chapter 4

I remember the morning in 1938 when my father and I heard a lot of aeroplanes in the distance. We looked towards the Chinese village which was a few miles from our house and I could see objects dropping from the planes. I realised they were bombs when I heard explosions.

I did not see the damage but within an hour we saw a flood of people from the villages rushing past our house with little bundles of whatever they could gather and heading for the hills to escape. The bombing only lasted a few minutes and did not affect us at all.

The next thing I remember was an influx of Japanese soldiers [17] armed with rifles. The officers wore swords. There were military vehicles, bicycles and motor cycles but I do not remember any tanks. I did not see any fighting. The Japanese did not interfere with the British or other Europeans in any way at that time as their war was only with China. The soldiers were followed eventually by many Japanese civilians from Japan and other parts of China who set up homes and shops mainly in the Japanese trading concession area.

[17] The Japanese reasons for the invasion of China are complex. In the 1930s, militarist factions gained control of the Japanese Government. In 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria where there were extensive Japanese interests plus mineral and farming resources desired by Japan. Subsequently, a considerable number of Japanese were settled there. In 1937, Japan began its invasion of northern China on the grounds it was protecting its economic interests and the Japanese citizens who had settled there. Their invasion was helped by the weakness of the Chinese Nationalist Army which was no match for the Japanese forces. In 1938, the Japanese took Tsingtao because of its strategic significance to the Japanese. It provided a good port for Japanese shipping and access to well-developed rail infrastructure.

For the next few years our pleasant lives went on as before but now it was under Japanese military government. Then, one day I remember hearing the newsreader, Caroll Alcott, broadcasting from Shanghai Radio, which was repeated into the Tsingtao area by a local transmitter. He said: "Ladies and gentlemen, Pearl Harbor has just been bombed by the Japanese. He then said: "Stay calm and stay at home" or, "indoors." That's about it.

Within an hour of that broadcast, Japanese officers wearing swords and soldiers with rifles knocked on our front door. The soldiers hammered wooden boards on our front door bearing Japanese characters that said `British enemy'. The Japanese said to us: "You are all under house arrest. How many people live here? How many males? How many females?" My mother said: "My husband, me, my daughter and son." A Japanese asked: "Where's the daughter?" and my mother said as she pointed to me: "This is my daughter."

Because I was recovering from typhoid fever my head had been shaven and I was in an emaciated state and wearing slacks to hide my skinny legs, the Japanese officer would not believe I was a girl. I do not know how she did it but eventually mother convinced the Japanese I was a girl. The officer then gave us a hand-made armband each bearing the letter `B' denoting British and some Japanese characters. He ordered us to wear them at all times.

How the 'Sidney Morning Herald' reported the end of World War II to Australians. Inset: my 'B' for British prisoner armband. Photograph: Georgie Perry.
[18] Japanese internee armband given by Japanese Army to Joyce Cooke to wear, December 1941. Bradbury family collection.

Because they were so quick in producing the armbands, I think the armbands must have been prepared before Pearl Harbor was bombed. I still have mine [18]. The Japanese then placed us under house arrest and said we could be absent from our house only between 9 a.m. and midday each day to go shopping. In other words, we had to observe a curfew.

During the first time the Japanese came to our home, one of the Japanese officers who my father later told us was Korean, accused him of working for the British secret service. He asked my father: "What do you know about the Japanese Navy?" My father answered: "Nothing." The officer then changed the subject for a while pointing to our dog and then at some ornament in the room saying: "That's nice." He did this several times and then he again said: "What do you know about the Japanese Navy?" and received the same negative reply.

While the officer continued to interrogate my father, my mother and I went into the kitchen where, with Chang's help, we burned in the stove some photographs of Japanese ships in Tsingtao harbour that my father had taken. They were in a large envelope ready to be given to the British Consul. The Japanese did not find out what we did.

We often wondered why they suspected my father. For about a week, the same Korean regularly came to our house and questioned my father, asking: "What do you know about the Japanese Navy?" Each time, he received the same reply. Father was taken away for interrogation several times by the Japanese. My mother kept a small bag of clothing and other articles for him to take with him in case he was kept for an extended period. He always came home at the end of each day.

