All Ships Follow Me

by Mieke Eerkens

  The family is in Camp Kandy for about four months. Fourteen-year-old Sjeffie and his eldest sister, Doortje, now thirteen, attend an official government-licensed Dutch school run by ex-interned teachers, while their little sister, Fieneke, eleven, and brother, Kees, eight, attend elementary school. The elementary school is farther from the camp and a long way to walk for little legs, so some days the younger children get a ride on the backs of elephants trained by the local inhabitants. It is the first time in three years that the children attend school, and most of them have fallen far behind the standards for students their age. They now work hard to catch up, knowing that in the Netherlands, they will be tested and placed in grade levels according to the results. Sjeffie is determined not to be stuck in a class with younger children when he arrives there. Because of his sharp mind and Aunt Ko’s secret lessons in the first part of their internment in Camp Lampersari, he is not as far behind as the others and manages to reach the equivalent of a second-year Dutch high school class during three months of schooling, right on par with his age level.

  The routine of school and the freedom the family experiences at the refugee camp after the years of war are welcome gifts. On the weekends, Sjeffie and his parents and siblings hike from the camp through the surrounding mountains to a nearby lake. After watching a massive monitor lizard emerge from the bushes to plunge into the water on one of these excursions, Sjeffie becomes convinced that there are crocodiles in the lake and refuses to swim there despite his father’s assurances, but he still enjoys sitting at the edge, picnicking with his family. His favorite thing about the camp is movie night, held every Sunday. He has never been to the cinema, and this is a spectacular development in his life. He and his friends are enthralled by the films of Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart playing out on the giant white screen. Sjeffie’s favorite movie is Can’t Help Singing, with Deanna Durbin, a musical that floods him with feelings. The former prisoners are listening to music and making art, as their senses reawaken to beauty and emotion they’ve had to repress for years just to survive. As a result, rather than the refugee camp being a place of darkness, it is a place of great joy, an intellectual and emotional renaissance for many. “I really enjoyed the refugee camp,” my father says now, when I ask him about his experience there. “I got to join a Boy Scout troop for the camp, which was really fun. I remember how amazing it was that we could get free snacks in the recreation building. About thirty to forty of Mountbatten’s soldiers ran the camp. I was jealous of those soldiers, because all the girls hung around making eyes at them, and of course I wanted the girls to be interested in me. They really showed off, these British soldiers in their uniforms.” He still seems a little sore about it.

  * * *

  After four months, in April 1946, the refugees are put on ships bound for Holland, the ultimate destination for all evacuees in Camp Kandy. My grandfather, as group leader and medical doctor of the refugees, is given an officer’s cabin next to the captain on the SS Willem Ruys. He shares it with Sjeffie’s mother and three younger siblings, but quarters are tight, and as a fourteen-year-old male, Sjeffie has to sleep in the troop hold of the ship with about two hundred men and boys fourteen years or older on canvas bunk cots stacked four high. Another converted cargo hold houses around six hundred women and younger children. Sjeffie and the other teens are assigned jobs collecting and dumping garbage and keeping living quarters clean, as well as assisting in the mess hall, washing dishes. They are paid a small wage for these jobs on the ship, something new to Sjeffie after years of unpaid labor in the internment camps. Each of them gets a ration of four packs of Navy Cut cigarettes each week, even the fourteen-year-old boys. Sjeffie gives the cigarettes to his parents, who later give them out as gifts to smokers when they arrive back in Holland, having little else to offer when they visit relatives and old friends.

