Nanny Saved Baby From Bombed Hospital, Loved Him as Her Own

A baby born in a concentration camp survived a hospital bombing in 1943 Indonesia, only to be saved by a woman who would love him like her own son for three precious years.

Walt Visser entered the world in July 1943 inside the Darmo Camp, where Japanese forces held his mother Tina and siblings during World War II. His father Tim was imprisoned separately. The malnourished newborn quickly fell ill and was taken to a hospital.

Then the hospital was bombed. Walt was one of just two survivors pulled from the rubble.

A Japanese commanding officer found the red-haired baby in the debris and took him home. He hired Erna Ouwens as a nanny to care for the child. When fellow officers criticized him for keeping a white child in his home, he told Ouwens to take Walt and leave.

She did. And she loved him fiercely.

"He was more corpse than living body," Ouwens later wrote to Walt's biological parents. "He had dysentery and malaria, and no one wanted to touch him because he was so skinny and dirty." But none of that mattered to her.

After Japan surrendered in 1945, Walt's parents returned to the Netherlands with their other children, believing their baby had died in the bombing. They searched desperately through the Red Cross and children's aid, finding nothing.

Finally, a newspaper ad led a friend to the Ouwens home in East Java. They found a healthy, cuddly toddler in a cute playsuit, cherished by a family who adored him. "Your darling has been kept safe," they wrote to his parents.

Ouwens pleaded to keep raising Walt. "We love him so much," she wrote. "How terribly will he cry when he must leave us."

Children's aid officials visited and saw no reason to remove the thriving child from such loving care. Walt stayed.

Sunny's Take: The bond between Ouwens and Walt shows how love transcends blood and borders. When a sick baby needed someone to see past his condition and circumstances, Ouwens didn't just care for him. She fought to keep him, wrote heartfelt letters to his parents, and gave him the childhood that saved his life twice over.

In October 1946, Walt fell ill again at age three. Ouwens brought him to a Dutch medical center for treatment. Officials promised to bring him back after his appointment. Instead, they smuggled him out the back door and onto a ship bound for Holland.

Walt never saw Ouwens again. Now 81 and living in Fergus, Ontario, he wonders how long she sat on that doorstep, waiting to bring her boy home.

Walt went on to serve in the Canadian army, earn university degrees, and sit on municipal council. But only recently did he fully understand what Ouwens meant to his survival. She loved a dying baby back to life when no one else would try.