My Grandfather, Part Two

It seems like a long time ago that we entered Indonesian waters, marked in part by a posting on my grandfather's choice of the sea as his calling, his posting to Indonesia,and his subsequent internment in a Japanese concentration camp. We expect to leave Indonesia in the beginning of September, and, as promised, here's the second part of two on my grandfather's life, this time beginning with his internment and covering the war years and his post-war adventures. As I mentioned, I am the proverbial son of a son of a sailor, and feel deeply influenced by and indebted to both my grandfather and my father for giving me the gift of a passion for the sea.


When we left the story, on June 25, 1942, my grandfather had just been spirited away by the Japanese to an internment camp in Batavia/Java, with two of his three children frantically bicycling behind the truck carrying him away, trying to keep up so they could report back to their mother where their father had been taken.

In his memoirs, gracefully translated by his son and my uncle Wim, he relates the initial conditions upon being taken prisoner:

"Once we arrived in the ADEK camp, I noticed that there were already hundreds and hundreds of men. We had to find a place ourselves and everybody was allocated about a 4 foot by 4 footspace (!). I lived in a room of 12 by 11 feet with seven people for about five months."

The camps were crowded -- after the initial period, he was housed in a shed with 120 others, sleeping on mats, with limited food and non-existent sanitation. The Japanese would shut the water off during the day, and the toilets could not be flushed. Fruit and vegetables were out of the question. Lice became a regular plague, and the Japanese confiscated all the shaving gear, a real hardship in the humid, tropical environment. Without an adequate diet, eyesight among the older prisoners began to deteriorate, and my grandfather, who spoke several languages, began to read to other prisoners, preferring French. Everyone was given a POW number --1488, Camp CQ-1, for my grandfather.

Johan and Wilhemina Glaudemans, after the war

In the first year at the camp, he tells a story of smuggling messages out of the camp, using a local native, and of learning that his wife and children were safe, in a so-called protection camp for women and children, a camp that was subsequently closed; the children were taken away from their mothers, and the women being incarcerated in a regular prison camp. In a sidenote, Wim points out that the Japanese considered boys of 11 years and older as men, so they were separated; the respective camps of women and "men" shared a hospital, situated midway between them, and they were able to pass messages occasionally ... at least when the carrying individual survived the hospitalization, which was rare.

From time to time, he would be moved to another camp, and in January 1944, he found himself in the inland camp of Tjikoeda Pateuh, still separated from his wife and children. In that camp, he joined nearly 10,000 other prisoners, with one water tap for every 450 men. Here, he goes into some detail: "In the morning we got a plate of porridge made of some tasteless kind of starch, with no nutritional value. For lunch we got 6 ounces of boiled rice with watery soup, and in the evening a small piece of bread. There was never any meat, vegetables, butter, fruit, or salt, which you need in tropical countries." Things continued to go from bad to worse, as the Japanese began an apparently-deliberate strategy of slow starvation. As my uncle Wim points out, when the war ended, there were some 20,000 tons of rice in local warehouses. The camp was full of disease and death; an average of 7 men died each day, dysentery and edema was everywhere, teeth were loosening and falling out, and by the end of the war my grandfather weighed just 110 pounds.

At the camp, he was asked to serve as a barracks leader, a request Johan did not especially appreciate but accepted nonetheless. In his words "it was not a nice job. It was mainly clearing up and cleaning up the places and belongings of the the people who had to be sent to the contagious disease barracks or those who died."

The war ended with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an event the local Japanese refused to acknowledge until the 19th ofAugust, 1945. As befits a Dutch mariner, who, as the saying might go, maybe wrong but is never in doubt, my grandfather was characteristically unambiguous in his support for President Truman's decision: "The Americans did the right thing, and I am still grateful. By dropping them they surely saved a lot of lives of prisoners in the Netherlands East Indies, Burma, Thailand, and the Philippines, not to forget the American, British and Australian soldiers still fighting in the Far East. We should never forget that."

Years later, I would marry a woman, Jennifer, whose father served in the US Marine Corps, deployed throughout the South Pacific during the war. Quite apart from the miracle of surviving numerous beach landings and firefights, Glenn Martin was poised as part of the planned Japanese invasion force when the bombs dropped. It's sobering to reflect on the fact that both Jennifer and I are alive ... as are our children -- in no small part a result of the timely end of the war in the Pacific.

Once the war ended, chaos prevailed for a period of months, as camps fell into uncertain leadership, governments and bureaucracies struggled with the realities of tens of thousands of displaced families, and the Netherlands sought to re-establish control over its faraway colony, a land that would become Indonesia. The Japanese had spent the war years fueling the independence movement that had already emerged, pre-war, in Indonesia, and the movement quickly blossomed, placing the Dutch on the defensive, leading to continued hostilities ... this time between the Dutch and the local Indonesians.

On August 27, 1945, Johan received his first bit of news from his family: his wife and children were alive. On September 5, his eldest son, Piet, appeared before him. In his understated way, Johan writes simply that "it was quite a reunion." The next day, the other two boys appeared, having walked and lorried their way to their father'scamp. There, Johan learned of Wim surviving attacks of appendicitis and peritonitis in the camp, and, soon, learned that his wife had been severely ill with dysentery and could no longer walk because of the resulting edema, and remained hospitalized.

