Father Unger remembered watching Spies walk onto the ship, the Van Imhoff, in which they were to come to India, with a roll of his canvases under his arm and a cigarette in his mouth, only to have them taken away from him as he started up the gangplank. Even so, Spies thought it a special piece of luck to be on that ship, he told the priest, since he would be going back to a country where he had been happy, where he had friends from before the war. They walked up the gangplank and were packed into barbed-wire cages on the deck. Thirty men to each cage about 150 centimeters high. Spies was not far from him, but inside the cages they were no longer able to talk or even move. The ship set sail. Nobody had enough water, the sweat, heat, and stench were unbearable. There was hardly any food. Two days like this rocking in the ocean, and then at about noon on the third day a Japanese bomb fell close to the ship. It was 19th January 1942. After some time another explosion, then a third when the ship reared up and fell back. And then silence. The hissing sound of steam. Cries of wild panic from the prisoners as the Dutch guards began abandoning ship. They took the lifeboats and were gone.
