Ghostwritten (24 page)
Authors: Isabel Wolff
My mother stared at me; the colour had drained from her face. I had shocked her, and shocked myself.
After that we didn’t talk about Peter any more. But as the days went by, I searched my conscience and wondered whether what she’d said might have been true.
I
had
been terrified of losing my mother. It was what all we children in the camps dreaded most. Had that been part of my thinking, subconsciously, when I chose Peter? I didn’t know. I just wished, with all my heart, that I’d never had to
make
such a choice.
‘I’ve never told anyone what really happened,’ Klara told me. ‘Not even Harold. My family know only that Peter died of a snake bite. They’ve never known what led up to it, or my role in it.’
‘You were put in an impossible, agonising situation, Klara – having to choose between your mother and your brother.’
‘Yes. This was how they tortured me – it was mental torture, and the pain is still with me to this day. In her grief and anger, my mother blamed me. And that is what you and I have in common, Jenni.’
‘It’s not the same! You did what you believed was for the best.
I
did what I knew to be wrong.’
‘You hadn’t meant any harm, Jenni. You were just a confused, angry little girl. But it happened a long time ago and it does seem sad that there’s still such a gulf between you and your mother.’
‘There always will be,’ I said stubbornly.
‘Not necessarily. You could change that, if you wanted to.’
I shrugged. ‘Did things change for you and your mother?’
‘Not for a very long time. She could hardly bear to speak to me, or be with me. She said that I’d promised to help her keep Peter with us, and had then had him transported, behind her back. She told me that it was the most dreadful betrayal – that it was “unforgiveable”.’
Unforgiveable …
‘Klara, is that why you said sorry to Peter, the night before he left?’
‘Yes – in case I never saw him again. But I believed that the chance of him returning was far higher than the chance of my mother surviving the punishment. But she didn’t see it that way. Which made it impossible for her to accept what I had done.’
‘It must have been hard, just being with her after that.’
‘It was very hard. Sometimes I’d catch her looking at me with pain and bewilderment and I’d feel accused all over again.’
‘I know
exactly
how that must have felt, Klara. But these must have been such dark days for you, because you’d already lost Flora, which was bad enough, and then Peter. You must have felt that you’d lost your mother too.’
‘In a way I had, which is why I felt for you, Jenni, for what you’d been through.’
‘But how did you cope, day to day?’
‘By distancing myself from her. I helped Corrie with the twins, and I played with Lena and Greta. I talked to Ina and Kirsten, and spent time with Susan and Irene.’
‘Did Irene help you?’
‘She tried. She spoke to my mother and told her that
I couldn’t have known what lay ahead. She said that she herself would have made the same choice. Then she warned my mother that she had lost one child, but that if she wasn’t careful, she’d lose both her children.’
I felt tears sting my eyes. ‘That’s what happened to
my
mother.’
Klara nodded sympathetically. ‘But, Jenni, you could break down the wall that’s between you.’
‘No. It’s too late.’
‘As long as you’re both alive, it
isn’t
too late. And surely your mother must wish for that too.’
‘She probably does, but we don’t know
how
to be with each other, so we keep each other at a distance. In any case, it’s still there, the knowledge that I was at fault.’
‘If you could only forgive yourself, Jenni. After all these years, isn’t it time?’
I shook my head. ‘It’s something that I’ll carry with me all through my life.’ I swallowed. ‘But did your relationship with your mother ever recover?’
‘In some respects, over time, though it was never the same. I knew that if she had my father back, this would help her. But we still didn’t know where he was, or if he was even alive. Then, in mid-October, my mother received a card from the Red Cross. It informed her that in December 1943 Hans Roland Bennink, born Rotterdam, 1912, had arrived in Japan.’
‘You must have been … stunned, to think that that was where he’d been.’
‘We were astounded. We were so relieved that he’d at least survived the journey there, because by then we knew that so many men hadn’t. Now we could only
pray that two years later, he was still alive. And a few days later, I went to the camp office, as I did each morning, to check whether there was any mail for us – and I was given this.’
Klara reached again into the wooden box. Out of it she brought a thick airmail letter, stamped
Manila.
I looked at the neat, looping hand. ‘This was what you were waiting for.’
‘Yes. With a cry of joy I ran with it to my mother and she opened it with trembling hands.’
‘May I look at it?’
‘Of course.’
The sky-blue paper was brittle with age. At the top of the first page Klara’s father had drawn a four-leaved clover. There were six pages, closely written on both sides. It was in Dutch.
‘Let me translate it for you,’ Klara said, so I handed the letter back to her and she began to read.
My darling Anneke,
I have been in Manila since the 5th September but it’s only now, six weeks later, that I’m strong enough to be able to hold a pen and write to you. How are you, my darling – and our sweet children? Every minute of the day I pray that I will soon get a letter from you telling me that you are all in good health.
I am in a tented camp here; the food is good and there is lots of it, and I gain a little more strength every day. We do exercises to rebuild our muscles and to pass the time while we wait to be airlifted out. The most frail POWs go first, and so I, being
‘healthy’ must wait, which is frustrating, as I long to be reunited with you and with our darling Klara and Peter. I’ve been out of my mind with worry about the turmoil on Java and every minute I pray that you are all safe and well. It’s impossible to believe that it is nearly four years since I saw the three of you, spoke to you, held you in my arms, all of which I long to do again soon! But let me now tell you what happened to me – the bizarre journey that I went on – after I left Tempat Sungai.
The truck took us to Bandung, to Tjimahi, where we stayed for five weeks. We then went to another camp called ADEK where we stayed for two months; then in mid-May we were told, to our amazement, that we would be going to Japan. At the end of August we went to Batavia, where we were held in a large school. In early September we sailed for Singapore on the
Makassar Maru.
