Slave Kids, the ‘death watchers’!

Although we were just real young kids, we were put to work in the tropical sun in the death camps of the World War II. We weeded around the death camp, or were put to work breaking clumps of hard dried dirt with our bare hands so as to prepare beds of soil for some foodstuffs to grow.

Some years after the World War, as a teenager, I made a drawing showing the dirt beds, the bilik fence, and a watchtower which was manned by an armed guard. A hole on the bilik symbolized the intense desire for life outside the camps; the desire to see the horizon rather than the hated fence.

There was another utterly disgusting job for which kids were used: the ‘death watching’ in the death camps. They had to do it with the dying old men whose bodies were usually terribly swollen, and from which as a result of the tropical heat fluids dripped.

After any one of the old men died, the kids had to close the eyelids and call the orderly. They then had to help prepare the body for burial. Basically that amounted to old watches, rings or other valuables being swiped, to be used for smuggling. The kids then had to place the cadavers on simple gurneys made out of boards, which were then often placed outside, in the tropical sun. There was no room anywhere else. Some 10-15 old men died each day. And thus our story in the death camps were horrible with lot of suffering aspects. The Japanese death camps in Ambarawa were more horrible. This WWII story is explained through a kid’s view on WWII by Mr. Ralph and Cathy Brink.