This blog is based on nostalgia and facts, although it could not be verified who made the cards.
However, the photos in the blog are of a real deck of cards that were made by one or more prisoners in Japanese captivity, it is not known where exactly though, and who made them. They were stored in a box, which must have been used later to store the cards. The box originally contained American-made playing cards that were sent as gifts to American soldiers and prisoners of war by the American Red Cross. The shipments were dated on the boxes. This shipment was from the stated date in 1944. The cards must have been made in 1942 when the Japanese camps still had a regime in which this was allowed. Later it was banned.
Picture of the deck of cards below was stored in a white cardboard box with a blue diamond pattern. The cards s are drawn and colored by hand. Some have images related to Camp Vught, in the Netherlands: including the Ace of Spades, the main building and the prison of the camp; on the Ace of Clubs the Roman Catholic Church of the camp, and on the Jack of Spades the ‘Jack’ is a camp guard in a barbed wire frame.
The nostalgia bit I was referring to is about a song I heard a lot when I was still a kid, the song was called “Deck of Cards,” but the version I would be familiar with was the Dutch version “Een Spel Kaarten” it was one of my mother’s favorite songs. Some of you might know it. “The Deck of Cards” is a recitation song that was popularized in the fields of both country and popular music, first during the late 1940s. This song, which relates the tale of a young American soldier arrested and charged with playing cards during a church service, first became a hit in the U.S. in 1948 by country musician T. Texas Tyler, and many others like Tex Ritter and Jim Reeves.
These are the lyrics:
“During the North African campaign, a bunch of soldier boys had been on a long hike and they arrived in a little town called Cascina. The next morning being Sunday, several of the boys went to Church. A sergeant commanded the boys in Church and after the Chaplain had read the prayer, the text was taken up next.
Those of the boys who had a prayer book took them out, but this one boy had only a deck of cards, and so he spread them out. The Sergeant saw the cards and said, “Soldier put away those cards.” After the service was over, the soldier was taken prisoner and brought before the Provost Marshall.
The Marshall said, “Sergeant, why have you brought the man here?” “For playing cards in church, Sir.” “And what have you got to say for yourself, son?” “Much, Sir.” Replied the soldier. The Marshall said, “I hope so, for if not I shall punish you more than any man was ever punished.”
The soldier said, “Sir, I’ve been on the march for about six days, I had neither Bible nor prayer book, but I hope to satisfy you, Sir, with the purity of my intentions.”
With that, the boy started his story:
You see Sir, when I look at the “ACE”, it reminds me that there is but one God; And the “DEUCE” reminds me that the Bible is divided into two parts; The Old and the New Testaments;
And when I see the “TREY”, I think of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost;
And when I see the “FOUR,” I think of the four Evangelists who preached the Gospel. There were Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John;
And when I see the “FIVE”, it reminds me of the five wise virgins who trimmed their lamps. There were ten of them, five were wise and were saved. Five were foolish and were shut out;
And when I see the “SIX,” it reminds me that in six days, God made this great heaven and earth;
When I see the “SEVEN,” it reminds me that on the seventh day, God rested from His great work;
And when I see the “EIGHT”, I think of the eight righteous persons God saved when He destroyed this earth. There was Noah, his wife, their three sons and their wives; And when I see the “NINE”, I think of the lepers our Saviour cleansed. And nine out of the ten didn’t even thank Him.
When I see the “TEN,” I think of the Ten Commandments God handed down to Moses on a table of stone;
When I see the “KING”, it reminds me that there is but one King of Heaven, God Almighty;
And when I see the “QUEEN,” I think of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is Queen of Heaven;
And the “JACK” or “KNAVE” is the Devil;
When I count the number of spots on a deck of cards, I find 365, the number of days in a year; There are 52 cards, the number of weeks in a year; There are 4 suits, the number of weeks in a month; There are 12 picture cards, the number of months in a year; There are 13 tricks, the number of weeks in a quarter; So you see, Sir, my pack of cards serves me as a Bible, Almanac and Prayer Book.
And friends, this is a true story, because I was that soldier.”
The song may possibly have been inspired by a sermon by a preacher in the late 1800’s.
This is the song:
This is the Dutch version, which is strangely enough one minute longer.
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Aside from the fact that February 28, 1944, was 80 years ago, the date is random, and that is just what all the murders by the Nazi regime were, random acts of violence.
