All Ships Follow Me

by Mieke Eerkens

  The initial fighting is near the capital in Western Java, so it is peaceful in the school on the hill where Sjeffie has resumed his studies and play and meals around the table with his family. Until one day, it isn’t. The Bersiap, the violent uprising that marks this early period of the Indonesian National Revolution, spreads and comes to Semarang. Civilian rebels, often with no organized command, begin to attack all non-Indonesians, conducting raids on households, where they drag the men out and murder them or kidnap them, demanding ransom. Mixed-blood Indos are also targeted, and those who have been allowed to live outside the Japanese internment camps because of their mixed heritage are now left without the same protection as the (re)interned Dutch-Indonesians inside the guarded camps. Thousands of men, women, and children, entire families living in villages all over Java, are murdered by the pelopors, or rebels, in the name of restoring the country to the Indonesians.

  When the pelopors begin to move through Semarang, it surprises my father’s family completely. My grandfather leaves in the morning for the Lampersari camp hospital to take care of the internees. While he is gone, Sjeffie and the other children, sitting at their desks, begin to hear shooting, explosions. They’ve barely had a reprieve from this sound with the end of the war, so they know it well. The teachers suspend class and take the orphans into the dormitory to be safe. Sjeffie and his siblings hurry back to their house, where their mother is anxiously peering out the window. Then they hear a truck crunching gravel in the drive, coming to a halt just outside. Four Indonesian men get out, holding rifles. Pelopors, rebel fighters. Sjeffie’s heart is pounding. The rebels shout, “Send out your men!” Sjeffie’s mother turns to Sjeffie and Cousin Kees, shaking. The teenagers are both taller than she is. “Get under the bed, boys. Get under the bed, right now!” Sjeffie and Cousin Kees scramble to the bedroom and crawl on their bellies under the bed, terrified. The pelopors are at their front door now, pounding. “Send out your men!” My grandmother shouts back through the locked door, “There are no men here, only women and children!” The pelopors move to the other side of the school. They kick in a side door. They emerge with five male kitchen and garden workers, whom they load into their truck with guns at their backs. They yell, “We are coming back! You can’t hide!” Then they drive off. The children are all crying. Sjeffie and Cousin Kees stay under the bed for a long time.

  Once they are certain the truck is gone, Sjeffie and Cousin Kees are allowed to come out from under the bed. But my grandmother tells them to get down low in a back bedroom. She runs through the inside door to the dormitory to check on the orphans. The teachers order all the children to sit in a hallway while they stand guard at each end with an iron bar in their hands. From the top of the hill, Sjeffie can hear shooting and explosions throughout Semarang. The family sits together in the back bedroom, too terrified to come out. Finally, after the sun sets, they hear another truck come up the driveway. Sjeffie’s mother pushes the boys back under the bed, holding her finger to her lips. Footsteps. Then voices.

  Japanese voices! There is a knock at the door. My grandmother calls through and the voices say they are safe. She opens the door. There she is greeted by a Japanese officer, three Japanese soldiers, and her husband, who has been escorted back through the fighting from Lampersari, sick with worry for his family. The Japanese officer tells the family that he has been ordered to protect the orphanage against the pelopors with a detachment of Japanese soldiers. He quickly has his soldiers take up guard positions at the main corners of the grounds and asks permission to use one of the storage rooms in the school for sleeping quarters. Sjeffie cannot wrap his head around this development; the same troops that had been his enemies and captors a month prior are now his protectors and saviors.

  Five or six Japanese soldiers stand guard day and night for weeks as a civil war for independence rages in the city below. The Allied forces are sending troops to handle the handover of power, but with the abrupt end to the war with Japan, it will take several weeks for them to arrive, so initially, the Japanese soldiers step into this new, unexpected role out of necessity. But in Semarang, they soon become committed to this new responsibility after a violent showdown with the pelopors. The rebels had driven to a Japanese garrison in Semarang and demanded that the soldiers stand at attention in the courtyard while the pelopors read a proclamation that the country was now under Indonesian control and the soldiers should put down their weapons. Approximately one hundred Japanese soldiers, trained to follow orders, put their weapons down. The pelopors gather the weapons and gun down the Japanese soldiers execution style. A few of the soldiers pretend to be dead and lie still under the corpses until the pelopors leave. Then the survivors crawl out from under the bodies, and race to the Japanese garrison in Semarang that has not yet been attacked, to warn them. The infuriated Japanese military commander of Semarang declares martial law. The rebels now have a new enemy. It takes the Japanese military three days to gain control of the city.

