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Excerpts from the Memoirs of Wenceslaus Staal Maluda
Youngest son of a Kadazan, Gallus Maluda, and his wife, Brigidda Kuan Sim, paternally descended from the tall people of the Shantung peninsula.
The Japanese Occupation of Borneo
Conscripted into Japanese Army
The District Office informs me I am now a conscript.
My father weeps at my leaving. I do not know if I will ever see him again.
My mother does not see me off. She works silently in the fields.
We are youths from different villages. They shave our heads.
Every morning we face and hail the rising sun. We speak Japanese words.
We attend classes where we are taught the Japanese language.
I know “Bagairo!”
Sten gun. I know it so well I can sketch it from memory.
We are at target practice. I aim and fire. The Japanese officer says, “You shot the heart of the enemy.”
He also says I will be sent to the front line.
I go away in bitter regret. Why had I shot so well?
The smell of cordite. Human entrails spilled out.
I have to transport sacks of rice downriver. The rowing splashes river water on them and they are soaked. The boatmen and I agree to say the same thing. When the Japanese query us, we say we were attacked by a crocodile.
Atiam. We are leaving. I look back at it and already feel homesick for it.
We enter the quarters of a colonial officer. There we find butter. We rub it on our chests so that we will have hairy chests like the POWs.
In the night we wake one another up with our sharp cries of pain. Something is nibbling our chests. Mice !
The Japanese call me. They want to tell the POWs something and they need me to translate. The men smile encouragingly as I inform them in my Standard Six English: There is no rice.
We are all very hungry. I feel I can eat cardboard. My stomach is clenching and unclenching with each hunger pang. We grumble.
Suddenly we hear the loud report of a gun.
Immediately I feel full.
Some boys from a different village show me their trick. They go into the village and find some pigs. They pretend to relieve themselves. The pigs come to them, and wait, ready to eat their faeces. The boys grab one and have it for supper.
There is a bridge in the area. We stick a length of thin bamboo carefully through the rice sack and rice grains come out in a trickle.
We boil the rice under the bridge.
I am on guard duty. One of the POWs runs into the trees with a shovel. The Japanese yell. I find that the man had to go and relieve himself right away.
The POWs are working at the aerodrome. One POW and I speak to each other.
The Japanese demand to know who brought who to talk.
It is another hot day. The POWs work by the river. They come to me and say they would like to cool down in the river water. The Japanese see them in the river and reprimand me.
I am troubled by my dreams. In my dream last night I am running to the ship. It will carry me away from here. I am afraid it will leave without me. As I run, I am slowed down by vines. They are holding me back.
A prisoner drops out of the march. His feet are swollen. He cannot go on. A Japanese soldier goes with him.
The prisoner sits at the very edge of the river bank, the water flowing below. He looks at us, filing past. Soon everyone has gone by him.
A shot rings out. We do not see it - maybe that is what he wants - but we know he is falling into the river.
We come to a waste heap. The POWs look through the heap for food. There are some papaya peelings. They eat the papaya peels.
We are certain the Allies have landed. This gives me hope of escape. I think: If the Japanese catch me, I shall act as if I have gone berserk.
Escape
I make for the hills. I contact my elder brother, Emmanual. He and my other older brother, Raymond, were not conscripted because they are married and needed to keep growing rice. Our father died in 1944. His good friend, Mill Hill Missionary Father Staal, whom he held in such high esteem that he gave his name to me as my middle name, also died the same year. I eat what Emmanual brings me. I move from hill to hill.
The Japanese have interrogated my mother, and frightened my sisters, Beatrice and Rita, bayoneting possible hiding places in the house.
Postscript by Clare, the fourth of the five children of Wenceslaus Staal Maluda
Rendezvous: My father flies with my mother to Australia 45 years after ’45 accompanied by their youngest, Alphonsa, from Kota Kinabalu, the former Jesselton of British North Borneo, to visit the family of the eldest, Irene, in Riverhills, Brisbane, Queensland where he is prevailed upon to look into a roomy closet – and there finds me hidden. I had flown down earlier from America.
The intertwining of his life with the lives of the mass of men of the Allied Forces had come out in his three daughters. The eldest studied, and settled, in Australia. The middle studied, married an American of maternal English descent, and became a permanent resident, in the United States. The youngest studied in the United Kingdom.
My parents’ two sons are named for St. Ladislaus and St. Stanislaus.
A visit to the doctor (with whom we were well acquainted from before he migrated to Australia) confirmed that I was with child. I told my father that if it was a boy, his 9th grandchild would be named after him. His grandson is Michael (the middle name of both his father and adoptive paternal grandfather who described himself as "Bedpan Commando" being deaf in one ear and subsequently sent to work in the military hospital) Wenceslaus Maluda (my father's name) O'Brien (my then-husband is of English descent; his biological mother is Bertha Selders of New Mexico - I found out that the Selders' family motto is 'Optimum pati' - 'To suffer is best' and Selders itself is Old English for 'hill with a flat top.')
I knew how much he loved the POWs and how grateful he was to the Australians who set the remaining captives free. And was thoroughly pleased to be able to ask this question of him in the homeland of his rescuers,
“What was the end of the war like?”
He replied, “Release from hell.”
I sense it troubled him sorely that during the war he found himself “on the wrong side” even though it was through no fault of his own. In the end, where it matters, he achieved common ground by departing in the same manner as did so many of the prisoners of war. Unable to complete the necessary regular rendezvous of temporal body and daily bread, his oesophagus having been closed off by cancer, he starved, sixty years in their wake, to death.
Dad hid in the hills and escaped from the Japanese who went to his mother's house - my grandfather, Gallus Maluda, having died in 1944, within months of the death of his good friend, Mill Hill Missionary Father Staal - to look for him with bayonets.
With the same pleasure I would like you to know that I brought him and my mother up to Canada after graduation from the College of Our Lady of the Elms in 1986. We walked on Canadian soil - homeland of Conservator of Forests Harry Keith, the husband of the author of Land Below the Wind, Three Came Home, and White Man Returns, Agnes Newton Keith.
Dad spent his last years surrounded by his descendants, including Michael Wenceslaus Maluda O'Brien. He had cancer of the oesophagus and was operated on. Eventually he could not swallow even blended rice gruel. He died ultimately of starvation. He was 83.
In front of his elaborate tiled - and roofed - tomb lies the grave of Michael O'Brien, Sr., the father of Michael O'Brien, Jr., British expatriate residing nearby when he is not away on his travels to Canada, etc. or back in the UK. Mr. O'Brien Sr., died of a heart attack while watching a ball game on television around 2 a.m. He had just returned from a tour of Vietnam. Mr. O'Brien Jr., says "Now they can carry on their conversation forever."
I am thrilled he lies near the comforting presence of his beloved White Man. White Man Returns indeed.
Yours sincerely,
Clare Maluda
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