Yes, they targeted certain groups, the biggest group being Jewish, within the groups the Nazis were still random in the selection. If they had use for a person he or she would be spared, at least temporarily. However, sometimes even if they would have use for them, they’d still be murdered.
Following are stories and photographs of victims who were murdered on this day 80 years ago.
The above picture is of Serica Bianca Gabay and her mother, Dina Gabay Smeer. Serica was born in Alkmaar, the Netherlands on April 30, 1943.
She was betrayed along with her mother by her mother’s cousin in early 1944. Serica Bianca Gabay was murdered on 28 February 1944 in Westerbork, and she was cremated on 2 March 1944. The urn with her ashes was placed on the Portugese-Jewish cemetery in Ouderkerk aan de Amstel on field 1924, row CU 2, grave nr. S. 14. She was only 9 months old when she was murdered.
Her mother Dina, was murdered eight months later in Auschwitz on October 31, 1944.
Robert Spiero was born in The Hague on May 23, 1941. Murdered in Auschwitz on February 28, 1944. He reached two years of age.
Benjamin Herman Gans was born in Amsterdam on February 9, 1926. He was murdered at Auschwitz on February 28, 1944. He was 18 years old.
Benjamin Gans was in hiding with the Koning family at Bloemendaalschestraatweg 123 in Bloemendaal, the Netherlands. In mid-1942 his younger brother Philip also joined him there. Their parents and sister, Rebecca, were in hiding in Baarn. In the spring of 1943, Benjamin and Philip also went to that address. Due to betrayal, the family was arrested on the night of July 24, 1943. The youngest son Philip was the only one to survive the concentration camps.
Werner Roth was born in Hindenburg, Germany on 12 August 1920. He was murdered at Auschwitz on February 28, 1944. He was 23 years old.
Although Sgt. Salomon Vanderveen technically wasn’t murdered by the Nazis, the circumstances of his death were a direct result of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. In a way, his death could be considered even a greater tragedy because he escaped the Nazi rule. He was born in Rotterdam, on December 13, 1919. He lived with his younger brother and stepmother (both survived the war) in Pijnacker, the Netherlands. On May 10, 1942, two years after the invasion, he escaped from the Netherlands. He joined the KNIL, the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army. When he joined I don’t know, and how he escaped imprisonment by the Japanese I don’t know either.
However, I do know he joined the No. 18 (Netherlands East Indies) Squadron, which was a combined Dutch-Australian bomber squadron under the operational command of the Royal Australian Airforce.
On February 8, 1944, the last large group left, led by A.B. Wolff, with their planes via Camp Beale in California to Australia. The group consisted of 38 pilots, 16 observers, 19 gunners, 9 aviation radio operators, 2 ground operators, 3 liaison officers, 5 officers and non-commissioned officer pilots classified as telegraph operators and a technical officer. The group included 23 officers and non-commissioned Naval Aviation Service (MLD) officers. The group was intended for the NEI Pool Squadron in Canberra, Australia. The B-25 Mitchell N5-191 crashed on February 28, 1944, during the crossing between Camp Beale and Hawaii. First Lieutenant Pilot C.W. de Veer, Sergeant J. de Wal (MLD), observer-navigator First Lieutenant Salomon van der Veen, and air gunner-sergeant H.Th. Klopper died. Only Sergeant L.Ch. Huisman survived the accident.
Despite escaping two invading occupying regimes, Salomon van der Veen faced death on February 28, 1944.
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The above photograph is of a plaque that hangs over a house in The Hague. It was the residence of Mies Wahlbeehm, where she hid a great number of Jews. The one thing that captured my attention was the words at the top of the plaque, “De herrinering aan de doden is voor hen een tweede leven,” which translates as ‘The remembrance of the dead, is for them a second life,” is so true.
Mies Walbeehm was born March 13, 1903, in Batang near Pekalongan, Dutch East Indies (currently Indonesia). She was the daughter of an Indonesian mother and a strict Dutch colonial official. Mies was a masseuse and found it difficult to say ‘no’ when Jewish clients asked her for help. In two years, she gave shelter to between 75 and 150 Jewish people in hiding in her house. Sometimes, she hid up to thirty people at a time in her two-room flat on the first floor above one of the many shops.
