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For my parents, Jeff and Else; the survivors of war; and all the ships that follow them.
The past is never where you think you left it.
—KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
A BRIEF WORLD WAR II TIME LINE RELEVANT TO THE NETHERLANDS AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES
May 10–14, 1940: Germany, under Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime, invades the Netherlands with a blitzkrieg that destroys the Rotterdam city center. The Dutch royal family flees to the U.K.
May 15, 1940: The Netherlands surrenders to Germany, and falls under German occupation. Only the Dutch NSB (Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging: the national socialist party), headed by Anton Mussert, is allowed to stay active as long as the party allies itself with the Nazi regime.
1941–1945: Mass deportation of Dutch Jews to Nazi death camps, most via Camp Westerbork in the Netherlands. Out of approximately 140,000 members of the Netherlands’ Jewish population, over 100,000 are killed in the Holocaust.
December 7, 1941: Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in a preemptive strike to prevent the American fleet from interfering with its invasion of American, British, and Dutch territories in the Pacific including the Philippines, Guam, Singapore, Malaya, and Hong Kong. Their plans to conquer the Dutch East Indies are made clear, so the Netherlands declares war on Japan preemptively and begins to prepare. As Japan successfully invades each neighboring country, the people of the Dutch East Indies know they are one step closer to being invaded. With the Allied forces occupied in Europe fighting the Nazis, there is very little defense.
February 27, 1942: Japan begins its assault on the Dutch East Indies with the Battle of the Java Sea. This battle lasts only a few days, with the Royal Dutch Indies Army going into the battle assured of their own defeat.
March 8, 1942: The Dutch surrender to Japan in the Dutch East Indies. Dutch, European, and other Western civilians (including some British and Australian residents) are rounded up, registered, and sent to hundreds of internment camps throughout the islands, where they remain for the remainder of the war. Indonesian civilians are allowed to remain free. An estimated 30 percent of the POWs die in the camps, due mainly to starvation, with untreated bacterial diseases and officer brutality also contributing factors.
September 5, 1944: Mad Tuesday in the Netherlands. As the Allied forces move up from the south after D-day, the Dutch people erroneously believe they are about to be liberated, and begin celebrating. Many Nazi collaborators flee to Germany. Operation Market Garden, an attempt by the Allied forces to control the bridges and end the occupation of the Netherlands, fails disastrously, and the war continues.
November 1944–May 1945: The Dutch Hunger Winter. The Germans cut off food and supplies to the northern part of the country during one of the coldest winters on record. Over 4 million Dutch people are affected, and 18,000 citizens starve to death.
May 8, 1945: Germany surrenders, bringing World War II to an end in the Netherlands. Immediately, Hatchet Day, a period during which vigilante justice is carried out on collaborators, begins. Collaborators, members of the NSB party, and girls who have had relationships with German soldiers are rounded up and sent to internment camps to await trial for treason.
July 26, 1945: In the Potsdam Declaration, the United States, the U.K., and China demand that Japan surrender immediately or face “prompt and utter destruction.” This declaration is ignored by Japan.
August 6, 1945: The United States drops an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. President Harry S. Truman threatens Japan with “a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth” if they do not surrender.
August 9, 1945: The United States drops a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, again demanding Japan’s immediate surrender.
August 15, 1945: Japan announces that it will surrender. In the Dutch East Indies, the Red Cross drops leaflets into the camps, announcing the end of the war. However, prisoners are advised to stay in their camps, as Japan’s notice of impending capitulation has triggered the uprising of an Indonesian independence movement. Indonesian rebels immediately begin fighting to prevent the country from reverting to Dutch colonial government control.
August 17, 1945: Indonesian nationalist groups, led by Sukarno, proclaim independence from the Netherlands. Dutch military forces turn from fighting the Japanese to fighting the Indonesian nationalists. Ironically, the Japanese soldiers who are awaiting official surrender in the Dutch East Indies are now enlisted to protect Dutch citizens and their own camp prisoners from rebel attacks by the Indonesian nationalist fighters. Still, many Dutch prisoners who have survived the Japanese internment camps, unaware of the dangerous political situation, do not get protection in time and leave their camps, only to be murdered by Indonesian rebels. Likewise, thousands of mixed-race Indos who have spent the war outside the camps are killed during this Bersiap period.
September 2, 1945: The Japanese officially sign a capitulation declaration, ending World War II. With the danger from the volatile war for independence in Indonesia, Dutch citizens there are immediately put on Red Cross ships and sent to various repatriation camps in places like Australia and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) to await further travel to the Netherlands. Most of these people never return to Indonesia.
December 27, 1949: After years of fighting in which many Indonesian people are killed, the Dutch government officially recognizes Indonesia as an independent country, and the Dutch East Indies as a colony of the Netherlands formally ceases to exist.
