Born in Paradise but raised in Hell

Jun 10 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

A Wirral woman’s childhood in a Japanese PoW camp is told in newly-published diaries. David Charters reports

IT WAS an awesome moment in history and it changed the lives of many people – the fat and the hungry, the powerful and the servile, the bullies and the brave, the whippers and the whipped.

In his anger, man had unleashed a force of such malignancy that from then on the past and the future could be destroyed as one.

The ground shook, an empire trembled, blackboards disintegrated in the school rooms, trees were stripped naked, a light brighter than the sun blinded the birds, a thin-faced emperor peered over his glasses in fear. For fear abounded.

But the little girl, who would many years later marry a Wirral businessman, knew nothing of such matters. The madmen who make wars meant nothing to her.

A few years earlier, she had been part of a group of happy and privileged families, who thought their island in the Pacific was Paradise on Earth.

But nothing stays the same.

When that awesome moment came, they were the prisoners of the Japanese in a wretched camp.

Some were dead. Many were dying. The rest were ill, ragged and hungry. For weeks, they had been teaching each other the American national anthem, in the hope that one day the GIs would storm up the beaches to rescue them – before it was too late.

“And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave, o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!”

But that hope would never be realised. Something else, both wonderful and terrible, had happened.

The Americans had dropped the atom bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, they dropped another one on Nagasaki. How could you react to such news?

Soon the Japanese would surrender. Wouldn’t they?

Then came August 15, 1945, the day that would be remembered as VJ Day.

A Dutch woman in the prison camp, one of those ladies from Paradise, had managed to hide her wireless from the Japanese guards. She walked towards the back porch of a grass hut, where another prisoner was feeding her children.

Suddenly, the mother felt a hand squeeze her “skinny” bottom very hard. Perhaps it wasn’t the most dignified way of breaking the news, but sometimes words are not necessary. The mother looked at the woman.

“One look in her eyes told me that I had understood her correctly,” she noted in her diary. “The Japanese had surrendered! And although this was a strange way to learn this incredible news . . . we were no longer prisoners.”

Now the sun is rising over a lush lawn overlooking the Dee estuary, and a fine looking woman, Romee Hindle, is reading from those memoirs written by her mother, then Gon Veltman, whose bottom had been squeezed on that momentous day.

In November, 1939, shortly after the outbreak of war, Gon and her husband, Eddie, left Amsterdam for their honeymoon, which took in the USA, Hawaii and New Zealand. In April, they arrived at their final destination of Java in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), just as the Germans were about to invade their homeland. Eddie had already worked for a trading company on the island.