There were two thousand men in the hold of that boat – Ralph Dekker was one of them, and we were glad to have each other’s company. On Singapore we had to build an airstrip, in the blistering heat. It was hard doing such physical work on such small rations and some of our group died.
In November we boarded the
Maru Shichi
that was to take us to Japan. It was part of an eight-ship convoy and, once again, we were packed in like sardines. There was no way for us to be able to wash and the toilets were a pair of crates that hung over the side; you had to hold on for dear life or get swept away!
After three weeks we reached Formosa, where we
were allowed to wash ourselves on deck with buckets of seawater. But as we set sail again, the convoy was attacked by Chinese planes. Our boat escaped damage but two of the other ships were sunk and we took on survivors. Then, just before we reached Japan, we hit a typhoon. It was terrible sliding around in the hold as the ship pitched and tossed in mountainous seas. We survived that ordeal only to find that we were now freezing because in Japan it was winter and most of us were just in a vest and thin trousers. We sailed along the coast, then finally, on 3rd December, we docked at Modji on the island of Kyushu in southern Japan. It was then that a sergeant told us that we were going to work in a mine. We were astounded; we had no experience of mining. At least it would be warm, one of the prisoners pointed out grimly as we stood there, freezing. Some poor lads were too weak even to stand. They just lay down in the snow.
The Japs made us walk to the train station, dragging our bags. We tried to help the sick as much as we could, by letting them hang on our shoulders, and so we marched to the railway station in this pitiful state. If you stopped even for a moment a Jap would run up to you and hit you with the butt of his rifle. Some boys were in such a bad way that they lay down and screamed that they wanted to die, but we lifted them up and told them to think of their families. And so we somehow dragged ourselves to the station and were put on a train.
For once we were glad to be packed together like cattle, because that at least created heat. We
travelled until we reached a small mining town called Miata. From the station we had to walk for half an hour before we reached a camp. Our beds were just thin mats on the floor. There was no heating and we were all
so
cold, despite our blankets, that we slept in our clothes. That first day many men died, and every day after that a few more died from exhaustion, dysentery and pneumonia. By now there were 400 men left out of our original 500.
We had been told that we would be working in a mine near to the camp. We each had our photo taken, holding a number, and were also fingerprinted, like criminals. We were treated like criminals and were severely punished for breaking any of the many rules. A single misdeed by anyone and the whole camp suffered terribly, including ‘hunger days’ when men simply died. But I was determined to live so that I could see you and our darling children again.
I keep wondering how much Peter and Klara have grown. Has Peter still got the Spitfire that I made him? If not, tell him I’ll make him another one when we are back at our home, which I pray has survived this terrible war.
In December we started work in the Nioroski mine, which was midway between Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We had to walk there every day, in the snow. They gave us an overall to wear with a miner’s hat that had a little lamp on it. Then you stepped into a mine car and moved down a long deep shaft that was pitch black. Once we’d gone about four hundred metres underground we had to
walk in single file for two kilometres. I kept thinking of a book I read when I was a boy
, Journey to the Centre of the Earth,
because it was just like that, with some tunnels going up, and some going deeper down. Finally we came to a tunnel that was a dead end, and this was where we were to work, pickaxing the coal.
The tunnels didn’t have enough props and several times the ceilings collapsed. One time there was a very bad cave-in and two guards and five prisoners were killed, one of them, I’m very sorry to say, Ralph Dekker, and this will be very hard for Marleen and Herman. But this hell-hole is where I toiled for seven months. The rations were so poor that we were getting thinner and thinner. They were just going to work us until our bodies gave out. Then one day we were told to work in another mine, the Ibigizachi, which was nearer to our quarters. I remember on 6th August we felt huge vibrations in the mine, and a lot of shaking and disturbance. We assumed that it had been an earthquake. It wasn’t. It was the first atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima.
The end came a few days afterwards when we were called to
tenko
and a Japanese officer told us that Nippon had surrendered. He said that we were free but had to stay in the camp until the US military took over. During the weeks afterwards we were fed from the air, as American planes came over and dropped crates of food. Then one day we were taken by truck to Nagasaki. My darling, the sight of that place will haunt me for the rest of my
life. It was just a flat, smoking landscape of vast emptiness, with only a few steel columns still standing. We could not imagine the kind of bombs that had been able to do this, and even when we were told that these had been ‘atomic’ bombs, we had no idea what that meant.
And then it was the beginning of the end. Or, as I hope, the beginning of a new beginning. At the harbour we were taken through various buildings that had been erected by the American army. We had to get rid of our clothes and shoes, which were to be burned, and were given military clothing. We were then taken aboard the US warship, the
Renville,
where we got our first civilised meal. It was only ordinary bread but to us it was like delicious cake!
We were flown here to Manila where we are being given the treatment necessary to restore us to health. Many of us were half blind because of malnutrition. But we have yeast and eggs every day, and my sight is now much improved, enough to be able to write to you at last.
Forgive me, darling, this letter has become a confessional, the words spilling out of me; but I’m so worried because I’ve no idea what has happened to you and the children while I’ve been away. I just hope and pray that you were able to stay at home, in safety. So please write to me, reassuring me that you are all fine, just as soon as you can. Two weeks ago the Red Cross gave us pre-printed cards with which we could request information about our families. I lodged a card for you, Peter and Klara,
and these will be sent to Batavia where any information that they have will be printed on it and it will then be returned to me. So I hope to get good news of you all before long.
Annie, give both the children a big hug from their daddy and tell them that I love them so much. And you, my dearest wife; I want to hold you in my arms and never let you go. And if I have somehow survived it was only because I wanted to stay alive in order to make you and our darling children happy.
With tender embraces, your loving husband,
Hans