One of the families who took shelter with Mies was the Koppel family. The Koppel couple and their son Martijn were arrested after betrayal on the night of March 22 to 23, 1943, at their hiding place on Reinkensstraat in The Hague. Because it was so overcrowded, the family had been moved to another hiding place shortly before the raid, in a hotel in Ugchelen, but they found it very boring in the woods and asked the courier who provided them with ration cards to take them back. bring to The Hague. The courier warned them that it was only a matter of time before a raid would follow on Reinkensstraat because the address was simply too full. But they persisted and later traveled back to The Hague on their own, shortly before the raid. They were eventually all murdered in Sobibor on April 9, 1943.
On the night of March 22 to 23, 1943. 24 Jewish people in hiding were found in the flat at number 19. They were all transported to the Sobibor.
The names of the 24 victims are: Johanna Arbouw, Joseph Isidore Cohen, Abraham van Dam, Izak Fransman, Rachel-Fransman-van Lochem, Jacoba van Gelder, Clara Juliard Logher, Louis Koppel, Betsij Hendrina Koppel-Meijers, Martijn Koppel, Clara van Leeuwen-Rosenberg, Mietje Mogendorff- Meijer, Alex Podchlebnik, Mietje Pool-Cappel, Samuel Salzedo, Rebecca (Riekje) Sophia Salzedo, Abigael Salzedo-Querido, Jacob Verliebter, Rosa Verliebter-Schleyen, Aron de Vries, Victorine Esther de Vries-Jacobs, Israël Wijnberg, Fanny Wijnberg- Podchlebnik and Meijer Izak Wijnberg.
As far as reconstruction after the war, the flat on Reinkenstraat was betrayed by Friedrich Weinreb, but by number. He might have been aware of the hiding place because he heard about it from Alex Podchlebnick, one of the people in hiding who sometimes was allowed to go outside. The Security Police, led by Fritz Koch and Antonie Bolland, first tried another part of the building and then raided Mies’s apartment around 8 p.m.
Most people caught in hiding were sent to their deaths at Sobibor in early April 1943. Mies Walbeehm was interrogated and tortured in the Scheveningen prison, nicknamed Oranje Hotel.
Later, Mies said, she had been interrogated by Schmidt at the Oranjehotel. The main reason for the interrogations is to track down more people in hiding or helpers. The interrogations themselves were often in Villa Windekind. There is a post-war anecdote, related by Marietje Koelman, being arrested on April 7 for hiding her Jewish mother-in-law.
“In Windekind I was locked up in a large basement cupboard with a nurse. There was water running through a gutter, water that was completely red. I thought it was clear: they were going to shoot us dead. My husband was already dead, what could it be? I don’t care. But we discovered later, there was a rusty grate in the water. The rust turned the water so red. That nurse was a fierce one. She had hidden twenty Jews in her apartment. Don’t let it get to you, she said. You have to They like being rude to those Germans. No, I can handle them, I said.”
In 1995, the then-only witness of the raid, Adriana der Harst-Groen, spoke up.
“Mies’ house, Reinkenstraat 19, was used as a transition house. The resistance kept coming with new requests to accommodate people, and Mies never said no. It happened that more than 30 people were in hiding for a long time. It is easy to understand that this was not easy. Space was very limited, there was a hallway, a bathroom with a bathtub (which was also used for sleeping), and an ensuite room of approximately nine by four.
Mies, herself, slept in the hallway under the monastery table. The situation was often untenable, and the chance of discovery was high. When two people were picked up by the Resistance, in the morning, five more people in hiding were added in the evening. That’s how Mies was—she couldn’t say no.
Of course, there were many tensions; some thought there were too many people in the house. There was disagreement about the rules—about the distribution of food and about the compensation of 30 guilders per month to be paid. But if you had no money you didn’t have to pay.
For Mies, it was purely human work; you can hardly imagine what those people are like in that small space. Mies tried to prevent fatal mistakes from being made by making firm agreements. In order not to allow the use of gas and electricity to increase too much and make it noticeable, they determined that two people had to use the bathroom. Flushing the toilet should not be done too often.”
On July 10, 1943, Mies was deported to Vught concentration camp and released more than a year later, on August 5, 1944. Her experiences did not stop her from taking in more people in hiding.
Mrs. Walbeehm died in 1981. The drama of the Reinkenstraat—was quickly forgotten after the war. That changed in 1976 when the NIOD Weinreb report was published. An article published in Goudse Courant by journalist Aad Wagenaar under the headline, The Hague Secret Annex using passages from the Weinreb report.
I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you.
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One of the definitions of hygiene is conditions or practices conducive to maintaining health and preventing disease—specifically through cleanliness.
