Thief of Glory (40 page)

It’s the only sketch that survived the Jappenkamp, the sketch she had drawn that showed me as a boy, the two of us holding hands, her dress swirling as if the wind were flirting with her, the smile on her face showing the joy of a purity of love.

I am glad it survived to remind me of a happier time in her life, because something remains to be told. As I admitted in the hotel room, Jasmijn had not died peacefully in her sleep and Aniek had not succumbed to infection. As promised, I did write the journals for her, over the course of a year, upon my return from Washington. They have been stacked in chronological order, and these pages will be my last for her.

In these final pages, I confess it was a deception earlier in the journals to suggest that Elsbeth lost her will to live because of the accumulation of tragedies: Nikki’s horrible death to rabies, followed by the strain of Elsbeth’s terror
of the Borneo plan, the news that our father and half brothers were dead, and Aniek succumbing to her infection that night as we slept.

Pietje knew better. That is not why Elsbeth died.

It was a lie in the Washington hotel room to tell Rachel and Laura that Pietje’s knowledge of Elsbeth was of a mother who believed it would be a mercy to suffocate her children. It was the opposite. Pietje did
not
know that she had killed them, and when I tried to tell him, he wouldn’t believe it.

Pietje never saw what I saw in the dark hours before he woke that morning to find Aniek dead in Elsbeth’s arms. I had lain awake in the dark for hours, trying to comprehend what I had witnessed—Elsbeth’s choice to end Aniek’s suffering.

A slight mewing sound had woken me. Half-asleep, in dim light from the moon through the small window high in the wall, I had seen Elsbeth straddling Aniek. I had seen Aniek reach up with both arms, as if imploring. I had seen Elsbeth lean down and Aniek’s arms wrap around her mother’s neck.

I had heard my mother half sob as the strange embrace continued, until Aniek dropped her arms from my mother. I had seen my mother stand and leave our small room. I had heard my mother vomit as she fled down the hallway.

I had crawled over to Aniek, to ask if she knew why our mother had fled. I had pulled the pillow off her face, still not realizing what had happened. Aniek hadn’t answered, no matter how hard I tried to shake her awake.

I’d crawled back to my sleeping pallet and pretended not to notice when my mother returned. She had lifted Aniek’s lifeless body and taken it into the corner of the room to huddle against a wall, cradling the body and continuing to weep.

In the dark, that’s when I’d begun to understand. How Pietje had been spared the pain of giving up Coacoa with all the other dogs taken from the
camp. How the scratches had appeared on my mother’s leg. How Jasmijn had died in her sleep and why the feather had been found in her mouth.

I still agonize over the choices I faced. What was I to do? Tell Sophie or Dr. Eikenboom that Pietje and I could not live with our mother because she might kill us? That would mean telling them what only Dr. Kloet suspected. That would mean betraying my mother by declaring to the world that she was far, far worse than a whore of Babylon.

I couldn’t flee with Pietje. There was no place to go.

I couldn’t ask to live with another family.

I couldn’t tell my mother what I’d witnessed her do.

I could only do what I’d vowed to do since the soldiers had taken away my father and my older brothers. Carry on and protect my family.

The next night, I’d tied a string from Pietje’s wrist to mine because I was afraid I would not be able to stay awake to protect him. The string had woken me. There she was again, in that same embrace with my brother, his arms up around her shoulders as she straddled him and he fought to breathe against the pillow against his face.

In the warm tropical darkness on that night in the camp, I could not see the future. I could not anticipate that no matter how I tried to explain, Pietje’s memory of that night would drive him away from me and to the amnesia that came with opium. I could not anticipate how my own insulation against the memory would turn my heart into a hard and tiny kernel, what it would do when I became a father myself, how guarded it would make me in showing love to my own daughter. I could not know the night of my mother’s death at the internment camp would send me into the dark for decades after, isolated on the other side of the fence from the campfires of humanity.

Yet had I known, it wouldn’t have mattered. What choice did I have? Pietje needed my protection.

I am grateful, beyond anything that can be expressed by words, that the undiminished love between a boy and a girl, which began seventy years earlier at a marble game beneath the banyan tree, eventually became an open gate to bring me back through the fence, to those campfires.

For in my twilight years, Laura decided to stay with me.

I am also appreciative that circumstances thwarted our marriage for sixty years, for her time in the Jappenkamp had done something to her body, and she was never able to bear children. If I hadn’t fled to America and married another, I would never have received the greatest gift in my life, my daughter, Rachel.

