THE JAPANESE GUARD held up two fingers. Only two graves. A few days earlier it had been eight.
Helen Colijn, a Dutch teenager, along with three other prisoners, had volunteered for grave duty. Sometimes digging graves didn’t seem as depressing as living in the filthy internment camp with all of the starving, sick, and dying women.
Helen’s view of death had changed drastically during her imprisonment. It was no longer a shock, and barely a sorrow. It occurred nearly every day. Few of the surviving prisoners still had the energy to grieve.
But Helen could do something to help: she could dig. The guards wouldn’t do it, so it was up to the prisoners. She wished the guards would at least give them better digging tools. The older women had repeatedly requested actual spades, but they were always ignored. The prisoners were given as little as possible of everything: food, medicine, clothing, blankets. Or effective tools with which to dig graves.
At least the ground wasn’t hard today; it had just rained. Still, the simple mattock Helen was using felt heavy. She had to pause from time to time because her heart began to race. Sometimes she experienced a short blackout. She was glad the guard was dozing under a tree; otherwise he would have certainly shouted, Lekas, lekas! (Quickly, quickly!)
Exhausted and weak as she was, Helen and the other teenager digging with her dug so deeply that eventually one of them had to climb inside the grave to continue.
As Helen dug from inside, she began to imagine her own funeral. Would her coffin be long enough? She was six feet tall. The Japanese provided only flimsy, short coffins; it was always difficult for the women to bury their too tall friends. Helen would probably not be buried in her “liberation” dress, the outfit she was saving for the day she hoped to be rescued by the victorious Allies. Her two sisters, Antoinette and Alette, would be able to use it.
Who would conduct her funeral? How would they write her name on the cross? Would it be Helen Colijn or Helen C. Colijn?
She quickly stopped herself from thinking this way. If she still had enough strength to dig a grave, she certainly wouldn’t be needing one soon. Though emaciated, Helen was actually healthy compared to some of the other prisoners, many of whom were dying not only from the lack of food and medicine but because they had lost the will to live.
Helen had everything to live for: her sisters were with her, and their father, Anton Colijn, was surely nearby in a men’s camp. Their mother, Zus, had been imprisoned by the Japanese elsewhere. She hadn’t evacuated with her family from their home on the island of Tarakan, part of the Dutch East Indies. Zus insisted her Red Cross nurse work was crucial and would prevent her arrest. It hadn’t.
The Colijn sisters, 1939 in the Dutch East Indies. Left to right: Antoinette, Helen, Alette. Song of Survival by Helen Colijn (White Cloud Press, 1995), used by permission of the publisher
Her father, on the other hand, knew that because he was a reserve member of the Dutch army, he would certainly be imprisoned. Long before the Japanese landed on Tarakan, he realized their tiny, oil-rich island would not be overlooked by the Japanese; the Japanese needed oil because the Allied nations had stopped giving it to them.
When the Japanese first attacked the Dutch East Indies, the Colijn girls did whatever they could to support the war effort. But those efforts were brief; the Dutch soon capitulated to the Japanese.
Anton Colijn could have escaped on a plane carrying other military personnel, but his daughters would not have been able to accompany him. So they all fled on an Australian-bound ship, which was bombed and destroyed by Japanese planes. Helen and her father became separated from Alette and Antoinette. After spending an entire week in a lifeboat with other shipwreck survivors, Helen and her father landed on the shores of Tabuan Island. Shortly after being reunited there with Alette and Antoinette, Japanese sentries arrested them all. The Colijn girls were then separated from their father, who was taken to a men’s camp.
Helen and her sisters were taken to an internment camp, referred to as a “houses” camp because it consisted of many individual structures. Imprisoned with them were other civilians, Dutch and British women and children, along with a group of Australian Army nurses.
The most difficult part of camp life was tenko, the term Japanese prison guards used during the war for roll call. Every day women and children were ordered, “Keirei!”—to bow from the waist to the guard who was the local representative of the Japanese emperor. Any gesture that could possibly be interpreted as a slight to Emperor Hirohito—a smirk, a comment, not bowing low enough—could result in a vicious slap or kick. Sometimes the women were made to stand in the hot sun for hours if one of them didn’t get it quite right.
There were also rules for those outside the camp. An elderly Chinese man who lived nearby was caught trying to sell the starving women some duck eggs. The Japanese guards hauled him into the camp, tied him to a pole, then wrapped a rope around his neck and hands in a way that would strangle him if he tried to lower his arms.