  The SS Willem Ruys takes a six-week-long route through rough and sometimes explosive-mined waters, via the Suez Canal, past Greece and southern Europe, and on to Holland. Just before entering the Suez Canal, the ship docks in Ataqa, Egypt. There, the passengers disembark and are taken by train in groups to a giant warehouse in an expanse of desert, the heat causing the air to warp in waves. In front of the building, in a surreal scene, a group of Italian prisoners—Mussolini’s soldiers captured during the war—play big-band music as Sjeffie and the refugees file into the warehouse. Inside are long aisles with individual stations of supplies piled high on tables. Each person is to receive one item from each station, including a winter coat, a scarf, long underwear, shoes, and a blanket, for the new climate in Europe. All the items have been donated by American and Canadian welfare organizations to help the refugees get back on their feet. It is the luck of the draw exactly which items each of them is handed, and children cast jealous glances at one another as they are given bright orange plaid coats while their siblings are given nice gray ones. Still, nobody dares to complain out loud about what they are handed as they walk down the line. Then they file back out of the warehouse, past the Italian band playing “Take the ‘A’ Train,” and make the journey back across the desert to the ship. A few days later, they are very grateful for their new clothing as the weather on the ship’s decks rapidly shifts from equatorial heat to winter cold past the Gulf of Suez.

  After marveling at the changing landscape as they move through the Suez Canal, Sjeffie and the other passengers emerge on the other side, cruising through the Mediterranean to the south of Greece and the tip of Italy. Finally, they pass the Rock of Gibraltar in the narrow strait between the tip of Spain and the north coast of the African continent. Sjeffie learns that the rock jutting straight up out of the sea is one of the two Pillars of Hercules in Greek mythology, the furthest reach of Hercules’s twelve labors and, according to Plato, the gate to the “Realm of the Unknown.”

  The Willem Ruys forges right past the rock, into the wide Atlantic. When it rounds the coast of Spain, the landscape changes again, and Europe feels very close. And one afternoon, they slide into Amsterdam’s harbor, where hundreds of people stand along the port wall waving and throwing confetti and welcoming their fellow citizens back to the motherland. My grandfather’s brother Jan and Jan’s wife, Jeanne, are among them, welcoming the Dutch East Indies side of the family to Europe. Sjeffie shakes their hands and looks around him, unsure of what to think. They all take the train to the seaside town of Scheveningen, near The Hague, where Jan and Jeanne make room in their two-bedroom apartment for the family of six to sleep. In the days following, they arrange for Sjeffie and his siblings to attend an overbrugging (transitional) school to prepare for entering the Dutch school system.

  As they settle in and Sjeffie takes in the unfamiliar tall buildings in a tightly packed country, the gray skies and dirty city pigeons, the bite of a cold air he’s never lived with before, the initial hopefulness he felt as they arrived begins to fade. He doesn’t want to say it out loud, because he knows he is lucky to be alive. But another unwanted knowledge is settling into his body along with the chill of the North Sea: He is Dutch, but the Netherlands is not home.

  * * *

  Zutphen, the Netherlands, 1947

  Eventually, Sjeffie’s family settles in Zutphen, back in Gelderland, where Sjeffie attends high school and drops the childish “ie” from his name to become Sjef. Intelligent, proud, and driven to learn, he had caught up extraordinarily quickly in the transitional school and has now become competitive with his Dutch peers. He’s fascinated by physics, math, and especially aeronautics, an interest developed during the years spent looking at the sky during the war, noting the different types of military aircraft, from the Japanese Zeroes to the Allied planes that brought news of the prisoners’ rescue. On the weekends, he joins other teens in an aeronautic club building and flying kites and radio-controlled model airplanes. He joins another club an hour away by bike, where they fly real gliders. He convinces the school headmaster’s son to join him, a boy who later becomes a pilot for KLM.

  Sjef finds c
omfort during these years with his eyes looking down in books or up in the sky. He doesn’t really have close friends. A psychologist friend of his father’s labels him a “secondary reactor,” someone who is slow to develop relationships. He is slightly introverted. He does make friends superficially in school, but he doesn’t try to hold on to them. Mostly he feels isolated and homesick for Indonesia during his teen years.

  Drang is a Dutch word that is not entirely translatable into English. Loosely, it means an unrelenting urge or drive, but the word also carries an implication of deep yearning born of absence. I have this image of a homing pigeon that is released above the ocean. If you tore down its coop, would it fly in confused circles over that spot in perpetuity, never landing, driven by the internal drang of home, home, always home? As a teen, my father writes multiple urgent and detailed letters to the minister of foreign affairs in the Netherlands, proposing the establishment of a refugee community for them in the tropical climate of Papua New Guinea. He argues that certainly there is an uninhabited patch of land there that they can live on, comparing the expelled Dutch-Indonesian colonists to the Jews, for whom the homeland of Israel is officially established during those same years. He writes that he and the Dutch-Indonesian colonists need the tropics, that they need a homeland too. They are earnest words from a homesick teenager. He checks the mailbox in their new house in Holland every day for a response, but it never comes.