The lack of hygiene was one of the hidden killers during World War II, and indeed any other war, because it wasn’t always possible to keep a minimal level of hygiene. This post has a few depictions of how hygiene was maintained during World War II. The drawing above is of women washing in tubs in the Japanese-run camp Kampong Makassar in the Dutch East Indies, Indonesia.
Arbeitseinsatzlager Erika, a judicial penal camp to relieve the overcrowded prisons. The first prisoners arrived on 19 June 1942. The prisoners were often black marketers and illegal slaughterers, people who had violated distribution laws. Eight Jews also remained in the camp. Abuse was more the rule than the exception.
European women and children washing themselves in the so-called bathroom at the civilian internment camp, Kampong Makassar.
Battle of Arnhem. Allied soldiers in front of a house southwest of Arnhem. The house serves as a changing and washing room for the soldiers.
Two poverty-stricken Polish children check each other for nits.
As the Nazis did in Europe, the Japanese Imperial Army had concentration camps in the Pacific. The Asian camps were nearly as horrific as the European ones, and the conditions were inhumane, nonetheless.
This is just a side note, but I did notice, while researching, none of the Pacific camps were referred to as camps in occupied countries. For example, the Tjideng camp was stated as being in the Dutch East Indies, not the occupied Dutch East Indies.
For this piece, I am focusing on those camps in the Dutch East Indies (presently named Indonesia).
Throughout East Asia, the Japanese set up concentration camps, also called Jap Camps. The Japanese in the Dutch East Indies detained approximately 42,000 soldiers and 100,000 civilians. Families were separated; the men were placed in different camps from the women and children. Malnutrition, disease, and abuse caused tens of thousands of casualties. More than ten per cent of the Allied citizens (mainly British, American, and Dutch) in Japanese captivity—died.
During the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies from March 1942 to August 1945, Dutch soldiers were interned as prisoners of war in camps at Batavia, Bandoeng, and Tjimahi. The military prisoners of war can be divided into two categories: those who remained in captivity in Java, Sumatra, and Madura, and those who were deported as forced labourers to Thailand, Burma (Myanmar), and Japan. Internment can be further divided into two other categories: civilians and military.
For the Japanese, your status in society did not matter. Among the victims were a great number of Dutch nobility.
The internment by the Japanese of European citizens in the Dutch East Indies was not the same everywhere. In the Outer Regions, quite soon after the occupation began, the entire European civilian population was interned in camps, the men separated from their wives and children.
In Java, the internment issue was more complicated because of the large number of Europeans living there. There, the confinement in camps proceeded in stages. First, in March and April 1942, Dutch civil servants and people from the business community – insofar as they were not necessary for the maintenance of public life – were interned.
In April 1942, all Dutch citizens on Java who were older than 17 years had to register. During registration, a distinction was made between full-blooded Dutch people, the so-called totoks, and Dutch people of mixed descent, the Indo-Europeans or Indos. Almost all of the totoks were eventually interned. The majority of the Indo-Europeans on Java remained free, although many Indonesians also ended up in a camp sooner or later.
Initially, there were large and many small camps scattered all over the archipelago; later the civilian internees were increasingly concentrated in a few very large camps. Urban districts, prisons, barracks, schools, monasteries, and even hospitals were set up as internment camps. Here began a period of internment that would last for many for almost three years or more, during which living conditions deteriorated. Nearly 13,000 people died during the internment.
Tjideng was a camp for women and children during the Second World War, in Batavia (today known as Jakarta, Indonesia).
Batavia came under Japanese control in 1942, and part of the city, called Camp Tjideng, was used for the internment of European (often Dutch) women and children.
Initially, Tjideng was under civilian authority, and the conditions were bearable.
But when the military took over, privileges (such as being allowed to cook for themselves and the opportunity for religious services) were quickly withdrawn. Food preparation was centralised and the quality and quantity of food rapidly declined. Hunger and disease struck, and because no medicines were available, the number of fatalities increased.
The area of Camp Tjideng was over time made smaller and smaller, while it was obliged to accommodate more and more prisoners. Initially, there were about 2,000 prisoners and at the end of the war, there were approximately 10,500, while the territory had been reduced to a quarter of its original size. Every bit of space was used for sleeping, including the unused kitchens and waterless bathrooms.
Former UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s mother, Hermance, was in Camp Tjideng in Batavia, with her mother and sisters. She remembers having to bow deeply towards Japan at Tenko, “with our little fingers on the side seams of our skirt. If we did not do it properly we were beaten.”