It took three days for him to die. During that time, everyone in the camp, including small children, had to walk past the tortured man on their way to tenko. A British woman who tried to sneak him a glass of water was discovered by a guard and savagely beaten, almost to death.
But the guards did allow the prisoners to conduct their own educational group activities. Some held classes for the children, while others shared their languages or other skills with adults. There was also a communal library. The women chafed at being imprisoned without contact with the outside world and having their food rations so limited, but they also had some time to enjoy themselves.
That all changed early in 1943 when they were moved into a hastily constructed barracks camp. Everyone had only a tiny area of individual living space. The latrines were public. Bathing was public. Everyone had to take part in communal jobs for the entire camp, not just the people in their “house.” This meant more work and less energy for anything educational.
Near the end of the year, Antoinette complained to Helen, “If this goes on for long, we’ll be reduced to a grey mass of regulated, automated prisoners.”
Two English prisoners decided to create something that would make a difference. One of them was Margaret Dryburgh, a musically gifted missionary who often led Sunday services for the prisoners and who had already written a very moving song for the prisoners called “The Captives Hymn.” She and Norah Chambers, a trained musician, formed a choir composed of Dutch, English, and Australian singers. They met at night in the camp kitchen to rehearse. Their first concert was rumored to be something very special, but no one outside of the choir was given any details.
Alette and Antoinette were both in the choir. A date was set for the first concert. The day before, Antoinette asked Helen to walk through each barrack to formally announce it.
Father, in captivity
We would lift our prayer to thee …
Give us patience to endure
Keep our hearts serene and pure,
Grant us courage, charity,
Greater faith, humility,
Readiness to own Thy Will,
Be we free or captive still …
May the day of freedom dawn
Peace and justice be reborn,
Grant that nations loving Thee
O’er the world may brothers be,
Cleansed by suffering, know rebirth,
See Thy Kingdom come on earth.
Helen was shy. “Everyone knows already there will be a concert,” she protested.
“But if you take the trouble to announce it, it will add importance,” Antoinette insisted. “Get yourself a tin and a stick and cry out the news, like an old-fashioned town crier.”
On the day of the concert, Alette and Antoinette left their section of the barracks, calling behind them to Helen, “Enjoy our surprise.”
Helen put on her liberation dress. An unpleasant woman who the Colijn girls referred to as Mrs. Sergeant Major saw her and said, “You must be going to that concert. It’s absurd to waste precious energy singing. The singers should be using their energy for just staying alive!”
“But the singers say they generate energy by singing,” Helen answered.
“Could be. But we all know the Japanese don’t want us to gather in crowds. To have a whole mass of us in the compound, listening to I don’t care what, is inviting disaster. The guard will lose his temper and we’ll all have to stand in the sun again. I am not going.”
As Helen walked to join the concert’s audience, she was glad she had taken the trouble to formally announce it. The gathered crowd was clearly excited: children nicely groomed by their mothers; adults, like Helen, wearing their liberation dresses; and a group of Australian nurses all wearing the same shade of lipstick.
Then Helen saw the word ORCHESTRA scratched in large letters in the dirt. Orchestra? She knew there were no real instruments in camp. Had she generated excitement for a performance played on crude homemade instruments?
They would all soon find out. A few minutes later, 30 women, each holding a piece of paper in one hand and a stool in the other, filed out of the main kitchen to face the audience. Children sat in front, while many of the adults, including Helen, stood.
Then Margaret Dryburgh spoke. “This evening,” she said, “we are asking you to listen to something quite new, we are sure: a choir of women’s voices trying to reproduce some of the well-known music usually given by an orchestra or a pianist.” The singers, she said, would sit on their stools just like orchestra performers, in order to conserve their energy.
Then she took her place among the singers. Norah Chambers stood in front of the performers. She raised her hands. The choir began to sing, in four-part harmony, Dvorak’s “Largo” from the New World Symphony.
“The music soared in its first rich and full crescendo,” Helen wrote later. “I felt a shiver go down my back. I thought I had never heard anything so beautiful before. The music didn’t sound precisely like an orchestra either, although it was close…. The music sounded ethereal, totally unreal in our sordid surroundings.”
“Huu, huu.” Helen heard a new sound, “the ugly raw voice of an angry guard,” coming up behind her. Surely Norah could hear it too. But she didn’t stop directing the music.