I found out later from my friends that the Japanese put notices on the doors of all the British, American, Dutch and Armenian homes identifying them by their nationality and as enemy. The notices were all placed within hours of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The Japanese were obviously well-prepared for the coming conflict. We lived under the curfew which was rigidly enforced. We did not have to go to school and Pop could not go to work.

Some time before the Pearl Harbor attack a local dentist had made braces to straighten my teeth. My mother had given him some gold to use for the purpose. While we were in the curfew period of periodic detention, my mother took me back to the dentist to have the braces removed because we did not know whether we would have access to a dentist in the future. To our surprise the dentist was gone so we went to Dr Lustig, another dentist. When he removed the braces he found they were made of brass and not gold. Our original dentist had kept the gold and substituted a cheap metal. Mum went looking for him but we never saw him again. Lucky for him.

After a few weeks, some Japanese officers came to our home and said: "We're going to put you into a civil assembly centre." That was our first full-time camp. They imprisoned us in the hotel just behind our house named the Iltis Hydro. It was a large hotel and there were about 500 internees with us. We stayed there until shortly after Christmas 1941. My family was accommodated together in one room. The food was reasonable and we were looked after by the regular hotel staff who were kept on by the Japanese.

At the Iltis Hydro hotel we were guarded by Japanese soldiers with rifles. They always carried rifles. To convince us to obey their rules, they grabbed a little Chinese beggar boy who had been scratching around for pieces of coke for his fire. The soldiers put a dog collar around his neck with a long chain, stuffed his mouth with orange peel and fastened the boy to a tree. They then undertook a Japanese martial arts exercise called 'kendo'. The guards used long bamboo kendo swords and beat the boy. The Japanese said to us: "If you misbehave, you'll get the same treatment." I vividly remember the poor little boy's eyes streaming with tears. It was sad but we could do nothing about it.

Another unhappy incident occurred when the Japanese brought one of the Chinese servants into the dining room while we were having breakfast. They put a kettle of boiling water on a chair and made him lift the chair up and hold it above his head. We all knew that if the chair moved, or if he moved it the wrong way the boiling water would scald him. Again we were told: "If you misbehave, this will happen to you."

On another occasion in the hotel, the Japanese took away one of our Armenian friends named Armic Baliantz [19]. They thought he was a spy because he spoke a number of languages including fluent Japanese. He was in his 20s at the time. The soldiers took him for the whole day and they brought him back terribly injured. My mother said to me: "Don't look, don't look." Everybody who saw him was `oohing' and `aahing' because of the blood. I didn't look because my mother said: "Go inside, go inside." My mother later told me that the Japanese had beaten him with bamboo rods and he was in a terrible mess with blood and bruises all over him. Afterwards his wife, Tsolik, asked mum for cushions to put under Armic to ease his pain. Mum gave her the cushions and mum also helped Tsolik nurse Armic back to recovery from his bashing.

[19] Under then and present international law, the Baliantz family should not have been interned because Armic, as an Armenian, was stateless. The Japanese interned him, his wife and his young daughter by claiming falsely that Armic was Iranian (Persian). They then refused him access to the Persian officals who would have proven that he was not Persian. Armic was born of an Armenian family in Manchuria. Despite his first Japanese bashing and the terrible consequences, Armic never gave up his subsequent fight with the Japanese. During his internment at Wei-Hsien he involved himself with Father De Jaegher who set up a small team to collect intelligence from the outside world. Armic managed to steal Japanese-language newspapers from the guards and translate them. He also got hold of a Japanese guard's radio which he had offered to repair. The radio was hidden in the camp's church altar and it was played quietly during Catholic services so that news services from the Allied side could be monitored in secret. Armic was beaten by the guards when they discovered the radio ploy. He was again savagely beaten when he told the Japanese guards he would name his child, if it was a boy – that was then being delivered in the camp hospital – Arthur, after US General Douglas MacArthur. This beating by the guards took place in the hospital delivery room in front of his wife, Armen. She was in labour at the time of this beating. [I knew Armen in camp and Tsingtao as Tsolik Baliantz.] Personal communication from Armen Baliantz. Bradbury family documents.

With my husband Bob, I had dinner with Armic's wife and Armic's daughter Jeannette in San Francisco some years ago. They retold the story about Armic first being beaten for no reason.

