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Re: 11 Year-Old Girl Spent Months in POW Camp

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: January 10, 2003

"Only 11, girl spent months in prisoner-of-war camp

Woman recalls how, during WWII, she and her sisters were taken to the Sime Road camp - which has been marked as a historical site

By Lim Hsin Hin

THREE weeks after their Eurasian mother died in 1945, leaving Singaporean Peggie Shrapnel and her three younger sisters orphans, Japanese army officers took the girls from their grandfather's home in Katong and bundled them onto a lorry.

Several long attap-roofed huts linked by concrete walkways once formed part of the prisoner-of-war camp in Sime Road, Ms Shrapnel, 70, revisits what remains of the site. -- ERNEST GOH

They did not know their destination that March 25, but the children, between seven and 11 years old, were not worried about their fate.

'When you are 11 years old, you don't know how to worry,' said Ms Shrapnel, who is now 70 years old. 'All we knew then was how to be afraid, hungry and tired.'

The lorry deposited them at a prisoner-of-war camp in Sime Road.

The place, now an empty plot except for bits of foundation and designated by the authorities as residential land, was marked at the end of last year as a historic site by the National Heritage Board.

It is the fifth of 10 places identified under a collaboration with Singapore Pools.

The camp, which is opposite the Singapore Island Country Club golf course, served as General Arthur E. Percival's base from December 1941.

From there, the commanding officer of the British forces oversaw the ill-fated British effort to defend the island.

He abandoned the place on Feb 11, 1942, when the advancing Japanese forces were only 1.6 km away from the camp. The British forces surrendered four days later. p> Two years after that, the camp was used by the Japanese as a place to put European and Eurasian prisoners of war.

Around 3,000 civilians, including Americans and Dutch, were interned there during the last days of the Japanese Occupation of Singapore. p> The four sisters were targeted by the Japanese because of their British links - their father was an Englishman. He died in 1939.

According to Ms Shrapnel, a retiree living on the east coast of Singapore, the 70-acre camp was a former rubber estate.

When she was put there, it held several long attap-roofed huts, all linked by concrete paths. Each hut housed about 50 people.

She said: 'It was fenced in with barbed wire, but even if you could escape where could you go? Nobody would take you in if you were running from the Japanese.'

The place had separate sections for men and women, she recalled, and both were allowed to meet every Sunday for two hours. Then, families would picnic with whatever scraps of food they had saved.

Ms Shrapnel, who spent six months there before the Japanese surrendered Singapore on Sept 12, 1945, is all for having the site marked.

'People nowadays only hear about war, but we went through it. For them, war is news, not experience, so they should know what happened in the past,' she said.

The Straits Times"