Memoir provides glimpse into WWII prisoner of war experience

Loet Velmans was reluctant to write Long Way Back to the River Kwai; his memories of being a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II were so painful to recall, he had tried to bury them.

He grew up in Amsterdam, Holland. The Jewish population in the upper class milieu there in the 1920s and ’30s had grown to some 80,000 people. It was an old section of the city; Rembrandt had in fact lived there.

There were 5,000 left at the end of the war. The Velmans family was lucky enough to find a small boat at the Rotterdam harbor departing for England – the last to leave. It was filled with people, but they managed to board. Holland was bombed the next day.

Loet, assigned to look for mines, found it a great adventure. Through various lucky accidents, they reached England. The family did well, but soon the threat of war there persuaded them to leave for the Far East.

Not long after they arrived, Loet, at 18, was drafted into the Royal Dutch East Indian Army and was sent to Bandung in West Java. Unused to war, the army there was ill-equipped: guns without gunsites, boots in only one large size as well as a post without war training.

The Japanese soon invaded Java and interned the soldiers there. Intent on escape, the youthful Loet (the writing up to this point has a wonderfully youthful air about it) headed for a southern port with a pal, but they were stopped on the way and forced to return to their barracks.

They later learned all the ships that left Java at that time were torpedoed, and there were no survivors. The Japanese soon came and immediately confiscated their weapons, beating the prisoners for the slightest of reasons.

His mother showed up, having come the long way from Batavia and then waiting hours to see him. That was the last he saw of her for over three years.

One day, they were told to pack up and marched to a port, where some 2,000 prisoners were put on a battered freighter on which they nearly suffocated for lack of air. They arrived at a large prison in Singapore which already held thousands of others. The prison there was lively: shows, games, theatre, trading, classes and even a small restaurant.

Saluting the Japanese guards there was another matter. If sufficient contrition was not shown for failing to salute acceptably, beatings and worse followed.

This time was followed by a journey north, across the Malay Peninsula into southern Thailand – four days and nights of a smelly, dirty, crowded train ride. At its end, they were told they were to work on a 35o-mile railroad through a jungle linking Thailand to Burma, giving the Japanese a threshold for conquering the British in India, which their navy had failed to do.

Their homes, in a poor, ramshackle village in the middle of nowhere, were filled with mosquitos. There were and had been thousands of Asian workers there, and, as Loet understood, some 80 to 90 percent of them had died.

The prisoners from the train then marched some 86 miles through jungle in the nightly rain, subsisting on handfuls of rice. Not all of them made it.

When the world began, only 50 or so of the very sick – which now included Velmans – were allowed to stay in their beds. The men became matchsticks; many died alone as they lay.

Velmans carried rocks (the railroad went through what became a huge canyon, cutting in two what had been a huge mountain), but he didn’t carry them fast enough: a guard hit him in the back with a hammer.

He was one of the few who survived. The sick bay was thought of as “a hospice for the dying.”

Thanks to the blow of the hammer to his back, Velmans became a medical orderly and no longer carried rocks. He also became one of those too numb to offer sympathy or a kind gesture toward another man.

All the men were weakened not only by punishment by their captors, illness, bugs (including mosquitos) and the unrelenting rain, but from near starvation as well. There is a photo of three of them whose ribs appear to be on the other side of bare skin.

There are more incidents, general and specific, in this “living hell,” but Velmans’ objective tone, his introspection, the thoughtful self-examination he brings to these incidents, gives the reader understanding rather than the shrinking horror he might have conveyed.

The bridge, ironically enough, turned out not to be of much use. It was eventually bombed, the area all but obscured by tropical growth – so much so that when he went back with a fellow Dutch prisoner, it was hard to find.

Velmans later had business dealings with the Japanese; there is a picture of him sitting with Japanese employees of his Tokyo office.

Difficult as revisiting these years must have been, it was well worth it for this reader. The thoughtful person revealed in the level, often wry, tone of the writing was someone I was glad to have met.

Book info:
Long Way Back to the River Kwai: Memories of World War II
By Loet Velmans
Arcade, $12.95 

Posted by Rae Eastman on December 6, 2012. Filed under Arts and Entertainment,Book Reviews,Columns,Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry