The Peanut Butter Miracle
I have always enjoyed writing. Whilst publishing Tea, War & Crocodiles: Tales from an extraordinary life I have written several short stories which I will be pleased to share with you in my blog.
The first is The Peanut Butter Miracle. This story was published on 23 December 2020 in the NSW Seniors Stories Volume 6. You can read the article and watch my interview with celebrity, author and comedian Jean Kittson regarding this story below
Read the Article - Seniors' Stories Volume 6
Watch the Interview - Seniors Stories Vol 6 - Ferdinand
THE PEANUT BUTTER MIRACLE
An Incident in War
At 14 years old, alone in the Japanese all male concentration camp on Java, I was not just ravenous, but starving. But then, so was everyone else and it made no difference that I had to work for even the pitifully mean provisions provided.
“Starving” is different from “hungry”, even from “ravenous”. The latter two are a craving, in a Dickensian sense an unfulfilled want for, “…MORE…??”
For me, starving in the concentration camp was looking down into a pitch-black bottomless pit, an overwhelming endurance which blotted out even a flicker of hope. But the choice was stark: give in to despair and die, or, “…When there is nothing
in you except the will which says to them: “Hold on…”[1], to survive.
Life holds some strange twists and this was definitely one.
In our camp working for one’s living was tied to a paper entry of 10 cents a day for every person who lined up for “Tenko”–morning Roll Call. With no-one excused, the sick or incapacitated in our ten thousand-man prison camp unable to stand were not counted, and so we each never received the already meagre ten cents worth of food. And with it came the unceasing craving which even the stout hearted faced with no confident hope for better to come.
In the game of life, the concept of hope is never better than a gamble with such a thing as luck. As days stretched into weeks, weeks into months and amazingly into years in which nothing much good came to pass, suddenly my luck changed.
I was working alone in a small vegetable plot behind the Japanese kitchens when the door opened. There stood the Japanese cook, no more than a couple of centimetres taller than me, but he wore boots while I went barefoot. The cook’s calling, “Tobang, koko ni” – the feared command, “Prisoner, come here!” – usually followed by slaps, kicks or beatings, I expected the worst.
Born in Java to Dutch parents, I did not speak Japanese, other than understanding their all too often experienced commands. Neither did the cook speak Indonesian, used both by the Japanese and we prisoners. How surprised was I when his arms not threatening, rather a kind of invitation, he beckoned me, “Koko ni, koko ni”, come to the kitchen?
Inside, the cook pointed to a table on which stood a small hand operated meat mincer and under it an enamel bowl. Next, he pointed to two buckets: one unbelievably filled with roasted peanuts, the second with sugar, and a small container of salt; delicacies of an almost forgotten past.
Noticing my confusion, making winding movements in the air, the cook beckoned first to the mincer. Dropping peanuts into it and continuing his winding movements over the mincer, he mimicked adding sugar and salt to the nuts.
In a flash of clarity that came to me, “PEANUT BUTTER!!”, I exclaimed. I will never know if the Japanese cook had understood me, but his lusty, “HAI” – “YES” – I took for an agreement.
Left alone, I began making the raw ingredients into paste by loading the mincer, turning the handle and watching a crumbly substance tumble from the spout. Judging it rather too coarse, I stuffed it back into the machine for another go. And when after a third treatment, it was finally judged to be a reasonable imitation of the pre-war, store-bought variety.
Even though the process of this wartime peanut butter-making was laborious, I did not mind. It was certainly easier than digging ditches or performing the other heavy labour I was used to. And in truth I thought the situation ripe for an opportunistic exploitation!
Every time I had to reload the small mincer with partly ground paste, taking care that the cook could not see me, I stuffed a portion of the delicacy in my mouth. I cannot describe the sensation of the taste of it at the time, or the surge of energy that coursed through my entire body, other than to say that it was overwhelming. And the miracle continued.
For the rest of the war the Japanese cook kept me working in his kitchen cleaning and dishwashing, where he allowed me to scrape caked-on food residue from his pots and pans and eat it: I could hope to survive.
Unfortunately, with the memory of my own good fortune sometimes comes a feeling that I compromised a common bond with camp mates who unlike me continued to suffer. I cannot forget that many, too many of my friends and unknown fellow prisoners never made it to the end of the war.
VJ (Victory over Japan) Day remembrance annually falls on 15 August. In our camp the news that the war was finally over did not reach us till 28 August 1945. On that day, every year I remember those with whom I shared a common lot.
When I reminisce on the war that robbed me of my childhood and too early challenged me to either survive as a man or probably die, I sometimes wonder was it by chance, or luck, or hope, or simply a stubborn will to beat the odds? Or was it by the grace of God’s mercy which rescued my future through something as common as peanut butter? The answer to this rests with one’s own judgement.
To me, paradoxically more than a chance incident in war that saved my life, ‘The Peanut Butter Miracle’ reflects the kind of tenacity expressed in Kipling’s “If”, “…When there is nothing in you except the will which says to them: “Hold on….”.
I Held on.
A true story.
Prisoner of war1942- 45, Çimahi (Java) concentration camp.
At time of writing 91 years of age.
[1] “If”, Rudyard Kipling’s Verse, Definitive Edition, Hodder and Stoughton Limited, London