Tokyo POW Camp #8-B

After our surrender, I was taken prisoner by the Japanese along with the entire army. The last time I saw my wife during the war years, was on our daughter's birthday, 18 June 1942. My wife gave me some money through the barbed wire of a new, heavily guarded camp in Garoet and she was promptly taken by the Japanese guards to their watch house, while I looked on in powerless fury. Luckily she was soon released unharmed and I was able to watch her as she walked away from the camp – and me. Only then did I let go of the barbed wire which my hands had been clutching until they bled. Only after the war did I hear from my wife that she and our daughter had spent most of the occupation in the notorious Ambarawa women's camp in Central Java.

Shortly after June 1942, I was transferred to a prisoner of war camp in Tjimahi. The food there was so bad that I soon got beriberi and pellagra through vitamin deficiency. The retinas in both my eyes were also severely damaged. From Tjimahi I was put on a transport to Japan via Batavia. From 26 to 30 September 1943, I and 3000 other prisoners of war sailed on a small cargo ship, the "Makasar Maru", to Singapore. The four days on board were terrible. Three thousand of us sat in the cargo hold below sea level. We were so closely packed that you could not lie down. There was only one water tap on deck and all three thousand of us lined up to fill our canteens. The hold on the boat was connected to the deck by a narrow, steep, iron ladder and you had to crawl along and over one another to get up top and below. It was so boiling hot in that hold below, that in comparison, the deck in the burning tropical sun was deliciously cool. I sweated so profusely that I did not urinate during the entire four days. My first pee, quite some time after our arrival in Singapore, was the colour of strong tea after a week in the pot. The voyage from Singapore to Japan began on 23 October 1943 on board the cargo ship "Atu Maru". Again we were in the cargo hold below sea level. This voyage was less arduous because there were "only" 1000 prisoners of war. We did run the risk though of being torpedoed by our allies, since they targeted all Japanese ships, not knowing that sometimes allied prisoners of war were on board.

On 15 November 1943, our ship arrived in Japan and we stood shivering from cold on the bleak quay of the Japanese harbour, Shimonoseki. The following day we travelled north by train. Our group of 1000 men was split into groups with different destinations. My group consisted of 250 K.N.I.L. prisoners of war. Our train journey ended on 17 November 1943 and we climbed a steep mountain to our mining camp, Ashio. The place was high in the mountains and terribly cold. It remained freezing there – from my arrival in mid-November 1943 to April 1944. Sometimes it was 36 degrees below zero. The barracks were made of thin planks and the heating with wood fires was useless. The food was monotonous and sparse. Partly because of the back-breaking work, my weight dropped to 45 kilos. We had to work hard every day from early morning until evening. Many of our comrades died in this camp, mainly from pneumonia and sheer exhaustion. On 11 August 1944, I and 150 other Dutch K.N.I.L. members left the Ashio camp and travelled on foot, by train, and again on foot to another copper mining camp, called "Motoyama". From that second camp in Japan, I did underground mining work, 150 to 160 metres deep. The ventilation throughout the mine was so bad and it was so hot that you had to work completely naked, with only a Japanese cardboard helmet on and a pair of thin rubber shoes. The work that I did there was always hard with a lot of nightshifts. Amongst other things, it involved sealing old mine tunnels. The filling material consisted of mud and stones. The filling was done in two stages. Applying the lowest layer was just bearable, but applying the highest layer was terrible. The remaining space was so low that you scraped your back when, crawling like a snake, you had to push a flat truck, loaded with wet rubble, to the end of the tunnel where you had to shove the rubble in all the nooks and crannies. Then you had to crawl back with the empty truck. For years after the war, I had claustrophobic nightmares about it.

Once, in a rage, I nearly killed a Korean mine worker. (At the time, Korea had been annexed by Japan and the Koreans were a kind of second-class Japanese). This Korean mine worker was a brute who cursed and hit me because he was dissatisfied with my work performance. Once when we were busy depositing pieces of ore in a waste chute, he went too far and my fury gave me Herculean strength. I dragged him to the waste chute as he squealed in fear. I shoved him into the chute with my feet. Luckily he managed to grab the rim of the chute. I hit his fingers with my fists to make him let go so he would fall into the pit. Then I awoke from a seeming daze and realized that I was murdering someone and that the Japanese guards would kill me for it. So I grabbed his wrists and pulled him out of the hole. The Korean threw himself face down onto the ground and lay there for some time. Then he came round and began to speak. From his gestures and Japanese, which I comprehended a bit, I understood that he had taken me for a malingerer who pretended to be weak, but who in reality was so strong, that he (me in other words) could overpower a sturdy Korean. Then he grabbed an iron bar, which was used to loosen debris stuck in the chute, and hit me with it. It was so low and narrow in the tunnel though, that he was unable to use much force. I allowed him three blows, grabbed the bar off him and said that that was enough and that we had to get back to work. I worked like a dog to get him in a good mood, because I was afraid that he would report me to the Japanese military guards. But it turned out that he did not want to let anyone know that he had been bested by a pathetic prisoner of war. After that, I no longer got any trouble from him.

A couple of times I was in danger of losing my life. One day, fairly late in the afternoon, I was walking with three comrades through an old mine tunnel. Suddenly the entire width of the tunnel collapsed in front of us. We ran back, but at the same moment a wall of grit and pieces of rock fell down and we were trapped inside a small space. Luckily for us, there was a waste chute connected to that part of the tunnel. We pulled the cover open and we were in luck for the second time: there was only a cubic metre of mud and rubble in the waste chute. We quickly removed this and crawled up the empty wooden chute. With a superhuman effort, we managed to crawl to a tunnel higher up. There then followed a labourious hike. Our mine lamps had gone out and the matches to relight them had got wet. In the pitch dark we had to grope our way along the walls towards shaft openings where successive wooden ladders led us to a higher tunnel. After labouring for hours we finally reached the exit. In normal times we would have been greeted as heroes, but we were met with slaps from the Japanese guards because we were late. Our comrades also blamed us because they had had to spend all that time in the cold standing in line waiting for us.

On 20 July 1945 we were startled by heavy bombardment by American warships. As a result, our mine's industrial centre was so heavily damaged that there was not much point working. After the surrender, it took a long time for the Americans to discover our isolated camp. On 8 September 1945, I arrived in Yokohama. I then flew on via Okinawa to Manila where I arrived on 14 September 1945.

I lived at the American army camp in Manila until 16 October 1945. I was in a state of euphoria until that day, then I suddenly woke up. I was overcome by an enormous fear about the fate of my loved ones. Shortly afterwards we were told that lists with the names of the dead and survivors were posted in a hangar. I walked to that hangar three times before daring to go in. My wife and daughter Ellen were alive. Of the prisoners of war, my brother Wim had been forced to work on the Burma railway and was still alive. But my brother-in-law, Jo Scholten, my sister Malie's husband, had died in June 1943. Later I received word that my mother, my sister Malie and her three children had survived the Tjideng camp, but that my father had died just before the end of the war in a camp in Semarang. It was not until 15 February 1946 that I saw my wife and daughter again.

Franz Adolf Lörzing