André researched the photo archive of the Fukuoka No.2 camp. He wanted to meet as many as possible before they are all gone. He interviewed people who lived near the POW camp at the time, as well as survivors of the bomb. Last year André visited Nagasaki for a fourth time. André's booklet depicts harsh life in POW camp, and also poverty of local people around it. "Many were victims themselves!" he writes. He disputes the prevailing view in the west that Japanese people were universally guilty parties in the war. They too were victims of the war, he says.Īndré has a nuanced take on the bomb. André says it was an area so poor that even the local people went hungry. He was imprisoned in a district of Nagasaki called Koyagi. "The story of Johan" is printed in Dutch, English and Japanese. When Japanese forces arrived to occupy the country, he was taken as a prisoner of war and sent to Japan. Johan was one of the troops stationed there in the 1940s. It begins in the East Indies, current day Indonesia, back when it was a Dutch colony. The resulting booklet, called The Story of Johan, took three years to write. It was one of the factors that prompted André to write about how the war had damaged both Japan and the Netherlands. "In memory of those who lived in such harsh circumstances, to which some of them succumbed, and with a profound sense of remorse, we proclaim our fervent hopes for everlasting peace in the world." The inscription on the memorial ends with the following message: But people don’t respond unless I speak about the broader context." I’ve been giving talks overseas about the devastation caused by the atomic bomb. "I can’t talk about my own suffering without talking about Japan’s history of aggression toward other countries. Shortly before his death in July 2019, he explained his motivation. The effort was led by atomic bomb survivor Toyokazu Ihara. The unveiling ceremony of the monument was held in September 2015 at the site of the POW camp. People there paid for a stone memorial for prisoners of war and their families, and they erected it at the site of the camp. In 2015, an event in Nagasaki added more nuance to André's view. He says that visit helped him overcome the negative feelings his father had left him. When Johan died, André wanted to learn more about where his father had been held, so in 2009 he traveled to Nagasaki. I won't bow for them."īut he could never ask his father the details of his experience, and it left him with a deep distrust of Japan that he carried with him for decades. André learned then about his father's hatred of Japan.Īndré recalls his father saying "I will never kneel down for the Japs. But he told his son nothing of his wartime experiences until just before he died at the age of 75. Johan survived, though, and returned to the Netherlands. The POW camp near Nagasaki was called Fukuoka No.2. Prisoners were sent to work at a shipyard with little food or medical care. He was held in a camp in Nagasaki called Fukuoka 2.Īndré says conditions were harsh in the camp, and the guards violent. In 1942, his father Johan became a prisoner of the Imperial Japanese Army in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. Johan Schram, André's father, was a navy sailor when the Pacific War broke out. When he retired about 10 years ago, he began researching his father’s wartime experiences. Schram used to be a professor of biology at the University of Amsterdam. The POW's experience André Schram gave lecture to high school students in Nagasaki.Ī Dutch NGO that advocates dialogue to foster war reconciliation sent 71-year-old André Schram to speak at a Japanese high school.
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