Another punishment, head shaving, was so common that the women would simply wrap a scarf around their bloodied scalp and carry on.
From April 1944, the camp was under the command of Captain Kenichi Sone, who was responsible for many atrocities. After the war, Sone was arrested and sentenced to death on 2 September 1946. The sentence was carried out by a Dutch firing squad in December of that year, after a request for pardon to the Dutch lieutenant governor-general, Hubertus van Mook, was rejected.
I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you.
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For a long time in Dutch historiography and discourse, the entirety of the Indonesian War of Independence was referred to by the euphemistic term politionele acties, as used by the government at the time. In the Netherlands, the prevailing impression was that there had only been two distinct, short-term police actions intended to restore Dutch authority over a rebellious overseas territory. This perspective disregards that between the arrival of Dutch troops in March 1946 and the cession of sovereignty in December 1949, a full-scale military occupation and a continuous counterinsurgency had taken place, involving 120,000 conscripts.
Some conscripts encountered something they would not have seen in the Netherlands. At this stage, the Netherlands was still quite Puritan, so public nudity was reasonably alien although it was part of the Indonesian culture.
The photographs are from an album named “Memories from the Tropics,” from conscript Corporal J. de Raad.
I have to admit, this was a welcome distraction from my usual heavy Holocaust pieces.
I love the Netherlands. I was born and raised there and proud to call myself a Dutchman. Like all other countries in this world, it has pages in history that are not so glorious.
I believe that the best way for any country to deal with the darker days of its history is not to deny or run away from it. But rather confront it and deal with it.
The Rawagede massacre is one of those darker days in Dutch history.
On December 9, 1947, Dutch soldiers raided the West Javanese kampong Rawagede, now Balongsari. A large part of the male population of Rawagede was killed without trial. Until the 1990s, there was hardly any attention to mass murder in the Netherlands. While such acts of violence were for decades, dismissed by the Dutch government as ‘excesses’, we now know that they fit into a pattern of frequent and structural extreme violence by the Dutch armed forces during the War of Independence.
In the early morning of December 9, 1947, Dutch soldiers led by former resistance fighter Major Fons Wijnen attacked the West Javanese kampong Rawagede, now Balongsari, in the Krawang region. Until then, the Dutch armed forces had difficulty getting a grip on Krawang. Rawagede was seen as a centre of Indonesian resistance, and the Dutch military was looking for a local rebel leader, Lukas Kustario. He was not found. Yet, during a “cleansing operation,” almost the entire male population of the kampong was summarily executed without trial. According to Dutch military reports, 150 men were killed. However, various Indonesian sources speak of a death toll of 312 to 433 men.
Below are just some witness accounts:
“We had to make two rows, each row with seven men. Then we were shot from behind, from a distance of about two meters. My father, Bapak Locan, stood in line with me. When the soldiers fired, the man behind me was a shield. The bullet went right through him and only grazed my back. The poor man died instantly and fell on top of me. I felt his warm blood run down my face. Before the soldiers left, they shot each of them again to be certain we were dead. They shot me in the hand. I was the only one of the fourteen men who survived. My father was also dead.” —Survivor Bapak Saih
“He was shot from behind. Together, with four girlfriends, I carried his body home on a bamboo bench that served as a stretcher. I washed him, wrapped him in cloths and buried him myself.” —Ibu Wanti Binti Taswi, Eyewitness and she was widowed by the Rawagede massacre
“Yes, that’s how it was,” I think at that moment. “That was us, and those were the victims of our violence. Ordinary, sweet village people.” —Veteran Jan Glissenaar
“We got prisoners of war, and those prisoners of war were shot several times when the cry was: go take a piss, which people then turned around and were shot in the back. […] Those were not incidental cases, that was the normal course of business.” —Joop Hueting, Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) veteran
The Nazis weren’t the only ones using concentration camps, the Japanese Imperial army had them too, although not to the extent as the Nazi camps, and they were not meant for mass extermination. However, the treatment of the prisoners was still brutal and evil.
One of the camps was the Lampersari Prison camp. Lampersari was a civilian camp, located near Lampersariweg and Sompok in the southeast of Semarang. It was in use between October 1942 and August 23, 1945.
The internment of the Dutch women and children in Semarang Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) started in November 1942. They were housed in the Lampersari-Sompok district. In early March 1943, the internment operation in Semarang was almost completed.