“Huu, huu.” The angry guard, his bayonet fixed on his rifle, passed through the standing audience. Soon Helen could only see the tip of his bayonet.
The music continued. The angry voice did not. Helen craned her neck: she could no longer see the bayonet. Had the guard put down his weapon? Was he also mesmerized by the beautiful music?
Apparently so. “As the Largo moved toward a great, glorious crescendo,” Helen would write later, “the guard remained as still as we” for the rest of the concert.
During the intermission, one of the women serving refreshments offered a tiny homemade rice flour cookie to the guard, who, Helen wrote later, “looked oddly alone in a sea of captive women.” He accepted the cookie with thanks. Helen wondered if the music had brought back memories or if it was the first time he had heard classical European music. She thought perhaps he “may have been as lonely as we were, caught up in the idiocies of war.”
The orchestra presented more concerts. One of them was attended by three Japanese officers, each respectfully wearing a formal uniform and polished boots. Helen attended every concert. “Each time we heard the music,” she wrote later, “we marveled again at the beautiful and often familiar melodies, at the purity of sound, at this miracle that was happening to us amid the cockroaches, the rats, the bedbugs, and the stink of the latrines. The music renewed our sense of human dignity. We had to live under bestial conditions but, by Jove, we could rise above them!”
But by the time Helen began volunteering to dig graves on the island of Bangka, the location of the third camp, the vocal orchestra was no more. Too many of its members had died, and the remaining singers were too starved to continue.
On April 21, 1945, Margaret Dryburgh died shortly after the prisoners were moved to a fourth camp. Although most camp funerals were attended only by those who carried the coffin and perhaps a representative of that person’s nation, Margaret’s funeral was attended by many prisoners, including all the surviving members of the vocal orchestra strong enough to walk up the hill to the cemetery.
Four months later, on August 24, 1945, the prisoners who were not bedridden were summoned to a spot outside the guardhouse. The camp commander told them the war was over. He didn’t tell them who had won.
The following day, the women began to receive items they’d previously been told were unavailable: food, medicine, blankets, bandages, mosquito nets, towels. Many weak prisoners continued to die, and all of them had to carry on in the squalor of the camp. But they were no longer starving. And they knew help was on the way.
On September 7, 1945, Dutch paratroopers entered the camp. They said “they had never seen such awful conditions [in the camps they’d been liberating] and were amazed that anyone could live like this.”
Australian soldiers, who entered the camp shortly afterward, brought the women news and rumors. Two Japanese cities, they said, had been completely destroyed by one bomb each. Not only had these bombs ended the war, the soldiers said, but they may have saved the women’s lives: their camp had been scheduled for annihilation on August 31, the birthday of Dutch Queen Wilhelmina.
Helen was now so weak she could not walk far. While waiting for the promised transport, she moved her hospital cot outside during the day so that she could watch the planes drop food into the camp. When she saw the red, white, and blue of the Dutch flag on these planes, instead of the Japanese rising sun emblem, she finally allowed herself to believe the war was over.
When she was released from the camp and hospitalized in Singapore, six-foot-tall Helen weighed only 90 pounds.
Helen’s father did not survive the war. Her mother did. The Colijn women moved to the United States, where they rarely discussed the war.
But in 1980, Antoinette rediscovered her 68-page booklet of vocal orchestra scores. The tiny, carefully penciled notes were beginning to fade. She decided to donate it to Stanford University. This started a series of events that brought international attention to the vocal orchestra. A California choir learned the music and performed it at a concert whose audience included the surviving members of the vocal orchestra. A documentary film, a feature film, and a CD eventually followed.
While being interviewed for the documentary, Antoinette described how the rehearsals had helped her: “[Norah] never let a false note or a muddled phrasing go by. She made us go back again and again, until we got the music just right. But to sing measure 32 and 33 correctly became very important and took your mind off whether you were hungry, or thirsty, or feeling sick, or just plain down in the dumps.”
Betty Jeffrey, an Australian member of the orchestra, said during her interview, “When I sang that vocal orchestra music, I forgot I was in the camp. I felt free.”
Helen died in 2006 at the age of 85.
LEARN MORE
Song of Survival: Women Interned by Helen Colijn (White Cloud Press, 1995).
Song of Survival DVD (Janson Media, 2000). This documentary has interviews of the vocal choir.
Paradise Road CD (Sony, 1997). This CD features a women’s choir singing music from the vocal orchestra scores.
