Robine Andrau - Bowing to the Emperor: We Were Captives in WWII

Copyright 2015 by Robine Andrau

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Klaras sections of this book first appeared in somewhat different form in Bowing to Fate, Copyright 1988 by Klara Sima Andrau, published by Miga Publishers, Myrtle Beach, SC 29572 and are used here by permission of Klara Sima Andraus living heirs, Maya Andrau and Robine Andrau.

Special thanks to Donald Versaw for allowing me to quote from his self-published memoir, Mikado no Kyaku (Guest of the Emperor): The Recollections of Marine Corporal Donald L. Versaw as a Japanese Prisoner of War During World War II, and to J.F. (Frits) Wilkenss daughter, Louisette Hartmann, who kindly gave me permission to use material from her fathers unpublished manuscript, The Missing Years: 1940 to 1947, which formed the backbone of Wims story.

ISBN: 978-0-9964119-0-5

Cover and Interior Design by Julia Gecha Designs

Published by Apple Rock Publishing, 160 Mann Lot Rd., Scituate, MA 02066

www.robineandrau.com

Publishers Cataloging-In-Publication Data

(Prepared by The Donohue Group, Inc.)

Andrau, Robine.

Bowing to the emperor : we were captives in WWII / Robine Andrau, Klara Sima Andrau.

pages : illustrations, map ; cm

Issued also as an ebook.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN: 978-0-9964119-0-5

ISBN: 9780996411912

1. Andrau, Klara Sima. 2. Andrau, Willem Hendrik. 3. World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, Dutch. 4. World War, 1939-1945--Japan--Prisoners and prisons. 5. World War, 1939-1945--Indonesia--Prisoners and prisons. 6. Concentration camps--Indonesia--Java. I. Andrau, Klara Sima. II. Title.

D811.5.A54 A3 2015

940.53492092

In honor of and gratitude to my parents

Klara and Wim

Contents

S it down, my sister Yvonne said. Are you sitting down? Now listen to this.And so began the bizarre tale of the mysterious reappearance of an old suitcase belonging to my father, dating from the year 1945.

At the start of World War II, my Dutch father, Wim, an engineer working for an American oil refinery construction company, was called up for Dutch military service. War runs on oil, and Indonesia, a Dutch colony at the start of the war, was rich in that liquid black gold. Because of his engineering expertise, Wim was temporarily released from service on the European front and sent in 1940, along with my Hungarian mother, two sisters, and me, to the then-Dutch East Indies. He was to be the construction manager for an aviation fuel plant located in Pladjoe, near Palembang, on the island of Sumatra.

With the attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Japanese military had inflicted great damage on the major force capable of resisting its advance. And advance it did, spreading down the Malayan peninsula and engulfing countries in its path like a swollen river swallows the countryside during a flood.

Trapped in Indonesia, we, along with thousands of others, were placed in an internment camp. The men, Wim among them, were first imprisoned in Java, then taken to Singapore, and subsequently crammed into one of the notorious hell ships, unmarked freighters/troop ships, and sent to forced POW labor camps in Japan. Wim was sent to Fukuoka #7, a POW camp in the coal-mining town of Futase on the Japanese island of Kyushu.

Meanwhile, the women and children were imprisoned in numerous internment camps in Java and on the other islands of Indonesia. My mother, Klara, my two sisters, and I were interned in two different camps in Java, first Karees and later Tjideng. Tjideng camp, into which more than ten thousand women and children were crammed and which was run by the sadistic Japanese commander Lieutenant Kenichi Sonei, was reputed to be the worst civilian internment camp in the Dutch East Indies.

Until our liberation in 1945, we didnt know where Wim was or whether he was alive. And he didnt know anything about our whereabouts or well-being.

Miraculously, we were reunited after the war and, having lost everything, including our home in Hungary, we came to America, the land of opportunity and hope. Although Klara had kept a diary during the war years, chronicling our experience in the Japanese camps in Java, what Wim had endured in Japan was a subject we never discussed and we as children knew little about. We put the war years behind us and built our lives anew, hardly ever speaking about those dark times.

Until, that is, April 2005, when my sister Yvonne received a strange letter from the Dutch Red Cross.

The Red Cross found Daddys suitcase from the war, my sister said. I was dumbfounded. With photographs and documents, she added. My eyes widened with a daughters as well as a writers greed. What an opportunity to touch our father again. And what a potential treasure trove of original source documents. How? What? I asked my sister. She read me the letter.

While cleaning up a storage room in their headquarters in The Hague, Red Cross employees found a mysterious suitcase whose tag indicated that it had been sent by the Dutch Department of War to the Red Cross in 1950. Thats all the information they had. Enthralled and intrigued, we made plans to fly to Holland to pick up the suitcase in person.

The old suitcase, girdled by three strips of curved wood attached to its body with brass rivets, contained three albums of family photographs (one of an unnamed turn-of-the-century Indonesian family and two others of trips taken by unnamed others), a towel and knapsack stenciled with the name W.H. Andrau, and some twenty photos of the POW camp and of Wim and other POWs.

In addition it contained several dozen documents, some of them written in pencil by Wim, some typed on scraps of paper and signed by him as the senior Dutch officer in charge of the four hundred Dutch military men in this camp and later of the additional two hundred Americans and two British who joined them in 1944. The typed documents recount serious injuries prisoners received as the result of dangerous conditions in the coal mine where they were forced to work. Other handwritten documents are Wims records of the men and their mental and physical condition. Still others appear to be a first partial draft of a report Wim was writing on the conditions of the camp and the health, nutrition, treatment, and so on of the POWs.

Since most of the reports are in English, we conjecture Wim might have written them as a report for the Allied liberation forces or as a preliminary draft of reports written for the postwar trials documenting brutal treatment of POWs by various members of the Japanese military. Sonei, the commander of Tjideng, our womens internment camp in Java, for example, was tried as a war criminal and executed in 1946 for his treatment of the women prisoners while he was in charge of this camp.

The Red Cross tracked us down by doing the most obviouschecking Dutch phonebooks for the name Andrauand found a 98-year-old cousin of Wims. The old womans son, Henry, identified the suitcase as Wims and gave the Red Cross my sister Yvonnes address.

And so Yvonne and I flew to Holland to retrieve this artifact of our fathers past. On the way the airline lost