  At the orphanage, despite the protection of the Japanese soldiers at their posts, the rebels make another attempt on the school. One afternoon, the children hear gunfire coming from a small kampong behind the school. They are immediately told to lay flat on the floor. Sjeffie lays on the floor as the new Japanese guard draws his revolver and slowly walks toward the kampong while his soldiers cover him. He looks up at the coconut trees from where the bullets came and aims his pistol. A pelopor jumps out of the tree and runs. They are not shot at again.

  * * *

  Van Deventer School, Semarang, Indonesia, 2014

  These days the Van Deventer School is a trade school. The buildings are still the same, and as we pull in to the driveway, my father’s face lights up. He recognizes the house attached to the school where he lived for a short period. We go into the school’s office and introduce ourselves to the woman behind the desk, but she doesn’t speak English, and my father’s rudimentary Bahasa is not good enough to explain why we are here. She smiles and gestures for us to wait, then returns with a man who speaks some English. He explains to her that my father once lived here and that we’d like to take a look around. She smiles and joins the man in giving us a tour. In one hallway, my father stops us. “This is the hallway where the children were hiding from the rebels,” he says. “This is the hallway.” The man translates for the woman. It’s hard to know what they think about the story. All over Indonesia, there are murals and plaques commemorating the men who liberated the country from Dutch colonialism. To the Indonesians, the pelopors are martyrs. They are freedom fighters and heroes.

  5

  INDEPENDENCE AND DISPLACEMENT

  Semarang, Dutch East Indies, 1945

  In October, British troops arrive in the Dutch East Indies. Because the atomic bombs have ended World War II so suddenly, the Allies struggle to move a sufficient number of their own forces quickly enough to replace the Japanese troops, who still occupy a large area of Southeast Asia. British general Louis Mountbatten, who commands the Allies’ Southeast Asian forces, is tasked with retaking the Dutch East Indies from the Japanese forces, who have been attempting to maintain the peace in this new conflict of shifting alliances and obey the orders of the Allied forces to keep the Dutch and Indonesian citizens safe. The Netherlands, which has just been liberated from Hitler’s devastating occupation, does not have enough time to reorganize and train a task force to relieve the Japanese in the Dutch East Indies. So the job falls to Mountbatten and his British troops. Even with seasoned troops under his command, however, it takes Mountbatten a few months to organize transports for his men from India and Burma to the Indonesian archipelago.

  During this long interim, and in this relative vacuum of power, Sukarno and the Indonesian fighters gain momentum in their fight for independence. When Mountbatten’s troops finally arrive in Semarang in October, rather than merely take over organization of the recovery effort as expected, they are thrown directly into this battle.

  At the Van Deventer School, a thrilled Sjeffie watche
s the arrival of the British troops, many of whom are Indian Sikhs and Nepalese Ghurkas from Britain’s own colonies. When these men get sick or injured, some of them show up at my grandfather’s medical clinic at the orphanage, asking for treatment. One afternoon, Sjeffie walks into the living room to find a tall Sikh with an elaborate uniform and an impressive turban waiting for his father. Sjeffie’s eyes widen when he sees the pineapple-shaped hand grenade hanging from the man’s belt. Now fourteen years old and bolder than he once was, he asks, “Excuse me … is that a real grenade?” “Yes,” says the Sikh. “Is it dangerous to carry that inside a house?” asks Sjeffie. “No, young man. See?” The soldier loosens the grenade from his belt and holds it in his hand with the explosion-timing release pin held down by his middle finger. At that moment, Sjeffie’s mother enters the room and blanches. “Sir, please! Put that away!!” The man grins as he puts the grenade back on his belt and winks at my father.

