My mother is very excited. A man in Australia has put together a whole website devoted to, Tjideng, one of the camps in which she was interned. What especially thrills her is the camp roster, which has so many familiar names, each one with a complex memory attached.
Mom always told me that the camp commandant was one of a handful executed for war crimes. Although I never doubted her descriptions about the many atrocities he committed, she’s delighted that her story is now confirmed. The website spells out Capt. Sonei’s many sins in some detail:
For fifteen months, April 1944 to June 1945, the camp was under the command of the infamous Capt. Kenichi Sonei. He came to Tjideng from the POW camp of the 10th Batallion in Batavia better known as the Cycle Camp. He was notorious for his cruelty particularly when the moon was full. Many of his most barbaric acts occurred at such time.
It is not possible to list all his crimes here. See references below. Briefly, punishments included ‘kumpulans’ lasting several hours in the hot tropical sun which even the sick had to attend, reduced food rations, head shavings, beatings. He had dogs beaten to death by the older boys, tipped food over in the central kitchen and buried bread in rage. His reign was one of absolute terror!
He was sentenced to death by the War Crimes Tribunal on 2 September 1946.
In December 1946 Captain Sonei got justice from a Dutch firing squad. His appeal to acting Governor General Hubertus J. van Mook had been rejected. Mrs. van Mook had been one of Sonei’s prisoners.
The only point my mother takes issue with in the above description is the bit about standing in the tropical sun for several hours. That’s an understatement. She vividly remembers a forty-eight hour stint in the sun, with two hours allowed off each night. Many people died where they stood.
Maybe it’s not surprising that I never did fit comfortably with the feel-good liberalism that paints all people as being good if you can just talk with them. While my parents didn’t come out of the Holocaust, They were close enough to evil for me to understand that the best you can do is try to control it (with traditional morality being as good a method as any). The one thing you can’t intelligently do is try to pretend it doesn’t exist.
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Executed for war crimes. Interesting legal standards they had then. Perhaps they benefit from seeing the enemy up close and personal, without the protection umbrella of a superpower. That tends to prevent judges and governors from going easy on enemies of humanity. When their necks are on the line, that is. There’s nothing like human self-survival as a motivation tool.
Compared to now, it’s a little hard to guess. The more orderly the world becomes, the more vulnerable it is to chaos. Back then, there was no one in charge, no top dog, no superpower. Obviously they couldn’t play around with let’s shuffle the prisoners around for a few years and then release him, game.
There is an argument to be made that the artificial stasis that the United States has emplaced in this world actually causes people to pretend that enemies of humanity do not exist, and actually get away with it to pretend again. Nature is supposed to kill off the idiots and retards amongst a species. When humanity started selecting for neo-teny traits of childlike adaptability and intellectual power, nature had less and less power over our destiny. As civilization progressed through the centuries, we have seen the world order coalesce around first a bipolar world, US vs Soviets, to a unipolar world, the United States.
What once got rid of failures in the human race, world wars and nation fights, has been put on hold. Just as humans put nature’s threads on hold. This has an interesting effect.
One of the effects is, did you know that prisoners at Guantanamo were being mistreated and tortured? Compared to Bookworm’s family’s testimony, what is torture compared to torture anyways?
The distinction was once made by circumstance. Now those circumstances no longer exist, except in memory.
It’s hard for people to understand what “mistreating prisoners” mean. They know about it abstractedly. But, most people don’t know a thing about torture or psychological warfare. Nor do they know about cruelty, the thirst for violence and to inflict pain. They look at this skinny redneck guy in South Carolina who locked up a 12 year old girl in a trap door basement-dungeon for a few days as a sex toy, and they think “what could have possessed him to think he could get away with it”.
The origin of cruelty isn’t self-survival, it’s parasitism, to drain until nothing remains, not even themselves.
People do what they do because they wish it to be done, and because nobody with power stopped them or threatened them with punishment or retribution.
How do you convince a person that feeds on pain, to stop hurting people? That’s like asking him to suicide. Not likely. That is why it is best to “get rid” of these “people”, at your earliest convenience.
Can you imagine what would occur if a time warp just happened, and anachronisms from the past survived to mesh with current reality? It would be crazy. It’s like 2 realities layered ontop of each other. Our reality is that people don’t like the US mistreating prisoners at Guantanamo. 3 square halal meals and prayer arrows to Mecca aren’t enough it seems.
Then we have the reality of the “Dark Old Days” where having one square meal was a blessing. Hrm…. it’s like things have changed, yet the more things change, the more things stay the same. The powerless are still at the mercy of enemies of humanity, but instead of it being because the sadists are in power, it is because now people won’t get rid of the sadists for fear of breeding more or being called bad names. Or, you might even lose your moral high ground, and then where would you be?
Could I please have the author’s name and email address? I have been in Tjideng Camp myself and I would like to ask/tell her/him something.
Regards,
Marguerite.