大象传媒

We still had only one suitcase to take with us, but the contents were different. Everything looked shabby, worn to shreds after two years during which we had been forced to move from one location in the camp in Bandoeng to another. You packed your case, loaded your miserable belongings on a hand-drawn cart and off you went to another room in another house. The large houses in what had been a beautiful part of the town were filled with as many families as there were rooms. Moving house invariably meant you had to leave some things behind. It also meant finding exciting stuff which the previous inhabitants had left behind. A book, for instance, that was what I hoped for most. Later on books were forbidden, like much else, but during the first two years we were allowed to read. Schools were forbidden, though.

I had only just started school when the war began but had been able to read for quite a while.

At first, the nuns took us in during the day and taught us the first elements of embroidery, but that soon stopped.

The best find of all was a beautifully illustrated "Alice in Wonderland". I could not have asked for a better gift. Escape literature was exactly what was needed.

After two years we were put in a train and sent to Batavia, or rather a camp outside Batavia: rows and rows of huts. Kampong Makassar, of the red earth, and the open latrines...

I got a seat on the train because I could hardly walk any more. You could not look out of the windows, but I managed to find a chink and watched violent storms accompanying the train, a whirlwind black and threatening coming closer and closer.

When we arrived at the camp, we had to leave our suitcases on a large field. That night a tropical storm drenched field and cases.

When the tsunami hit Aceh, this Christmas, the first pictures caused a flood of memories: similar landscape, similar desolation. In the morning the sun twinkled in the broken pieces of a red goblet. All the suitcases lay open, the contents all but destroyed.

Looking back at the first two years of imprisonment from that point in time, made me realise that up to that moment we had been living well, almost. We had been able to grow tomatoes in the garden and make a fire. If you had a handful of flour and a small piece of candle, you could bake pancakes. Luxury.

Tomatoes were dangerous in one respect: there was one Jap who would wander in and out of the gardens to steal the ripest fruit. He was known as Johnny Tomato and at first was looked on almost with affection, but it was soon rumoured that he became very dangerous when the moon was full.

Before the war, stilts were in fashion in the mountain village where we lived. And the gardener made wonderful kites. He used finely ground glass and glue on the string and when the kites were in the air, the boys tried to slash the strings of the other kites to bring them down.

All this was left behind, of course. In fact, all toys were left behind as far as I remember.

We were quite resourceful and made 'stilts' out of empty tins. You knock two holes in, under the rim, pass string through and walk on the tins drawing your feet up with the string.

We made castanets from slivers of wood. They became all the rage, but they were noisy. Like the tin-stilts, they were soon forbidden.

In fact, most things were forbidden after a while and the object-lesson which I have described in another contribution: the girl who was hanged by her wrists between two trees because she had forgotten to wear her number, taught us once and for all that the Japs were to be obeyed.

Indoors became a safer place. While we still had paper and crayons, we made paper dolls which were cut out and then dressed in paper clothes.
We even made board-games, using shells or pebbles to mark our positions.

All this was also left behind when we moved to the final camp. We didn't play much there. Going to the latrines took all your energy, especially since the whole camp seemed to be down with dysentery. There was one thing which kept us busy each day: catching flies.

I had completely forgotten this, until one fine summer day, some ten years ago, I tried to persuade a fat lazy fly to leave the room by waving a newspaper at it. Instead I killed it. The horror I felt was so disproportionate that it stayed with me for days. It was only when I read a book about our particular camp and the measures which the Japs had taken when the combination of open latrines and dysentery had caused the fly population to grow alarmingly, that I understood why. Handfuls of flies had to be handed in each day. The sickly sweet smell came back, too. Horror upon horror.

I don't think I wandered around at all in that last year. At night I listened to the rats moving around over our heads and wondered what they were doing there. There was no food left for them. Perhaps they were waiting for us. During the day, if you were lucky, you could watch the flying squirrels leap from palm tree to palm tree. They were free, they were beautiful.

When we were liberated, a kindly Gurkha tried to cheer us up. He looked at us with sad eyes, sat down on the ground and tried to get us to laugh by first passing one leg around his neck (scratch your left ear with your right hand passing your arm behind your head. Imagine, but only imagine, that you could do the same thing with your leg.) This went well, but he got into trouble when he tried to do the same thing with his other leg. We even laughed then and that seemed to cheer him up no end.

From that moment the desire to play came back, tentatively.

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