All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [313]
A powerful sensation among hundreds of millions of people was that of injustice: they did not believe they merited the plagues of peril, privation, loneliness and horror that had swept them away from their familiar lives into alien and mortally dangerous environments. ‘I don’t believe I am wicked,’ wrote British gunner Lt. John Guest, ‘and I don’t believe the majority of people, Germans included, are either – certainly not wicked enough to have been deservedly overtaken by this war.’
The peoples of countries ruled by the Axis were in worse condition, of course: almost all found themselves at the mercy of both the enemy’s soldiers and new collaborationist administrations. A Chinese in Malaya, Chin Kee On, wrote: ‘The former social order was reversed. The “nobodies” of yesterday became the “big shots” of today. The former scum and dregs of society, such as ex-convicts, notorious gentleman-crooks, swindlers and well-known failures became the new elite, riding high in official favour and power.’ On Java, two young Dutch girls travelling with their mother aboard a hopelessly overcrowded train were startled to be denied the seats to which they were accustomed. An elderly Indonesian noted their confusion. ‘Ya Njonja, daly Iain sekarang,’ he said sardonically to the mother – ‘Yes madam, things are changed.’
That Dutch family soon fell victim to far worse misfortunes. Elizabeth van Kampen, daughter of a planter, spent the years between her fifteenth and eighteenth birthdays in a Japanese internment camp with her mother and two sisters, clinging precariously to life as they suffered malnutrition, lice, beriberi, dysentery and repeated attacks of malaria. Most of Mrs van Kampen’s teeth fell out; her husband perished at the hands of the Kempeitai police. Elizabeth tried to preserve her sanity by dreaming of her past idyllic colonial childhood, and of a world beyond walls, but ‘How can you dream while you are locked up in a dirty, overcrowded prison, when you are lying on a filthy mattress full of bugs? How can you dream while your stomach cries for food? How can you dream without a sound of music? I was seventeen years old, but I became scared to dream at all.’
In the occupied countries, law was no longer an absolute, but became whatever the conquerors chose that it should be. Few Germans were as squeamish as Abwehr official Helmuth von Moltke, who during a visit to Oslo found himself occupying a requisitioned Norwegian home. ‘The … disgusting thing was the feeling of having entered a stranger’s house, to sit there like thieves, while the owner, as I knew, sat in a concentration camp.’ In Łód in April 1940, the lzak family was evicted from their small flat and shop, which were given to their neighbours, who were ethnic Germans; George’s mother wept bitterly. ‘My dear father was a gentle giant. I had never known him to lose his temper. Seeing the Bucholts take our home and shop, he shook with anger, but could say nothing with two Gestapo men present.’
German and Japanese carpetbaggers who had achieved little status or respect in their own societies became proconsuls in their nations’ new possessions; Takase Toru, from 1942 to 1945 a powerful figure in Japanese-ruled Singapore, taunted Chinese business leaders: ‘I have been to Malaya three times before, and seen many of you at dinner table … but you had not paid any notice to me then.’ The Japanese extorted a ‘gift’ of fifty million Straits