Although the children survived, the attack came just three months after their mother’s death in the third Japanese-run internment camp in Java where they spent World War II and three years after separation from a father who spent it in a prisoner of war camp in Japan.
How Wimmie struggled and ultimately honored his mother’s dying plea that he not hate the Japanese for the rest of his days — and how his father’s secret wartime diary helped the boy do so — is the story of “A Gate in the Wall: A Pacific War POW’s Secret Diary and a Family’s Path Toward Reconciliation."
As a near case study of a father’s and mother’s quest to retain their own humanity during war and help their children do the same is of obvious value to a human family always recovering from armed conflict somewhere.
A studied approach
Twenty years in the making, the book began with a chance meeting between Barnhardt and Wim at a Cincinnati church meeting about the German theologian and Nazi-resister Dietrick Bonhoeffer. At the time, Barnhardt was teaching at the University of Cincinnati and Wim setting up a hydraulic laboratory there.
Close ties between the families led to a 2003 visit to the Netherlands when Barnhardt and her late husband came across Wim Sr.’s diary, and she turned to him and said, “Hank, this is an important book.’”
The first 148 pages hold Barnhardt’s combined, reworked and significantly expanded version of Wim Sr.’s previously translated secret diary, which had been written by a man who knew its contents would be destroyed if discovered.
In his must-read foreword, James L. Huffman, a revered professor emeritus of history at Wittenberg University, says keeping that diary was among the “lifelong practices” Lindeijer continued during his imprisonment in a way that “ordered his days … gave life meaning” and reduced his need to escape not just from the prison gates but the grind of its daily life.
A diary entry from April 8, 1944, in which Wim Sr. writes he was “too possessed by sorrow and hate” to write Wim Jr. on the boy’s birthday and expressed his worries that the war was robbing children of the “deep-felt need” for joy that feeds their spiritual growth.
The good, the bad and the ugly
The diary does not skirt the most inhumane aspects of the war: of Dutch officers forced by their Japanese captor to attend the bayonetting deaths of Dutch soldiers who had broken minor prison camp rules; of men suffering and dying on an overcrowded transport ship “whose decks and holds …were perpetually soiled with slime and human feces”; and, near war’s end, of Lindeijer and other medical officers having to treat friends whose “upper bodies and faces were badly burned … and in some cases parts of their ears, singed or gone” after American ships shelled the factory they were forced to work in.
The diarist’s greatest strength, however, may be in bringing a scientist’s skills of observation to see that even in a prison of war, camplife is full of the enormous range of thoughts and deeds “which we, as God’s creatures, display.”
To Huffman, the diary provided moments of truly human contact among adversaries in a way that defined a new standard.
“So, this,” he writes, “is the way we ought to expect people in horrific situations to act if they have the will to do so.”
And, perhaps, Wim Sr.’s temperament and skill.
Common ground in war
Barnhardt’s interviews with Texans who were in Lindeijer’s company during their traumatic transfers to Japan capture moments on the docks of Takao, Formosa, in which Japanese soldiers and Allied prisoners found common ground shared through hunger.
“Returning Japanese troops … must have been desperate for vegetables, too,” she reports from her interviews.
“The prisoners had apparently formed a line to steal daikon radishes from the piles of produce loaded onto the docks. A Japanese soldier stood lookout and motioned when the coast was clear. Then the roles had reversed, with the soldiers performing the theft, and a prisoner giving the ‘all clear.’”
Even amid the hardships at camp, she adds, many prisoners “couldn’t help noticing the random guard who offered a small package of fish or another with a cigarette to be passed around.”
In one case, a sergeant and his wife took the risk of buying medicines for prisoners on the black market.
A man in black
On the first of March 1943, Wm. Sr’s diary mentions “a small Japanese man … dressed in black, with a little white kerchief tucked into his belt in back.”
At first dismissing him as “an official of the mining company who likes nothing better than to write novels,” he subsequently says that the man “may at times bring pepper, salt and cigarettes along; one time, even about five potatoes on which we feasted as if they were a delicacy."
He finally notes that “sickroom medics who saw the man” found him to be a“ completely genuine” person Lindeijer also found him to be.
He was Hiroe Iwashiti, or Iwashiti-San, whose company Lindeijer would seek out regularly as their common love for learning brought them together and eventually generated the trust needed to fully open their minds to one another.
Prisoners came to feel similarly attached to scarred Japanese war veterans who had served at the front and came to replace the camp’s more militant guards who were sent into combat.
Among them was one who asked about the Western tradition of Christmas one Dec. 24 and returned Christmas day with 100 oranges – one for each man in the barracks.
He and other veterans like him were called the “The Honorable Men” who also saw honor in what their prisoners had done and experienced.
“Little men want to be friends,” one of them told a prisoner, “But Number One (man) says fight, so we must fight.”
A Japanese guard who taught prisoners how to count from 1 to 100 in Japanese took the first step in helping both sides develop a jumbled mixture of Japanese and English that helped everyday communications.
Changes of heart
Regular conversation with Japanese they once considered the enemy “other” also helped two Dutch soldiers who had fought between themselves to reconcile with one another at News Years of 1944.
“Encountering each other by the fire late in the night of January first,” Barnhardt writes, “the two had shaken hands and apologized, agreeing ‘to start the New Year off right,’” with one saying, “he couldn’t explain the feeling this had given him. But he would always remember it.”
Barnhardt also sees the same dynamic at work in the Wim Sr.’s realization that “too often in his marriage he had failed to respond to an undercurrent in (his wife) Nel’s voice” that signaled a point of conflict.
She adds: “His growing awareness of the role of listening in developing the empathy needed for understanding was one of the greatest lessons of his imprisonment.”
Arms and race
Barnhardt writes that the diary-keeper’s friendship with Iwashiti paved the way for Iwashiti to challenge Wim Sr., “about the antagonism between the Dutch and the Indonesian (Asian) Dutch” in the P.O.W. camp.
Iwashiti saw a racial dimension in it that the European Dutch almost universally denied and that Iwashiti saw as a fundamental cause of the World War started by Nazis who claimed Arian superiority and what Huffman describes as Japan’s “racist subjugation of colonial peoples in Southeast Asia.”
At the time of their discussion, Wim Sr., had no idea that his four sons would so soon be caught in that crossfire by the time his imprisonment ended.
Editor’s note: A Part 2 of this column will be published next Sunday.
About the Author