It is with the same breathtaking gratitude that I realize I have been rescued from my past and present and future by my daughter, who did so by granting me our reconciliation.

Thus, in solitude one night all these decades later, while still cognizant of the words I spoke, I found the strength and courage to fold my hands together and bow my head and finally ask His mercy.

I etch these last words not from a need after my death to share and dissipate the shame of what I did on the night my mother died at the internment camp, but from a desire to comfort Laura and Rachel, who led me, for the first time since that horrible night, to find the courage in that solitude and pour out my soul in prayer and finally weep with all the anguish I had denied myself for far too long.

In telling what remains to be told, I want my daughter and my one true love to know that they helped me find a way to defeat what I thought could never be defeated: the boyhood memory of the resolute action of protecting Pietje from our mother by pushing a pillow down on my mother’s face and holding it there while she clawed at my arms and thumped her feet on the floor until her body stopped quivering, with me unaware that Pietje had returned to
the room and was transfixed as he watched every cold moment, fleeing in silence, and even through opiates unable to escape that memory until his own death years later.

For as I near my end, I understand.

Against any horror that we may face in this world, and in the face of knowledge that for each of us time is a thief of glory, what matters most and what gives meaning to our lives and deaths is love and hope, if we are willing to share and accept.

When time comes to take me, I will go in peace.

A
UTHOR
’
S
N
OTE

Growing up, what I mainly knew about my grandfather, Simon, a headmaster in the Dutch East Indies before the capitulation to the Japanese, was that as the first born, I would have been named after him. But my mother, new to Canada and the English language, had found out that “Simple Simon” was a nursery rhyme, and she didn’t want me teased for that name.

Because Willem, my father, spoke so little about his boyhood time in a Jappenkamp, I only knew that Simon had died during the war. Simon Brouwer had joined the army and was taken prisoner of war when Japanese forces were victorious. His fate can only be gleaned from a single letter, written to my grandmother, Grietje, from someone who did survive.

The letter is haunting to me in its sparseness of detail: “In November of 1942 we were transported to Soerabaia. There we had a bad time … later that camp was named Camp Makassar. Not a very good camp.”

(The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia gives this description of Makassar: “The camp commander, Yoshida, was a sadist who engaged in frequent beatings and other abuse of the prisoners. Prisoners were forced to climb trees full of fire ants and were beaten unconscious for the least infraction.”)

From Makassar, my grandfather was sent to Singapore, where he first contracted dysentery. And from Singapore, as told by the letter, “In the middle of April we were sent to Siam. In Ban Pons we started a march through Siam. But after two days of marching, your husband had to stay behind in Non Pladuk.”

No details, either, of the march.

But even a cursory reading of any material about the Burma Railway paints a horrible picture, for my grandfather had become one of tens of
thousands of prisoners of war forced into slave labor on what became known as the Death Railway. The building of it took the lives of 356 Americans; 6,318 British; 2,815 Australians; and 2,490 Dutch. Simon Brouwer was among those Dutch soldiers who perished.

Simon carved his own chess pieces and was a chess champion, as the letter informed my grandmother, and he was a man of strong faith and excellent spirits, leading fellow inmates to the same faith. This, in essence, is all that I know about his character.

My father was fortunate. Unlike so many children, he survived the war with his mother and all of his sisters and brothers. They returned to Holland, where my grandmother tried to rebuild a family life without her husband. My father dated my mother while he was in the army and she was a nurse, and he would have to bicycle for miles for the chance to spend time with her.

Much of what I learned about what my father endured in the Jappenkamps came from accounts of children who were older when they were sent to the camps, and I’ve listed those books at
www.thiefofglory.com
, along with the few photos that exist in our family archives, the letter about my grandfather, and my grandmother’s description of the best birthday present she received, during her years in camp.

I was brought to tears by a video that you will find at the Thief of Glory website via a YouTube link to the footage of the most infamous of these camps—Tjideng Internment Camp. While the footage shows the considerably better conditions of post liberation, it was the closest I could come to understanding those three years of my father’s boyhood.

I was also touched deeply when my research about cleft palates led me to the “before” and “after” photos of children whose lives are transformed by Operation Smile, where we can help bring new smiles and joy and hope to children like Adi, a character who really came to life for me during the writing of the story. (
www.operationsmile.org/sigmundbrouwer
)

My grandmother, Grietje, with her children, posing for a photo in Holland in 1946 after arriving by ship. My father, Willem, is on the far right.

Tenko (roll call). Used with permission of KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies.

My grandparents, Simon and Grietje, having a quiet family moment in the house in Magalang.