Bonnie Henry: End of WWII halted ordeal of Dutch girl in Japanese camp

Arizona Daily Star ^ | Aug 10, 2005 | Bonnie Henry

[SandRat]

Those who lived it will never forget what they were doing 60 years ago this month, on the day Japan admitted defeat.

For Americans, it was wild celebration in the streets of cities large and small.

For Deli Brink Bloembergen, then 16, it was staring at a plane circling the prison camp where she and other Dutch civilians had been held by the Japanese, in what is now known as Indonesia.

"A small plane with a red, white and blue circle flew low over our heads," says Bloembergen. Two men in the see-through cockpit made the "victory" sign.

The war was over.

While others sang the Dutch national anthem, Bloembergen could only point at the sky, tears coursing down her face.

Weak from hepatitis, starved to half her prewar weight, her legs covered with sores and her scalp covered with head lice, Bloembergen was, nonetheless, a survivor.

"I was in the best condition in the family," says Bloembergen, whose mother was suffering from malaria and dysentery.

Her father, kept at another camp, had been beaten. Her brother, barely 15 at war's end, had also been starved - and forced to carry the dead away from camp on stretchers.

"We had 3,000 in the camp. At the end, they carried out 15 dead a day," says Bloembergen, 76, a four-year resident of Tucson.

No one had a clue, of course, in 1927, the year Bloembergen's parents moved from the Netherlands to Java, in the former Dutch East Indies.

Her father, trained as a biologist, worked for the coffee and rubber industries. "We lived in a nice house, servants, private school," says Bloembergen.

The war came home in early '42.

"Our school was strafed by the Japanese," says Bloembergen, who stuffed cotton in her ears to muffle the sounds and bit down on an eraser to keep her teeth from chattering.

While Dutch military personnel were imprisoned right away, men like her father still worked. "The Japanese had no idea how to run a coffee and rubber plantation," says Bloembergen.

But in the early summer of '43, the family was moved to Camp Halmahera, in Semarang, Java.

"The camp was like a small village, with white houses. But the houses were meant for four to six people. We had 20."

Sanitation was nil. Food was starvation rations: corn, rice and watery cabbage soup.

Within a couple of months, Bloembergen's father was moved to a camp far away, her brother to a camp close by.

Meanwhile, she worked in the camp kitchen, splitting tree trunks for firewood, hauling in 50-pound bags of rice and corn, and keeping the cooking pots going.

Every morning prisoners bowed to their captors, then launched into pre-work gymnastics - all the while singing about how lucky they were to be getting healthful exercise.

The day after the plane flew over, the camp commandant ordered all the prisoners into an open field and told them the war was over. Soon, Bloembergen's brother, and then her father, joined them at camp.

Ironically, the Japanese continued to guard the camp, this time against Indonesians fighting to gain their independence from the Dutch.

In late '45, the family was allowed to leave, moving into a house formerly occupied by Japanese officers. The next year they sailed to Holland on a troop ship. In 1950, Bloembergen moved to America.

Twice, she's returned to Indonesia. "The camp is still a little village. You'd never know it was anything else," she says.

She's also traveled three times to Japan. "I have Japanese friends," says Bloembergen. "I'm sure they suffered, too. I have no hate."

[rawhide]

Amazing!

[nw_arizona_granny]

Part of history, interesting read.

Thank you.....to Sandrat.

[fortress]

Thanks SandRat for posting this article.
My parents & brothers were in similar prison camps in Indonesia.
It is a part of history rarely recounted, except in one British series called Tenko.

Ironically my son's major in College is Japanese and we have Japanese students over on a regular basis.
Life goes on.

[rdcorso]

We never hear much about the brutal treatment that civilian and military prisoners had to endure at the hands of the Japanese.They might not have been as bad as the Nazi death camps but they ended up taking the lives of many people.There is a good movie about a young British boy who was separated from his family and forced to survive in a Japanese prison camp.

[poetknowit]

Big bombs are good.
Let's drop a few more. Soon.

[COEXERJ145]

The Japanese were as bad if not worse than the Nazis but this is usually overlooked by history.

[marsh2]

Rent the Aussie movie a "Town Called Alice" or the movie "Paradise Road."

[Mind-numbed Robot]

They might not have been as bad as the Nazi death camps...

They were worse. They did all the Nazis did and more. Read about The Rape of Nanking and The Bataan Death March. Try Googling Japanese WWII atrocities.