In September 1945, Johan was finally able to write to his father in Holland about his experiences, a letter that is included in his memoirs. At the time, he did not know that his father had died on February 18, 1945, just before the liberation of the Netherlands from the German invaders. In his letter, written just a month after the end of the war, his feelings about his captors are revealed when he exclaims that "everyone should know what these bastards have done ... people died like rats." In fact, the author James Clavell's first novel was titled King Rat, a barely-fictionalized account of a similar WWII Japanese POW camp in Singapore.

Piet, Neil, Wim, Johan, and Wilhemina Glaudemans, post-war

As a result of the independence movement's growing hostility to the recently released Dutch prisoners, life outside of the camps became as or more dangerous than life inside the camps; abductions and murders of Europeans were commonplace. Train travel was suspended as a result of insurgent attacks, so it became impossible for Johan to reach his wife, despite her steadily worsening condition. Finally, he left the three boys with a military officer, who promised to try and get the boys to their mother's hospital, and he hopped on a Japanese (!) plane to Batavia, where he was driven by military truck under armed escort to a local camp, from where he took a bicycle to his wife's hospital. He arrived on October 4, 1945, having been separated for three years and three months. She had lost a lot of weight, suffering extreme edema, but, in his words, "her spirit was unbroken."

Continued political unrest and violence led to the now-Dutch-managed camps being attacked regularly by Indonesians ... as if the Japanese-driven privations weren't enough, the Dutch now faced daily attacks from the local population. Train travel was prohibited for Europeans, and even the local buses were dangerous. Eventually, the three boys arrived at their mother's side; on October 20, 1945, in what my grandfather describes as the happiest day of his life, "the boys came in and the five of us were together again."

SMN Flagship "Oranje," fitted as a hospital ship during WWII

After the reunion, even as political events began to accelerate in Indonesia, the Dutch shipping companies, and my grandfather, resumed their business of shipping supplies to and from the island archipelago. Crew for these ships were in short supply, and my Dad's two older brothers were old enough to join on as crew for the return to Holland on the flagship of my grandfather's shipping company, the"Oranje." The ship returned to Batavia in February 1946 to find Johan's wife in better health, and my father ready to return to Holland in his own right. They arrived in Holland on March 19, 1946, and soon thereafter arrived in the family village of Kerkdriel.

A few months later, my grandfather left Indonesia on April 26, 1946, as second mate on the same ship "Oranje." After 19 years on land, he was back on a ship. After a few hours at the helm, "I had the feeling that my career as a ship's mate had never been interrupted. We sailed straight for Suez, and through the canal to Rotterdam. We arrived at Rotterdam on May 16, 1946, and I was told that I had to stay on board to move the ship the next day. I told the captain to find someone else and left to join the bus to return to my family."

Johan was to return to the East Indies sooner than he could have imagined; in November 1946, he was ordered back to his old port in Batavia, leaving his wife and children behind. There, he was charged with the responsibility of getting the ports operating again, after years of neglect and bombing. He traveled throughout Indonesia seeing to the various ports' reconstruction efforts, navigating the restless and often warring political factions in these nascent days of Indonesia's declared but as yet-unrecognized independence. In a letter sent home in June 1947, he wrote that: "it seems we are a country still at war." Attacks on Dutch businessmen were common, but Johan traveled extensively by plane, ship, and train to address port reconstruction requirements. On January 26, 1949, just before the Dutch and Indonesian governments completed negotiations for the terms of Indonesia's independence, Johan embarked on the now-familiar "Oranje" one last time for his final trip home.

After 44 years of service to the shipping company SMN, my grandfather retired on June 30, 1960, and spent his retirement years consulting globally on port construction and operations, visiting his children and grandchildren. The company's motto, Semper Mare Navigandum (Always sail the seas), conveniently fits the company initials.

After the war, Johan never accepted a ride in a Japanese or German car, preferring instead to walk. His wife, Wilhemina Johanna Glaudemans, but referred to as Mother throughout his memoir, died on January 6,1975, after a steady decline owing to Alzheimer's disease.

Johan Piet Maria Glaudemans died on June 7, 1991 in Bilthoven, Netherlands. His burial card, written by his three children, reads: We are saddened but grateful for everything he did for us. He possessed an unassailable integrity and sense of duty. ... He always championed the cause of those entrusted to his care, even under the most trying of circumstances, such as occurred in the Japanese concentration camps duringWorld War II. "

I never really got to know my grandfather in person; my one visit as an adult came as he struggled with the mental and physical infirmities of old age, but his memoir has given me a strong sense of attachment to a man who set goals, saw them through, and embodied a sense of stoicism in the face of the unexpected.  In this, my grandfather's life, as reflected in his memoir, recalls a quote by the Stoic philosopher Seneca, perhaps a tidy summation of a life well lived and a life well worth reflecting upon:

"For what prevents us from saying that the happy life is to have a mind that is free, lofty, fearless and steadfast - a mind that is placed beyond the reach of fear, beyond the reach of desire, that counts virtue the only good, baseness the only evil, and all else but a worthless mass of things, which come
and go without increasing or diminishing the highest good, and neither subtract any part from the happy life nor add any part to it?

A man thus grounded must, whether he wills or not, necessarily be attended by constant cheerfulness and a joy that is deep and issues from deep within, since he finds delight in his own resources, and desires no joys greater than his inner joys. "