  General Mountbatten’s troops quickly lift martial law and initially relax their focus on the pelopor movements while they help organize the Japanese soldiers to facilitate their transfer home to Japan. Lady Mountbatten, the general’s wife, tours Java to survey the camps and their survivors. Her photos are some of the only ones that document the camps and the medical condition of the survivors immediately after the war. Viewing those photos on the internet, I scroll through images of emaciated ex–prisoners of war lying in hospital beds. It gives me some access that I can’t get through my father’s stories alone. Seeing these people’s bodies makes his experiences there more palpable.

  Within three weeks of the arrival of the British troops, a second insurrection by Sukarno’s men takes place, and again they occupy large parts of Semarang. But this time they are more prepared and have better weapons. The Van Deventer School is now guarded by British soldiers instead of Japanese, and the Indonesian pelopors take up positions in the treed foothills behind the school that overlook Semarang. Many families are not as lucky as my father’s family. They don’t have soldiers guarding them. On the first night of the second uprising, the pelopors sweep through houses and murder Dutch and mixed Indo civilians who have made the mistake of returning to their old homes in the suburbs of Semarang. In response to this new uprising, the British position a battleship at the entrance of Semarang’s harbor and start to bomb the hills behind Sjeffie’s house at the Van Deventer School with cannon-fired heavy missiles. Sjeffie looks up to the sky and sees the missiles fly overhead, exploding with a thunderous noise in the trees behind the school. It quickly becomes very clear that the Dutch and Indo ex-internees are not safe and a plan needs to be formulated to get them out.

  At this point, not all of the camps have been completely cleared of internees, many of whom no longer have homes, jobs, or money. In Semarang, the camps are protected by the British troops, but there are several additional camps inland that are much more rural, with several thousand Dutch internees still in residence. They have very few guards. During this second uprising, the pelopors decide to overtake those camps and eliminate the occupants. Trucks with armed pelopors arrive at the gate of one such camp, Camp Ambarawa, demanding to see the Dutch camp administrator, as the Japanese camp administrator has already been sent home by the British. The pelopors tell the approximately six hundred women and children still living in the Ambarawa camp to congregate immediately at the center of the camp for an important announcement. Then the pelopors yell “Merdeka!”—Freedom!—and throw hand grenades into the crowd.

  At that moment, those left standing hear the indisputable sound of a tank crawling toward the gate. Armed British Sikhs jump out of a truck behind the tank and run toward the pelopors, shooting their guns into the air as a warning. The pelopors turn and run, with most of them managing to escape. However, they leave behind a bloody scene in the camp clearing. About fifty women and children have been killed or wounded by the hand grenades. Some of the British Sikhs try to do triage as others quickly call for backup. It’s clear that the situation is out of control, and the former internees are not safe. All the Ambarawa survivors are evacuated, along with former internees at several other inland camps. But now there are hundreds of evacuated internees in trucks, and nowhere to bring them. About fifty of these Ambarawa survivors are brought to the Van Deventer School, where they sleep in the gymnasium. Choking up over the cups of tea held in their trembling hands, they tell Sjeffie and his family about the traumatic experience they’ve just been through, shell-shocked and grief-stricken over the loss of the family members and campmates they’ve just seen blown apart after surviving for years in the prison camps.

  Sjeffie and his family don’t stay in the Van Deventer School much longer. The British forces and Red Cross immediately begin evacuating European and Indo people on every military battleship and plane they can call to the Semarang harbor for an emergency rescue mission. As soon as they gain partial control over the city again, they begin to move women, children, and civilian males out of Java in trucks with military escorts. The ships take as many refugees as possible to Australia and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). In Eastern and Western Java, people are also evacuated from Java’s two other main ports in Surabaya and Batavia.

  Sjeffie and his family are among the last ex-internees to be evacuated from Semarang, as Sjeffie’s father is under orders to stay at his station at the Van Deventer School until most civilians have been evacuated. Then Sjeffie says goodbye to his bedroom and the living room and the little house. He says goodbye to the Van Deventer School and climbs onto the bed of a military truck. As the truck moves toward the harbor, he says goodbye to the Tjandi Hills, goodbye to the jasmine and the orchids and the banana trees, goodbye to the chichaks and geckos, the sugarcane and coffee plantations, goodbye to Mount Ungaran in the distance. Snaking down past Camp Lampersari and Camp Bangkong in the distance, he says goodbye. And then he is boarding a huge ship in the harbor, and he says goodbye to Semarang as it slides from view, and then to Java, and then to the whole of Indonesia, the only home he has ever known, columns of smoke rising in scattered spots on the island, which recedes behind the churning water in a strip of shore and monkeys and mango trees that thin and flatten before becoming one with the horizon and vanishing entirely from view. It is December 25, Christmas Day.

