South Surrey resident Miriam Zwaan-Van Veen will be alone when she visits the White Rock cenotaph today (Friday, Aug. 15).
Unlike years gone by, when she was one of the organizers of the August 15 Foundation, there will be no event held to mark the end of the Second World War in Asia, and the freeing of Dutch civilians interned in Japanese camps in what was then the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia).
The last of these was held 10 years ago in 2015, when it was clear that the passing of years had dwindled to a shrinking few those who still remembered the significance of the anniversary of the day Japan announced its surrender to Allied forces (although V-J Day is formally celebrated on Sept. 2 when the surrender documents were signed on board the American battleship USS Missouri).
"The others are all gone now," Zwaan-Van Veen said. "I'm the only one left."
She recalls, with gratitude, how White Rock city and residents and churches always supported the August 15 Foundation events and that to this day the cenotaph has the only inscription in Canada that remembers the internees.
She also remembers the sacrifices of Allied troops in the Far East, including 1,975 Canadian troops who served, 290 who perished in combat and 264 more who died of starvation in prisoner of war camps.
This year, when she lays flowers at the cenotaph, it will be a private compact between herself and others she still recalls with fondness, including her mother Adriana and father Kees, who were missionaries in what was then Sumatra.
They also spent the war years in captivity along with herself and her brothers Dick, Pim and Kees and their nanny Iwa, a native of the region.
She was only five-and-a-half years old when the war ended. Born in Tahuna on the Sangir and Talaut Islands, she had moved with the family to Sumatra shortly after she was born.
Interned when she was just under two years old, after the Japanese overran the the island in early 1942, the camps (she and her family were in five, in all, on Sumatra) were virtually all she had known. Her father had been held in separate camps for men and boys over 10, and was a stranger to her when the family was finally reunited.
But Zwaan-Van Veen will also be remembering someone else this Friday 香蕉视频直播� a man she knew first as Mr. Saidi, but came to call "Papa."
A Japanese officer assigned to the internment camps for women and children, he was technically one of their captors. But he was also a kindly man, she recalled.
"I think he may have been a doctor, and I seem to remember him telling us he had a wife and daughter of his own," she said, relating how his smattering of Dutch and the children's growing understanding of Japanese words allowed them to communicate with each other.
His kindness to the internees relieved conditions of great discomfort, in which crowded barracks, brutality, and starvation rations were facts of life for the internees 香蕉视频直播� but it ultimately cost him his life.
Zwaan-Van Veen has undergone many years of therapy to deal with the traumatic events that robbed her of any normal childhood 香蕉视频直播� and her religious faith has also given her a belief, despite the manifest evils of war and hatred, in the essential goodness of people.
But it's fair to say that she experienced things that no child should ever have to 香蕉视频直播� including the execution, by beheading, of the man she had called "Papa."
She later learned that he had promised to smuggle letters from the women and children to the men's camps (such communication was strictly forbidden). But the letters were discovered by the Japanese military authorities, and "Papa" had been arrested.
His interrogators tried to force him to translate the letters and identify the senders and recipients. Knowing it would likely lead to their execution, he refused, Zwaan-Van Veen said.
In an account of her experiences she later wrote for an anthology compiled by internee survivors, she recalled that, seeing "Papa" brought to the main square of the camp under armed guard, she had attempted to run to him.
She remembered him calling out to her to stay back or they would execute her, too, and his last words to her, asking her to remember him kindly.
While there are other experiences she prefers, understandably, not to discuss, Zwaan-Van Veen has never forgotten the fatherly officer's compassion, or his words.
The three-and-a-half years of internment took its toll in so many other ways, she said.
Her mother, a registered nurse, had been placed in charge of her barracks, which meant she was first in line to be punished if there was any infraction of the authorities' draconian rules such as when many women 香蕉视频直播� believing a false rumour that the war had ended 香蕉视频直播� had staged a mass walk-out from the camp they were in at the time.
The strain of the responsibility of caring of other internees had an impact on her mother's health, Zwaan-Van Veen recalled.
Food was very limited and medications were practically non-existent.
"I remember we all got half a carrot for lunch, and a handful of rice 香蕉视频直播� a child's handful 香蕉视频直播� for supper."
Fortunately Iwa, the nanny (they had claimed she was a family member so that they could stay together) was versed in the properties of native plants and was able to make broths from them that ensured the children received some vitamins.
Her mother, who had weighed 140 pounds when first interned, was down to 70 by the time the war ended, Zwaan-Van Veen said.
"One more month and she would have died," she remembered.
"I remember having trouble walking, falling constantly, but we all survived."
Asked what she remembers most about the camps, however, Zwaan-Van Veen's answer was surprising.
"It was the love, most of all," she said.
"I was able to go to a kindergarten that Catholic nuns among us had started in a corner of the barracks, and they brought love into the camp for the little ones, and there was a lot of giving among the mothers 香蕉视频直播� things were mended and traded, and there were always little presents that were handmade for the children on their birthdays."
Her strongest memory of Aug. 15 itself is the surreal one of being a little girl watching "papers coming out of heaven" 香蕉视频直播� leaflets dropped by an Allied plane on the Aek Pamienke camp informing the 4,700 women and children there that "the war was over and that we were free."
"My mother or Iwa told us what it meant 香蕉视频直播� that we could walk through the gate outside."
Irony succeeded irony as they awaited ultimate liberation by British Gurka troops 香蕉视频直播� including that, under the terms of surrender, it became the Japanese troops' responsibility to care for the safety of the internees.
And, while one war was over, another was heating up 香蕉视频直播� as the Indonesian people, promised independence by the Japanese, took to armed conflict to seize their country and the internees were glad of the protection of the Gurka troops.
The family, along with Iwa, eventually moved to Holland where they made a new and successful life for themselves 香蕉视频直播� and her mother kept her long-standing promise to help Iwa become a registered nurse.
Zwaan-Van Veen also chose it as her career, and worked as a registered nurse in Holland, and after emigrating to Canada, at Victoria Jubilee Hospital and with the Victorian Order of Nurses.
Looking back today at the significance of Aug. 15, she can't avoid the biggest irony of all: that the surrender wouldn't have happened if atomic bombs had not been dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
"A horrible thing happened," she said. "But that saved us."
But she fears that the lessons of the horrors of the Second World War have been lost on the world, and she believes that the history of what happened in the Pacific War should also be taught in schools alongside the significance of D Day and the European conflict.
"Are people ever going to learn 香蕉视频直播� are we going to learn?" she asked.