He now lives in the US and still suffers badly from his injuries because over the period of his internment he suffered three savage beatings by the Japanese. Armic was a pleasant young man. Before the war he helped his parents in their Vienna cafe in Tsingtao which also was a bakery and confectionary shop. Armic's grand daughter is Melissa Etheridge, the world famous singer and songwriter. Melissa's mother, Jeannette Etheridge – who was a very young fellow wartime internee with me – owns the famous San Francisco Tosca Cafe, which is well-known for its show business patrons.

During the hotel internment, I was one of a group of children who put on a Christmas concert for internees. The girls dressed as angels.

Tsingtao Christmas concert 1942 given by child prisoners of the Japanese.
Photograph restoration: Advance Photo.

Early in 1942, Japanese officers told us: "You will be given one hour to go home and collect whatever you want to collect. We are going to put you into another civil assembly camp. You have got only one hour to get ready." They did not tell us where we were going or for how long. Fortunately for my family we only had to climb a fence and we were back home so that saved time, but the dilemma facing the family was: what to take? My mother solved the problem by telling us to place four bed sheets on the floor and to pile whatever came into our minds – clothing, bits and pieces. Looking back it's funny to know what strange things people pack when they have got only an hour to do so. Mum wanted all her jewellery and my father said: "It's no use taking your jewellery. It might get confiscated, so leave it behind."

Then, he had a bright idea. At home, we had built-in cupboards. Pop put the jewellery into little cloth bags, placed the bags under the floorboards in the built-in cupboards and then nailed back the floorboards. We just left the jewellery there for the duration of the war.

We packed clothing and a few blankets. The Japanese said we could take our beds because where we were going we would need furniture. My parents took their double bed and two camp stretchers. We took toothbrushes, towels, linen and my father took as much money as he had. I don't know how much.

I had a large elaborate doll house and a number of beautiful dolls which my uncle André said he would look after for us. Uncle André (mother's brother) had Russian nationality and was not interned. It was a large collection of dolls which I had collected and carefully kept. Years afterwards, we found André sold them because he thought we would be shot and never come back. André also undertook to look after our cocker spaniel dog, Sally. Somehow, a German couple obtained her and renamed her Mutze. We got her back after the war but we didn't have the heart to change her name again so we left it as Mutze. She later died while having puppies.

During our time as prisoners at the hotel, our home was not looted because our servants remained there. They probably thought we would be back because the Japanese had said we were only going to be sent away for a short time. We strongly felt the second time we left home that we were leaving home for a long time.

After we packed, a couple of trucks came and took us together with our furniture to the main Tsingtao railway station where we were placed on a train. On the train, we sat on tatami straw mats. The train took several hours to get to a place called Wei-Hsien (pronounced wee-siang). It is now known as Weifang and it is a major rail junction town in Shantung province. From the railway station we went to our new camp.

The new camp was formerly an American Presbyterian missionary training centre. Its buildings included a well-built church, a hospital, dormitories and two-storey houses surrounded by a brick wall on which there was barbed and, later, electrified wire. There were machine-gun posts at intervals on the walls. On arrival we were allotted rooms. In our case we were given one room sized about 3 metres by 4 metres for my parents, young brother and myself. Upstairs were the de Zutter family from Tsingtao. Unaccompanied single persons were put into same-sex dormitories.

Wei-Hsien is a hot-and-cold place. It has snow in the winter and can be boiling hot in the summer. It is inland and about 120 kilometres west of Tsingtao. Outside the camp, there was farm land on which there were market gardens. Because for three-and-a-half years we did not leave the camp, I cannot describe what the farmers did and what the nearby town area was like.

When we arrived, the camp [20] was in very bad condition because it had not been used for some years. It had earlier been looted by Chinese bandits or Communist forces before the Japanese Army took control of it. The camp's toilets were all blocked or inoperable. There was rubble everywhere.

[20] It was quickly claimed soon after our arrival that the US novelist Pearl Buck (The Good Earth, interalia) and US publisher Henry Luce (Time, Life, Fortune) were born in the Wei-Hsien training centre. Buck (nee Sydenstricker) was born 1892 in West Virginia USA and Luce was born 1892 in Tengchow, Shantung province. Both sets of parents were American missionaries who served in China. Buck's first husband, John Buck, who she divorced in 1934, was also a missionary in China. Consequently it is possible the parents of Buck, Luce, or Buck's first husband may have used the Wei-Hsien facility. The assertions that Buck (1892-1973) and Luce (1892-1967) were born there are not correct.

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