Below is an excerpt from the book, All Ships Follow Me by Mieke Eerkens, it illustrates just some of the horrors of the Lampersari prison camp.
Internment Camp Lampersari, Semarang, Dutch East Indies, December 28, 1942
Authority in Lampersari is established immediately. As they enter the camp, some women are pulled from the line, and their suitcases are opened to be searched for contraband: money, Dutch or English printed material, radios, and more. Sjeffie, now eleven years old, watches wide-eyed as the Japanese officers hit mothers with their batons to make them move when they get off the trucks. They shout orders in a language none of the prisoners understand, and when these orders aren’t followed, the flat ends of their sabers come down hard on whomever they happen to reach, sometimes splitting flesh and drawing blood. It’s new violence for most of these children, and a cacophony of cries adds to the chaos. Luckily, Sjeffie’s mother is toward the back of the group of arriving prisoners and escapes injury, though later in the year she will not be so lucky, and her children will have to watch her being beaten to the ground because she doesn’t notice an officer approaching and therefore fails to bow to him in time.
Sjeffie and his mother and little sisters and brother are assigned to a small house on the Hoofd Manggaweg, the Main Mango Road. There are already three families living in the two-bedroom house when they arrive, and they shrink themselves into the corners, hanging a sheet up for privacy. Soon more women and children arrive, truckload after truckload, and Sjeffie and his family contract their spaces repeatedly, compressing more tightly with each new family until 30 people living in the house are crammed into every square inch. Children sleep in drawers, on and under tables, piled in sweaty heaps in the tropical heat. Snoring bodies lie shoulder to shoulder on mats on the floor. One toilet without running water serves all thirty of them in the house, and it soon overflows with human waste. They try to fend off malaria by hanging up klamboes over their sleeping bodies, a necessity in the Indonesian tropics so that the house at night fills with ethereal clouds of hazy mosquito netting from wall to wall. My grandmother keeps a secret diary in the camp, penciled onto onionskin paper hidden in the pages of her Bible.
She addresses her entries to my grandfather throughout her internment:
I am sleeping with the boys in what was once a kitchen…On February 2 the first group arrived [of the 2,000 new internees]…860 people. Until this point, they had been housed in nice, large homes where they had taken care of themselves. There was a lot of hustling and the empty places streamed full…Tomorrow we’ll get another 250 from Soerabaya.
Almost immediately after they arrive in Lampersari, Aunt Ko begins covertly teaching Sjeffie, his siblings, and other boys and girls in the camp from contraband Dutch language textbooks she has smuggled in. Every day, she sets up a little schoolroom in the tiny kampong house while the others clear out and stand watch in case an officer passes and hears them. Sjeffie gets to practice his numbers again. He gets to read, sucking up the words, reading the same books again and again. In one of the houses across the road, he and some other boys have set up a little hidden library under the thatched roof, where they collect their books— Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Hector Malot’s Nobody’s Boy, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and other books with wide appeal to young boys. Most of the children or their parents have brought pencils and notepads, but very quickly they realize how scarce these things are. “Sjeffie, make sure you write small. Save room on your paper,” Aunt Ko says sternly during class. Aunt Ko is very strict. She’s a religious woman who does not approve of waste or idleness. Sometimes she draws on the dirt floor with a stick so she doesn’t have to waste paper or pencil.
Meals during the first month in the camp are meager but sufficient. The prisoners get small portions, mostly of rice but also of some vegetables and meat in the beginning. The meat lasts only a short time. The vegetables last longer, but they too dwindle after several months. After that, all meals consist of a cup of rice or tapioca porridge twice a day, sometimes once a day. Sjeffie lines up with his mother and siblings with all the other prisoners, holding their tin cups. When they get to the front of the line, their cups are filled from giant pots that the kitchen workers have cooked the rice or porridge. One measured portion per person. Being assigned to work in the kitchen is a coveted job because there are chances to tuck food under one’s shirt, swipe a finger inside the rim of the pot when the officers look away or sneak a second helping.
Lampersari is one of the first camps in Indonesia to be targeted for the infamous “comfort women,” the women specifically selected to be raped by Japanese officers. A recruiter is sent to Lampersari for this task. However, the women hear the rumor about what is about to happen and gather en masse to fight back. They block access and fight fiercely to protect the young mothers and teenage daughters whom the Japanese officers prey upon, forcing the Japanese to abandon Lampersari as a suitable source of comfort women, not worth the trouble after repeated violent beatings only seem to strengthen the prisoners’ resolve to fight back. The Japanese set up two hundred internment camps throughout the Dutch East Indies, and prisoners at the smaller camps were easier to overpower.