  * * *

  Semarang, Indonesia, 2014

  It’s hard to calculate how many people died during the Bersiap, this violent period immediately following the war. Among the Indonesian rebel fighters, the estimate is anywhere between 20,000 and 100,000, depending on the source. The British and British-Indian relief forces lost around 650 troops, with a further 320 permanently missing. The Japanese army fighting the rebels lost 402 in this conflict, with 88 missing. The mixed Dutch-Indonesian victims of the Bersiap are estimated at around 20,000, with 3,500 confirmed dead and the rest kidnapped and presumed dead, their bodies never recovered, though mass graves were reportedly seen by soldiers at the time. The Chinese Indonesians outside the camps lost hundreds of lives as well.

  In what is considered a shameful period of Dutch history in the Netherlands, after the Dutch were evacuated from Indonesia, the Dutch army returned to try to win back its lost colony. It fought for three more years during this war of independence, leading to enormous bloodshed and recently discovered atrocities on the part of the Dutch fighters against the Indonesian people. Ultimately, the Dutch government had to accept that the Dutch East Indies would be no more, and that after hundreds of years, Indonesia would never again be a colony of the Netherlands. In December 1949, the Dutch transferred sovereignty to the Republic of Indonesia. With the transfer, a huge wave of remaining mixed Indo-European people migrated to Europe, no longer feeling there was a place for them in the new republic, even if they had survived the targeted attacks during the Bersiap period. There are Indo people in Europe today who still feel an intense amount of pain over having been forced to abandon the heritage of their Indonesian parent. They speak of a sense of rejection and a schism in identity due to their mixed race and
expulsion from Indonesia.

  * * *

  As Joko drives us out of Semarang from the Van Deventer School in the Tjandi Hills, we pass the church on the hill that my father almost burned down as a young boy. I imagine the fire surrounding him and chasing him from the hill, the unstoppable advancing force, and how this was a foreshadowing of years later when he would flee these same hills, escaping from rebel fighters.

  We pass the memorial cemetery and the thousands of white crosses that represent the souls that rest there into eternity, those left behind. I feel an odd sense of abandonment myself as we pass them in Joko’s van. When this trip is over, I will go back to the United States, where my friends and family wait. My father will go back to his couch and his favorite blanket and will push the numbers he loves around on his papers. These crosses will stand there then, with no visitors, or maybe only one or two visitors a month, in monsoon and glaring sun, in a grass plot in the middle of a city of people who forgot they were there.

  * * *

  Java Sea, Indonesia, Christmas 1945

  Sjeffie stares out over the billowing waves of the Java Sea from the deck of the HMS Princess Beatrix, a former passenger ship that was converted into a Dutch troop transport ship during World War II. He is en route, but to what he is en route remains unclear. Everything has happened so quickly. Left behind in Indonesia are the remnants of the only life he’s known, and once again Sjeffie finds himself in a liminal space, with no sense of where his place in the world is. The authorities call it repatriation, but that word feels wrong for people who never lived in the Netherlands. Repatriation of the great-great-great-great-grandchildren of the first colonists, perhaps.

  It takes five days to travel to the Red Cross refugee camp in Ceylon. When the refugees disembark in Ceylon’s main harbor, Colombo, they are taken by train to the inland city of Kandy, and from there by trucks to a nearby temporary displaced persons camp, formerly used by General Mountbatten for housing his troops. There are already thousands of Dutch refugees there, as several shiploads of people from Java have preceded them. With their arrival on the last ship, the total head count of Camp Kandy swells to around five thousand. Sjeffie’s father, who is still officially employed as a military doctor, is appointed co-administrator and hospital director of the Kandy refugee camp by the Dutch government. Sjeffie thinks of all his friends from Lampersari and Bangkong who just happened to be loaded onto the evacuation ships headed to Australia. They never even got to say goodbye. At this point in his life, he knows better than to become attached to people, but it’s still difficult for him to wrap his mind around the idea that he will never see them again.