J
apan launched its entry into World War Two
in December 1941 with a series of surprise
attacks in the Pacific, most memorably on
Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Japan was aiming to
capture the resource-rich British, American
and Dutch colonies in the region. Although
the Dutch colony of the East Indies (modern
Indonesia) was not included in these initial
attacks, it was clear that these oil-rich islands
would be high on their list of priorities. Japan
was eager to capture Dutch-controlled oil fields
on Borneo, Java and Sumatra, not least because
of the USA-led economic embargo which was
depriving Japan of the vital oil needed to sustain
its military campaign against China. In Europe,
Holland was already under German occupation
and Britain stood alone against Germany and
so neglected its colonial defences in the Far
East. The US mobilised too late to offer effective
resistance and by March 1942 the Japanese had
successfully invaded West Java in Indonesia.
After the invasion, the Japanese set about
winning hearts and minds by turning the
Indonesians against their Dutch colonists. All
Dutch citizens on Java above the age of seventeen
were required to ‘ register’ in April 1942. During
registration a distinction was made between
full-blooded Dutch (Totoks) and Dutch of mixed
parentage (Eurasians). Dutch civilians were
interned during 1942 and 1943; men between the
ages of sixteen and sixty years first, then women,
children and senior citizens. The members of
the Eurasian community on Java were treated
as Asians by the Japanese and only Eurasian
military were interned in prisoner-of-war camps.
My husband’s grandparents were living
and working in West Java at that time. They
worked for the Dutch government and ran
two orphanages for a mixture of Dutch and
Indonesian children. The Japanese made life for
the Dutch colonists as difficult as possible. Their
funds were frozen, all radios were confiscated
and constant house searches were imposed.
Alongside this the local population grew more
and more hostile until they eventually attacked
and ransacked many Dutch households. In
a letter home my husband’s grandmother,
Lisa Kiesling, describes her last night of
freedom before being interned with her two
daughters, including Dee (pronounced Day):
When we were interned on 30 August
1943, it was almost a relief. Our lives in
Indonesia had become untenable. My
husband’s nerves were in tatters trying
to keep everything together. The men
were sent to a camp in Buitenzorg and
I went with my two daughters Ems and
Day to Bandoeng. It tore me apart to be
separated from Willem. The last night
that we were together as a family we
prayed to God that he would look after
us. We could only resign ourselves to the
situation and hope for His Mercy.
HerStoria magazine Summer 2011
16
Women behind the Wire
Memories of life in a
Japanese Internment Camp
Dee Kiesling’s Story
as told to Angela Williams
I
was sixteen when we had to go into the camp. We were
all in shock. My mother was reeling from the trauma of
being separated from father. We spent the first night in a
monastery and after a few days were moved to Bandoeng,
the capital of West Java province. Camp Karees was a
collection of houses in the European section of Bandoeng,
fenced off with gedek (plaited bamboo sheets) and topped
with barbed wire. The camp held 6000 internees and the
Japanese guarded the circumference. We moved into houses
that had been recently vacated by the Dutch. My mother,
sister Ems and I had to share a house with seven other
families. Within that house each family was assigned a room.
There was a camp kitchen which at first served one warm meal a
day; later, after the poorly constructed ovens collapsed, we were given
raw ingredients from which we had to prepare food for ourselves.
My sister and I cooked over a charcoal fire and became very adept
at making meals from our rations. Our speciality was ‘Crème de Trasi.’
Trasi is shrimp paste which we used to fry and mix with rice.
To get extra protein we hunted frogs after sundown. The three
of us sneaked out together, using a pillowcase to put our catch in.
We usually caught about seven or eight and back at camp mother
chopped off their heads and skinned them. Their little torsos, with
their broad shoulders and thin hips, looked just like a man’s body.
When you salted them their nerves twitched and made their legs
dance. We boiled them in water and they tasted like chicken. After a
while the Japanese forbade it as the frogs kept the insect population
down and mosquito numbers were turning into plague proportions.
For extra protein we hunted
frogs after sundown
My mother helped in the hospital, nursing the sick. The lean rations
aside, conditions were fairly good at this stage. We made friends
with a woman from the Jordaan neighbourhood of Amsterdam
(equivalent to a London Cockney). She was a young newly-wed
who still had potions and creams from the beauty salon she had
run in Bandoeng before the area was ghettoised. She was always
ready with a smile and a joke and helped to keep our spirits up. We
traded cooked meals with her in exchange for beauty treatments.
Ando-san, a Japanese guard was about eighteen years old. He
confided in my mother that he hated the war and the way the women
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