PREFACE
My father was in a Japanese internment camp as a child. My mother’s parents were arrested as suspected Nazi collaborators. These are facts. Also facts: My father was part of an oppressive colonial system. My mother was put in an orphanage, and her parents were tortured.
Growing up in the United States with the authoritative voice of history books and media, I absorbed an interpretation of war that adhered to a bifurcated world of absolutes. On one side, a medal pinned to the chest of a proud soldier. On the other, an officer in handcuffs. I learned about winners and losers, justice and evil, glory and shame. I learned that there are victims who have a right to their victimhood and others who have not earned the right to complain. It’s a stringent voice of judgment to reckon with. But the more I hear my parents’ stories and see how their war experiences influenced the people they became and how I was raised, the more I understand that war injures without prejudice. It injures participants and bystanders and all the people who come after them. Inherited trauma. Like a pileup on a foggy freeway, each car slamming into the car in front of it, war injures generations down the line who haven’t a clue what started the chain reaction in that fog behind them but feel the impact and find themselves skidding off the road too.
* * *
World War II is an ever-present specter in my family. Beneath everything, there exists a silent backstory that my father has seen some kind of hell that I will neve
r be able to tenant sufficiently to understand him. I know he was in a Japanese concentration camp in the Dutch East Indies, but what does that mean to me as I try to navigate a relationship with this difficult man sitting before me? When I was growing up, whenever my father did something strange or infuriating, my mother muttered, “That’s his camp syndrome.” For years I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but we accepted it and understood that he was entitled to his character quirks and flaws.
My Nazi-allied maternal grandfather crept more silently in the family. I didn’t even know he was there for many years, though I sensed a presence I couldn’t explain and a sadness in my mother that couldn’t be comforted. We always knew about my father’s war trauma, but we never talked about my mother’s experiences as a little girl in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. I was a teenager when I learned that my mother’s parents had been arrested after the war and that my mother had spent time in a children’s home. But it wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned about the conditions there, and about the struggles of her family as they attempted to reconstruct their lives as the subjects of seething cultural hatred. My mother felt she didn’t deserve to claim her pain about the war the way my father was permitted his “camp syndrome.” It was always something to keep secret because I think at her core, she believed maybe she deserved it.
I want to know why she lost her own sense of self-esteem and right to take up space in the world. I believe the reasons are connected to the war. But now, as I uncover more facts, how do I process them? Raised watching Holocaust films, visiting the Anne Frank museum, listening to my friend’s grandmother talk to my elementary school class, the crude black numbers tattooed on her aging skin held up as an edict, what do I do now with the growing knowledge that all of that wickedness is also partly my heritage?
In a strange twist of irony, the more our parents bury their own trauma, their own grief over a lost childhood and a fragmented family, the more it bubbles up in me, my sister, and my brother—their offspring. But we can’t name it. Unlike them, we have no tangible anchor for our sense of loss. Groping in the dark for memories we don’t have, we can’t quite explain why we have increasing difficulty parting with old magazines or T-shirts with yellow stains, what makes us withdraw from or cling to love neurotically, why we lie awake with anxiety as we run through an endless list of all the things that could possibly go wrong tomorrow and all the things we might lose. We can’t tell you why we imbue food with a power beyond its purpose and starve ourselves or binge compulsively. But we learned some of these behaviors from our parents, and they learned them somewhere to protect themselves. Some of us can ignore our questions, quelled by all-encompassing explanations like “camp syndrome” and “survivor’s guilt.” And some of us, driven to give those terms a more comprehensive definition, hoping to fill in the blanks of our own gaping heritage, go looking for the past.
PART I
FATHER
In the midst of winter,
I found there was,
within me,
an invincible summer.
—ALBERT CAMUS
1
SELAMAT DATANG DI INDONESIA
Java Sea, Indonesia, December 2014
Humming above the warm equatorial waters of the Java Sea, a small commuter plane approaches the island of Java, Indonesia. Inside the plane, my eighty-three-year-old father hunches over the O of his window as the misted island comes into view after thirty hours of travel. He has grown quiet, his aging eyes focused on the world below as the plane drops altitude and the palm trees rise through the steam to meet us. I crane my neck to look over his shoulder while the Central Java city of Semarang fills the window. We have come here together, a journey of return for him, a journey of discovery for me.
Nearly seven decades earlier, my father stood on that soil below us, a skeletal fourteen-year-old kid in a loincloth who hadn’t seen his parents in years, watching an Allied military plane appear in a halo of sun to announce that the war was over and he would live. He had spent two years in a men’s forced-labor camp by that time, separated from his parents and siblings. In the country of his birth below, my father helped carry his friends out of that internment camp in bamboo coffins. He hallucinated during malarial fevers, and chewed banana leaves to settle the effects of dysentery. He tried to sleep on his stomach as the blood from a whip’s lashes formed into itchy scabs on his back. Sixty-nine years earlier, in that place below, my father was a kid who had nothing left, watching the news fall from that plane in a shower of tiny papers, like so many butterflies descending from the sky: To All Allied Prisoners of War: The Japanese Forces Have Surrendered Unconditionally and the War Is Over. Stay in your camp until you get further orders from us. Deus ex machina. He was saved. Over a third of his camp’s approximately fifteen hundred inhabitants had died of starvation and disease by that point. Standing in the center yard of his camp, my father raised his arms to his rescuers and lived to bring me into the world three decades later. And now he and I will stand together on that same ground.
