My Father Was a World War II Prison Camp Survivor

My family had some peculiar proclivities when I was growing up. Dad would not even entertain the idea of eating sweet potatoes. My aunt, his older sister, would not ride in a red car or buy anything Japanese. We ate Indonesian food at home, even though my parents’ heritage was European.

As I grew older, I came to understand them all.

My father and his immediate family spent nearly four years in a World War II prison camp. It was a Japanese prison camp located in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Thirty thousand Europeans died in the camps between 1942 and liberation by American and British troops in 1945, most of malnutrition or dysentery. The only thing they had to eat consistently was the leaves of sweet potato plants they were forced to farm for the Japanese army.

A Little-Known Part of History

In 1940, the German Nazis invaded Belgium and the Netherlands. My father was an eight-year-old son of a diamond dealer living in Amsterdam, who had been born in Brussels. Our family and friends and business associates moved between the two neighboring countries constantly. Prior to the Nazi invasion, life had been very good for my family. My grandmother, Oma, played the cello in orchestras and was a rising star. My Opa ran the diamond business with his two brothers.

When things in both the Netherlands and Belgium became ominous, the family and friend group formed a plan: caravan down to Portugal and take an ocean liner to the Dutch East Indies to wait out the war. Many cars lined up, filled with husbands, wives, children of all ages, and grandparents, and headed south.

Within days, the first tragedy struck. One of the cars, a red sedan, flipped over driving around a sharp curve. A small child, who had been riding on his mother’s lap, was thrown out the window. They found him dead on the road. My aunt, at the time fourteen years old, would have been one of the people to see his broken body. The trauma was forever tied to red cars in her mind.

I don’t have all the details of what happened immediately after the accident, but the caravan eventually continued on. At some point, not long after this, Luftwaffe airplanes strafed the heavy traffic of vehicles fleeing, killing many as they sat in their vehicles. By some miracle, no one in the family caravan was injured, but they had to drive around the devastation on the highway to continue on their way. My dad and his sister would have borne witness to the death and destruction and been privy to the adult conversation that followed.

Their original plan was to stop in northern Spain, but then news arrived that Spain was fighting a vicious civil war and would not provide a safe harbor; so they continued South. More dodging Nazi fighter aircraft fractured the caravan. Some of the people decided to return home, thinking they were not safe anyway. They died in Auschwitz. Some of the younger men went to England to join the war on the side of the Allies. Some, including my dad, aunt, and grandparents, continued on to the harbor in Portugal.

They arrived safely and, with many other Europeans, rode the ship with nearly a holiday atmosphere, disembarking in the tropical dreamland of Jakarta. The adults and my teenage aunt got jobs and my father enrolled in school. For a year, it seemed their goal had been achieved. They wrote to the friends and family members who had remained in the Netherlands and Belgium and told them to come south.

It was too late. Not long after they left, the Nazis loaded the rest of the family on trains at the Centraal Station in Amsterdam and took them to Auschwitz. Only two of my Oma’s sisters survived by dyeing their hair blond and being taken in by a Christian family in the countryside. My family in Indonesia had no idea what had happened until after the war, since they did not receive responses to their telegrams and letters.

Then, Pearl Harbor

Early in 1942, the Japanese marched into Jakarta and convinced the government that the Europeans living among them were evil. They told the people the Europeans were colonists who had destroyed their culture and taken everything that was good for their own use. This is likely at least partly true; the Dutch had been ruling that part of the world since 1602 when most Western European countries began exploring and exploiting the spice and mineral riches of the area.

It worked. All European men were taken to a “camp” for detention not far from their families. Within months, they were moved far away, and the women and children were sent to another town. Fences went up. More women and children came, until there were twenty in a bungalow, sleeping on mattresses on the floor. The teenage girls were taken to another camp. My aunt would never talk about what happened during those years, leaving it to our imagination. Our imagination took us to dark places.

My father remained with his mother for the next several years. They were all made to work under the brutal hot sun under the brutal overseer who physically punished anyone who offended him in any way. Elderly women were beheaded for nearly fainting in the daily morning roll call. Children were made to beat puppies to death and bury other children who had died. There was not enough to eat, and the women gave whatever they had to the children. My Oma told of the mothers sitting around and conjuring up stories of delicious meals of their previous life and it actually somehow satisfied their hunger instead of making it worse.

My father found a mouse and kept it as a pet. One day the other boys his age told him to come and eat some meat they were able to find and after he was done told him it was his mouse he had eaten. He made his Bar Mitzvah in near silent secret in the dead of night to avoid the detection of the guards. He and my mother learned that my grandfather had died of dysentery when one of the guards brought them a small box with clippings of his fingernails. They had no word of my aunt for years.

I don’t have any details of the liberation from these camps. There are few stories on the internet about this part of the war. My Oma and father reunited with my aunt at some point and made their way back to the Netherlands. Life there was untenable for them; the emotional baggage alone must have weighed them down to unthinkable depths.

My Oma had lost her parents, her youngest sister, all three of her brothers, most of their friends and family, and neighbors. Anne Frank lived just three blocks from the flat my family had occupied, and her story is only known because of that diary, but her story was not unique to that part of Amsterdam. And there were countless other stories never told. The stoic survivors vowed not to speak of what had happened but to only look forward. My father emotionally remained a damaged child his whole life and told us the stories of the horrors they had faced. It scarred us all.

At some point my Oma and father moved to Ecuador and took jobs for a while and eventually made their way to Brooklyn, N.Y. Oma joined the Queens Symphony Orchestra where she played cello first seat until her retirement. Dad had trouble holding a job in spite of being fluent in five languages and had difficulty being a husband and father as well.

I often think that this war had killed most of my family physically and the rest emotionally, with the exception of Oma whose level of determination was a model for me to this day. My father’s story has affected the way I think about my own life story from the time I was very small to the present. I learned about hate, resilience, dealing with adversity, and acceptance that material things are not important like love. I hope my life is a bit of vindication for Dad; the hand he was dealt was devastating, but I’ve been able to carry on and create the next generation with my husband.

His story needs to be told, and so does the story of anyone in history that survived worldwide trauma. I hope one day humanity can learn from its mistakes and become more, well, human.

Below find links to my mother’s story, and to my author info. Thanks for reading.