As we go through old memoirs written by those who had served in Sarawak, be it during the Brooke administration or the British colony, there are indeed countless fascinating stories.
And what makes these old stories more fascinating are the people behind them.
Naturally, these people don’t feature in our textbooks because of the minor roles they played in our history, but that doesn’t make their life stories less interesting to learn or read about.
Kenelm Hubert Digby published his memoir Lawyer in the Wilderness about his life in Sarawak in 1980.
In his book, he told us plenty of stories that took place from the middle of 1934 to the end of 1951.
One of those stories was about the first medical officer appointed at Batu Lintang Camp during the Japanese occupation of Sarawak.
According to Digby, the doctor was a Jewish refugee from Germany who had served in the Prussian cavalry in the First World War.
“He was primarily a dentist by profession, but he was also qualified to practice as a doctor in Germany. This qualification was not recognized in Sarawak, but in 1939 he had obtained a contract as Government Dentist,” Digby wrote.
On how he ended up in Sarawak and became a dentist here, Digby did not explain.
Digby didn’t even share the dentist’s real name other than stating that he was generally known as ‘Zo’ due to his frequent use of that German exclamation.
Apart from that, Digby shared that Dr Zo was a very amiable man whose principal interest was music.
Dr Zo, the Jewish doctor in a Japanese POW camp
When the Japanese landed in Kuching on Christmas Eve in 1941. Dr Zo was quickly interned at Batu Lintang Camp along with the rest of the Europeans.
Digby narrated, “In the early days of the occupation was detained with the other European members of the Medical Department in the General Hospital. He was sent to the police station to tend the wounds of the “Astana Party,” and thereafter he stayed with us and acted as our medical officer, until the other doctors were brought to Lintang in or about August 1943. Zo did great and good work amongst us, with the very minimum of medicines and equipment and in the face of a barrage of unreasoning hostility.”
Since Dr Zo had served in the German Army before, Digby claimed his military training was ‘always coming to the fore’.
He wrote, “Most of us were satisfied with our status as civilians and did our best to offer moderate passive resistance to the military discipline which was imposed upon use. Many of us had never been soldiers and with the best will in the world, which we by no means possessed, we would have had great difficulty in comprehending the working of the military mind. When it was a Japanese mind as well our difficulty was greater still, Zo ,however, had no such worries. His background and upbringing had made him extremely receptive to military command, and it was in his nature to obey without question any instruction emanating from a gentleman of sufficiently martial appearance. He seemed to realise what our masters were doing and why they did it. One obtained the impression that, their cruelty apart, he would have given the same sort of orders if he had been in their place.”
During his interment at Batu Lintang Camp, Dr Zo volunteered his service at the camp ‘hospital’.
Digby pointed out that Dr Zo did excellent work there in spite the filthy conditions in which the patients were housed and the almost total absence of medicine.
“He pulled several teeth out without any sort of anesthetic,” he stated.
Dr Zo and his life after the war
According to Digby, Dr Zo’s services to His Majesty’s subjects received poor recognition.
After the war, he returned to England on the same boat with most of the Europeans from Sarawak.
Unfortunately for Dr Zo, he was arrested at London and once again repeated his WWII nightmare of being placed behind barbed wire.
Digby wrote, “Only the valiant efforts of the Sarawak Government Agent secured his release after three weeks. Even then he was not given his full ration of clothing coupons and turned up to dine with me at a Piccadilly restaurant in curious and borrowed apparel. He was not permitted to travel more than five miles from his residence without police permission, and so, since he was far too proud to seek such permission, he was debarred from visiting his friends who lived outside London.”
Dr Zo and his sad life ending
The depressing part of Dr Zo’s story is where he ended up after the war.
When he was living in Kuching, Zo had a wife and a seven-year-old son.
Shortly before the Japanese landed, he managed to evacuate his family through Kalimantan.
The mother and son somehow managed to reach Java.
Sadly, Zo’s wife committed suicide in Java and later his son was adopted by a Dutch couple.
Zo’s unfortunate fate did not stop there as his son was killed by Indonesian insurgents soon after that.
At the last part about Zo in his book, Digby wrote, “Like the rest of us, Zo had come home immensely looking forward to reunion with his family, and, when the sad story was told to him after his release from the British internment camp, he was a broken man. He resented bitterly the treatment which England was according to him and went to Sweden, where he died at the end of 1949. I was invited to write an obituary for the Sarawak Gazette, but my account of his persecution was deemed to be unprintable, and so my contribution was rejected.”
Since what Digby wrote for his obituary never saw light of day, we can only imagine what the content was.