The country we are approaching is my father’s memory, but it has been my mythology. On the other side of the planet, in a suburb of Los Angeles, my siblings and I grew up with muddled identities as the children of Dutch immigrants. We returned to Holland every summer to stay connected to our roots, and lived in hyphenation as Dutch-Americans. Yet there was always a third cultural layer complicating our heritage, one that we had less access to. Like a relative who had mysteriously died prior to my birth and was never spoken of, the ghost of Indonesia silently filled our home with inherited relics: carved furniture and batik pillows, Bahasa words mixed into our English and Dutch, nasi and bami goreng fragrant with Indonesian spices on the dinner table.
Despite its significant presence in my life, I have never set foot in Indonesia until now. I’ve spent months planning this visit with my parents, mapping out a trajectory that will take us to the sites of my father’s childhood.
We approach our starting point. We secure our tray tables. Flight attendants strap themselves in. Wheels touch asphalt. I look at my father, his hair an unkempt cloud of white, his hands spotted with age. He’s stronger and more persistent in life than men with half his years, a scientist who still works diligently toward a breakthrough in his laser isotope separation process for hours every day in the hopes of revolutionizing the world with safer and more efficient carbon-free energy. But there’s no denying that he’s moving into the twilight of his life. This may be his first and last visit to his home country. It’s a moment that takes hold of me in its poignancy. My heart rises into my throat. As the flight attendants take their places at the exit, we gather our belongings and prepare to disembark for a two-week journey through my father’s past. I hope to find answers. I hope to connect to my father’s war, and to better understand his wounds. I hope to find images to fill the empty spaces in my history.
Selamat datang di Semarang. Thank you for flying with us. Welcome to Java. Enjoy your stay.
In the arrivals terminal, my father’s duct-taped suitcase appears between the sleek spinner bags on the conveyer belt, and we pull its frayed heft from the belt in a team effort. It’s an unwieldy 1980s suitcase without wheels that he insists is still “perfectly good,” crammed full of sweaters and jeans that he won’t be able to use in this heat but brings along “just in case.” He also has two pairs of busted shoes he has brought along because he heard that they can be resoled inexpensively here. My mind momentarily flashes on a vision of the 1940s suitcase that my father took when leaving this country after the war, packed with the relative lightness of all of his worldly possessions at that time. I eye my dad’s double plastic bag, aka his carry-on luggage. “Maybe we can get you a duffel bag for that stuff while we’re here, Pop.” He grumbles, but the plastic handles have already ripped from the weight of everything he’s crammed into the bag, so even he concedes to this necessity. I place my hand on his back. “Don’t worry. It’s a good thing. It will be much easier to carry.”
A downpour begins as we emerge from the airport to meet our driver, Joko, with whom we have exchanged emails in the past months at the suggestion of my father’s younger brother, who has also made this journey of nostalgia through Java. Joko is a fixer who has driven hundreds of former Dutch colonial residents and their children around the country. He speaks a bit of Dutch and English, and knows all the Dutch colonial sites of interest. Joko-from-the-internet is finally revealed to us outside the Semarang airport as a middle-aged, mustached man wearing a striped polo shirt, a pair of khaki pants, and sandals. Joko stands at the exit smoking a cigarette with another man. He holds a sign that displays our last name, ready to drive us through this most populated island of Indonesia for two weeks, all the way from the north of Central Java, through the interior of the island, to Western Java. It’s a reverse journey of my father’s youth here, starting with the last city where he lived as a prisoner of war, passing through the places he lived and spent time in as a child, and ending in the city of his birth, Jakarta.
We run through the hammering rain and ankle-high water to Joko’s white van, and help him load the suitcases before ducking into the dry cab. After fifteen minutes, while we’re still sitting in the heavy traffic leaving the airport, the shower clears to blue sky. This pattern repeats itself several times during the day as we nudge up against the beginning of the rainy season in Indonesia. Between these short explosions of heavy rain, the tropical sun beats down to steam us into sticky, flushed messes in the ninety-degree heat. Or at least, it does so to my mother and me. My father, having been raised here, is entirely unbothered by the heat. In fact, he seems to enjoy it as he downs bottles of cold mango nectar, a favorite childhood treat. While my mother and I mutter Jesus, so hot and fan our flushed faces uselessly, my dad, like Joko, literally doesn’t break a sweat.
All Ships Follow Me Page 1