The officers who guard them inside the camp quickly get Dutch nicknames. The officers include John the Whacker; Little Ko; Hockey Stick; Pretty Karl; the Bloodhound; the Easter Egg; Bucket Man; Chubby Baby; and Dick and Jane, who patrol together. Seikon Kimura, the man known as John the Whacker, is arguably the most sadistic. He earns his nickname for the way he seems to enjoy striking internees indiscriminately, without warning. When he discovers that a woman in the camp has been hiding money, he confiscates it and punches her in the face. He kicks her in the back until she is unable to stand while her children scream. He has her carried to the center of the camp, where he makes her lay injured in the equatorial sun from morning until evening without water. After the war, the Allied war crimes tribunal sentenced him to death for his human rights violations during the war. He is convicted of “carrying out a systematic reign of terror,” with witnesses at his trial describing his beating of a woman with a piece of wood until her arms broke in several places for sitting down during her work, causing a woman to go permanently deaf after being beaten for thirty minutes for smuggling cigarettes, forcing prisoners to stand in stress positions, withholding water and food, and whipping children until their flesh was in tatters, among other atrocities. Hockey Stick earns his name from the wooden hockey stick he carries with him throughout the camp and uses to take the legs out from under a prisoner. Then he makes them stand up so he can do it again, over and over, laughing every time. The Bloodhound is more selective, but he is capable of beating people into a coma when he does lose his temper.
In September 1944, the Japanese officers announced that the boys on the hill would be transferred out of Lampersari and tell the mothers to say goodbye to their sons, that scab-kneed, lizard-catching children now considered mature enough to do hard labor in a separate camp. The phrase the Japanese use is “men over ten.” As in, “All of the men over ten are hereby reassigned to new camps.” And so with a change of one word, with a relabeling, they justify the transfer.
The women clutch at their sons and weep. They whisper words into their ears as they hug them goodbye, hasty insufficient summaries of all the things that they would have taught them in the remaining years of childhood that now have to be condensed into a few minutes. Sjeffie’s mother tries to remember things to tell him. Wash whenever you can, check for lice and ticks, find a buddy and work as a team, don’t fight, keep practicing your equations, whatever you do just don’t do anything to anger the officers, that’s very important, OK, you have to promise me, can you promise me that? Aunt Ko says, “Say your prayers every day.” Sjeffie’s little sister Doortje hugs him and gives him some coffee. Fien, his youngest sister, hugs his legs, and my father kisses the top of his baby brother Kees’s head. Through the agitated buzz of the Dutch mothers, camp officers shout angry words in Japanese, words like iikagennishiro, teiryuu, shuutai, and hikihanasu, words that tumble into one another and mean nothing to the women until the guards start whacking them with their batons and whips, pulling son from mother and mother from son like starfish from wet rock. Then the boys are marched out of Camp Lampersari as their mothers wail and their younger siblings watch wide-eyed. The cries of Mammie, Mammie rise repeatedly from their midst as they pass through the camp gates, heads swiveling for their last looks back. The newly branded “men” march with their little suitcases banging against their knobby knees for what Sjeffie believes is many hours, along the banana trees and the warungs and the kopi carts. A rumor spreads in low tones through the group as they walk. “I heard they’re taking us to Bangkok.” “Yep, they said they’re taking us to Bangkok. I heard the Jap say it.” “Psst, hey, the word is we’re going to Bangkok.”
“Bangkok! That’s not even in the Indies! I won’t ever see my family again!”
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Grogol was a civilian camp, located just outside Batavia (now called Jakarta, Indonesia), about three kilometres Northwest of Tjideng, on the railway to Tangerang. Grogol started as a lunatic asylum and it was converted to a Japanese internment camp for civilians during World War II. Grogol was used for internment from 1 July 1943 til 18 April 1945.
This blog contains images of wooden labels that were used at the camp.
The picture above is a wooden board entitled Arrival at Grogol, with a magnifying glass burned-in scene of boys arriving by bus and unloading their luggage from Camp Tjimahi, where they had just left their mothers. The board was made after the Japanese permitted all the boys in December 1942 to send a package with Sinterklaas (Saint Nicholas) to their mother detained at the women’s camps.
