I don’t think I can take this one on; sorry. I’m an ex-POW,” I reminded him.
Hill was blunt. “This is your big chance,” he said. “And I think you’re a bigger man than you think. You have twenty-four hours to think it over.” I took the job.
The Tokyo of 1953, one year after the American occupation had ended, was home to few Americans or Europeans. In the rush hour, its streets became a human stampede. I felt lost and isolated, the only non-Japanese face in the crowd. The city was gray, in contrast to New York or London or Amsterdam, its people one dark-hued homogeneous mass that went rapidly but quietly about its business. It was eight years after the end of the war, but fire-ravaged areas and half-destroyed, burned-out buildings were still in evidence. A massive rebuilding was under way. Towering cranes were visible everywhere. Here and there sat a white-clad war veteran with a begging bowl in front of him. There was no laughter.
In the meetings that had been set up for me, I could not help wondering if my Japanese interlocutors were the brothers or comrades-in-arms of my former tormentors. Caltex was in partnership with a local oil company, whose Japanese executives showed little or no interest in being interviewed. Most of the information we were after could only be gleaned from the handful of Americans who had been put on our prearranged schedule. None of the Western expatriates seemed comfortable in their new environment. To me the whole atmosphere was cold and distant, quite a contrast to the much more hospitable and cooperative attitudes of the Indians, Indonesians, and Filipinos we had encountered on the preceding legs of our trip. One incident stuck in my mind. Passing an office, I heard a loud, barking voice. From the corner of my eye, in a fleeting moment, I glimpsed a sharply dressed senior Japanese official, to whom I had been introduced earlier, chew out a rather shabbily outfitted underling. Inevitably I speculated that the senior man was an ex-officer snapping an order to his corporal, who in turn would remove a hammer from his belt and plant it in the small of my back. I began to realize how deep the Japanese experience was buried beneath my skin.