The Devil’s Garden

 

You want to know about evil? Real, honest-to-Christ evil that wears a smile and promises you the world while it’s sharpening the knife for your back? Let me tell you about a place called Klapa Noenggal, way out there in the steaming jungle heat of Java, where the year was 1944 and the world had gone madder than a shithouse rat.

Now, I know what you’re thinking—another war story, another tale of Nazi nastiness or Japanese brutality. But this one’s different, friend. This one’s about the kind of evil that comes wrapped in good intentions, the sort that makes you want to believe, right up until the moment you realize you’re already in hell.

Picture this: Batavia, December of ‘44. The war’s still raging like a fever dream, and tucked away in the internment camps are these kids—Indo-European boys, caught between worlds like flies in amber. Not quite Dutch enough for the Dutch, not quite Indonesian enough for the locals, and sure as shit not trusted by the Japanese who’ve been running the show since ‘42.

Enter Piet Hein van den Eeckhout.

Now, there’s a name that should’ve come with a warning label, like those little skull-and-crossbones they put on rat poison. Van den Eeckhout had that peculiar gift that all the worst monsters share—he could make you believe he was your salvation while he was digging your grave.

He’d gotten himself sprung from the Tjimahi camp by sweet-talking the Japanese, telling them exactly what they wanted to hear about loyalty and cooperation. And once he was out, breathing free air while his fellow prisoners rotted in their cages, he set about his real work: hunting for prey.

“We’re starting something special,” he told those boys, his voice smooth as altar wine. “An agricultural colony. You’ll learn farming, get your own plot of land when it’s done. Real work for real men.”

Eighty boys signed up. Kids, really—sixteen to twenty-three, with that terrible hunger that only the truly desperate know. They looked at van den Eeckhout like he was Moses come to lead them out of Egypt, when he was really just another snake in a cheap suit.

The place they sent them to was called Klapa Noenggal, and if you’d seen it on one of those old Dutch colonial maps, it would’ve looked pretty as a picture. Rubber plantations, coconut groves, even some caves where they used to harvest bird nests for Chinese soup. The kind of place where a man might make an honest living, if the world wasn’t going to hell in a handbasket.

But maps lie, friend. They always do.

What those boys found when they got there wasn’t paradise—it was a preview of the pit. No farming equipment, no agricultural training, just backbreaking labor from seven in the morning until six at night, making charcoal for Japanese war machines with their bare hands and whatever tools they could scrounge.

The barracks were damp wooden coffins crawling with insects that bit and stung and never gave a man a moment’s peace. The food was rice and vegetable soup—150 cubic centimeters a day, just enough to keep you breathing but not enough to keep you strong. Just enough to make you grateful for every moldy grain.

And running the show were two men who’d discovered that cruelty was its own reward.

J.B. Keller was the camp commander, an Indo-European like the boys he was tormenting. There’s something particularly poisonous about that kind of betrayal—when someone who should understand your suffering becomes the instrument of it instead. Keller had a stick he liked to use, and he’d make the boys stand for hours as punishment, like scarecrows in a field of misery.

But the real monster was the Japanese commander, Maehara. That bastard treated those kids like prisoners of war, like enemy combatants instead of the desperate, hungry boys they were. He had that dead look in his eyes that you see sometimes in people who’ve discovered that inflicting pain is easier than feeling it.

The boys started disappearing.

Some tried to escape, walking dozens of kilometers through jungle and plantation with nothing but the rags on their backs and the hope that maybe, just maybe, they could make it back to Batavia alive. Some made it. Others didn’t. The jungle’s got a way of keeping its secrets, and Java in 1944 was particularly good at making people vanish without a trace.

The ones who got caught? Well, let’s just say there were other camps, worse camps, places where even the ghosts were afraid to tread.

By the time Japan surrendered in August of ‘45, there were maybe a dozen boys left at Klapa Noenggal. A dozen out of eighty. You do the math.

But van den Eeckhout wasn’t done yet. Oh no, that particular devil still had work to do. Come April and May of ‘45, he opened another camp—Halimoen, on the outskirts of Batavia. This one was Klapa Noenggal with all the bugs worked out, all the inefficiencies corrected.

Same forced labor, but now with added ideology. Afternoons filled with political indoctrination, military drills with wooden sticks, propaganda sessions designed to hollow out whatever was left of those boys’ souls and fill the empty spaces with Japanese loyalty.

It was more controlled, more militaristic, more perfect in its awfulness.

And when the survivors of the Glodok Prison massacre—that’s another story, friend, and not one for the faint of heart—were finally released, guess where they ended up? That’s right. Halimoen, van den Eeckhout’s newest masterpiece.

After the war, the Dutch tried to clean up the mess, tried to prosecute the collaborators and war criminals. J.B. Keller got seven years in prison—less than the ten the prosecutor wanted, but more than the nothing he probably deserved to serve in a just world.

As for van den Eeckhout? That slippery son of a bitch vanished into the chaos of the Indonesian revolution. Changed his name to Amir Daeng Mataram, married a woman from Manado, and disappeared into the crowd like smoke in a windstorm.

He surfaced once more in the Netherlands, but they wouldn’t give him a passport—seems even the Dutch had their limits. After that, nothing. Some say he died in Sukabumi in the ‘90s, but who knows? Men like that have a way of surviving long past their expiration date.

The thing about Klapa Noenggal that gets to me, that really crawls under my skin and sets up housekeeping, is how perfectly it captures the banality of evil. It wasn’t some grand, dramatic atrocity. It was just a small experiment in human misery, a little laboratory where monsters in cheap suits could explore the limits of human endurance and desperation.

Those boys went there believing in promises of land and work and a future worth living. What they found instead was a preview of hell, administered by men who’d discovered that breaking human beings was easier than fixing them.

And the worst part? It worked.

Not the way van den Eeckhout intended, maybe. He never got his loyal army of Indo-European supporters, never created the perfect collaboration he’d envisioned. But he proved something far more sinister: that hope itself could be weaponized, that the very dreams that keep us human could be turned into chains.

In the end, Klapa Noenggal wasn’t really about agriculture or loyalty or Japanese war aims. It was about power—the power to take someone’s trust and twist it into submission, to transform hope into despair as efficiently as those boys transformed wood into charcoal.

And somewhere out there in the steaming jungles of Java, if you know where to look and you’re brave enough to go looking, you can still find traces of that devil’s garden. Rotting barracks, rusted tools, maybe even some of those caves where they used to harvest bird nests in happier times.

But I wouldn’t recommend going alone.

Some places hold onto their darkness long after the people who made them dark are gone. Some places remember.

And Klapa Noenggal remembers everything.