Above is a narrow strip of wood labelled with 41881 and Japanese/Chinese(?) characters burnt into the wood. Someone made a hanging loop for it that still has a safety pin and a curved metal pin with a disc attached. The label belongs to R.A. the Lord (02.01.32) during the period Karmat, Tjodeng, Grogol.
The board pictured above is of text that reads, Arrival in Grogol, 29 August 2604, J.G. Post, P.O.W. 1-551 and below is a picture of the reverse side of the wood is an image burnt into the wood that represents a bus with people inside and luggage atop as well as, a soldier stands with his rifle on the left, while on the right, a figure walks to the right with a bag in hand.
The Netherlands has for most of its history quite a prosperous country. I wish I could say that all this wealth was always begotten in a fair way, but that would be a lie. The Dutch were ruthless in their quest for the things they desired.
From the arrival of the first Dutch ships in the late 16th century, to the declaration of independence in 1945, Dutch control over the Indonesian archipelago was always tenuous. Although Java was dominated by the Dutch, many areas remained independent throughout much of this time, including Aceh, Bali, Lombok and Borneo. There were numerous wars and disturbances across the archipelago as various indigenous groups resisted efforts to establish a Dutch hegemony, which weakened Dutch control and tied up its military forces. Piracy remained a problem until the mid-19th century. Finally in the early 20th century, imperial dominance was extended across what was to become the territory of modern-day Indonesia.
The first Dutch expedition set sail for the East Indies in 1595 to access spices directly from Asia. When it made a 400% profit on its return, other Dutch expeditions soon followed. Recognising the potential of the East Indies trade, the Dutch government amalgamated the competing companies into the United East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC).
The VOC was granted a charter to wage war, build fortresses, and make treaties across Asia. A capital was established in Batavia , which became the center of the VOC’s Asian trading network.
The sun that rose over Batavia,(now called Jakarta) the Dutch colonial capital on the island of Java, on October 9, 1740, revealed a city on the verge of catastrophe. Two days earlier, Chinese laborers, unemployed and unsettled by rumors that they would be deported. Allegedly led by a man called Nie Hoe Kong, they ambushed and murdered 50 Dutch colonial troops. Governor-General Adriaan Valckenier declared that any uprising would be met with deadly force.
In response, he sent 1,800 regular troops, accompanied by schutterij (militia) and eleven battalions of conscripts to stop the revolt; they established a curfew and cancelled plans for a Chinese festival Fearing that the Chinese would conspire against the colonials by candlelight, those inside the city walls were forbidden to light candles and were forced to surrender everything down to the smallest kitchen knife. This was intended to protect the colonial and indigenous population from the Chinese. Meanwhile, rumours spread among the other ethnic groups in Batavia, including slaves from Bali and Sulawesi, Bugis, and Balinese troops, that the Chinese were plotting to kill, rape, or enslave them.
These groups pre-emptively burned houses belonging to ethnic Chinese along Besar River. The Dutch followed this with an assault on Chinese settlements elsewhere in Batavia in which they burned houses and killed people. The Dutch politician and critic of colonialism W. R. van Hoëvell wrote that “pregnant and nursing women, children, and trembling old men fell on the sword. Defenseless prisoners were slaughtered like sheep”.
In the days that followed, Chinese homes were raided, their inhabitants taken outside and imprisoned or murdered on the spot. Cannons were brought to bear against the Chinese sections of the city, and soon entire blocks were aflame. Survivors, many of whom took refuge in small villages or in the forests surrounding the city, were sought and slaughtered. This went on for nearly two weeks. By the time the violence ended,10,000 Chinese had died in and around the colonial capital. Although I ceasefire was called on November 2dn, the Dutch troops kept looting until the 28th of November 1740.
Most accounts of the massacre estimate that 10,000 Chinese were killed within Batavia’s city walls, while at least another 500 were seriously wounded. Between 600 and 700 Chinese-owned houses were raided and burned. Historian Vermeulen gives a figure of 600 survivors, while the Indonesian scholar A.R.T. Kemasang estimates that 3,000 Chinese survived.The Indonesian historian Benny G. Setiono notes that 500 prisoners and hospital patients were killed, and a total of 3,431 people survived. The massacre was followed by an “open season” against the ethnic Chinese throughout Java, causing another massacre in 1741 in Semarang, and others later in Surabaya and Gresik.
I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you.
To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.
History of Sorts 
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