  The Netherlands is cold and gray and wholly foreign to a boy who is used to running around on bare feet, scaling coconut trees, and eating mangos on the beach. Having been ignored by the minister of foreign affairs and accepting that he will never be able to go back to Indonesia, Sjef turns to the next option: the United States. He sees the United States as having saved his life in the war. He reads about America, listens to American music, watches American movies. John Wayne, the American West, the Andrews Sisters, Perry Como, Bing Crosby on the radio. John Steinbeck and warm California, with its Pacific Ocean and orange groves. And of course, the repeated clichés about America: the American Dream, freedom. In America, a person can be anything, achieve any goal. He cannot wait. At sixteen years old, Sjef tells his parents one weekend that he is going to the glider club with friends. Instead, he cycles all day to the German border because he knows there is an American military base on the other side of it. He plans to stow away on the first plane out of that place. He doesn’t know how; he just knows he needs to keep going. At the border, uniformed agents stop him. “Passport?” they say. Sjef blinks. He feels his face go hot. “Uh, no … no passport,” he says. The agents look at one another, amused. They laugh at him. They offer him a cigarette and tell him he can come no farther. He declines the cigarette and turns the bike around, begins to cycle back to where he came from. Back to the Netherlands, trudging up the school steps in the unfamiliar snow with children he has nothing in common with, wearing hard leather shoes on his feet, watching black crows chatter in the trees instead of cockatoos, biding his time.

  * * *

  This story about stowing away on a military plane baffles me when he first tells me. “What were you going to do if you succeeded?” I ask him. “You must have believed you were going to succeed or you wouldn’t have gone. You were really prepared to tell your parents that you were going to fly gliders and then never see them or the rest of your family ever again?”

  “Yeah, I don’t know. I guess so,” my father says. I see in his desperate attempt to leave the extent to which the war took home from him, not just Indonesia or his house, not just his Dutch-Indonesian identity, but that deepest sense of home, the home of family and kin and citizenship, the home where you belong to a unit. After years of fending for himself in a men’s labor camp, he didn’t know how to be a child in a family again.

  * * *

  But my father is a persistent creature. He tells his father that he wants to go to America when he finishes high school. He is obsessed with the idea. His parents can’t stop him from leaving once he turns eighteen. And they want him to pursue his goals. So they try to help him. My grandfather calls his brother-in-law Henk in Bolivia to ask for advice, because Henk knows a lot of Americans. Diploma in hand, my father prepares to leave the Netherlands, this pit stop between Indonesia and the United States of America. He doesn’t feel any sadness leaving his classmates or his house in Eefde. He feels nothing but eagerness. He’s going to do great things, and it isn’t going to be in Holland. Every month, ships set off for New York, bringing people to new lives.

  In the very near future, my father will be on one of those ships too, on his way to a long life in California, where he will marry and have children. He will build a home. He will carry the war with him, but he will also carry an unfaltering survival mentality, the lessons of self-sufficiency. He will carry the fight across the ocean and into a new world.

  PART II

  MOTHER

  People say you’re born innocent, but it’s not true. You inherit all kinds of things that you can do nothing about. You inherit your identity, your history, like a birthmark that you can’t wash off.

  —HUGO HAMILTON,

  The Sailor in the Wardrobe

  6

  FASCISM ON THE RISE

  Hoog Soeren, the Netherlands, 2015

  I am on my way to return a rental car when I abruptly pull off the highway at the exit that leads to the tiny village I lived in for a year as a child. The last time I traveled these roads, I was following the hearse that transported my beloved aunt Hannie’s body back over the heath, through the woods, and finally to a plot in a tiny graveyard. I’m in Gelderland, a province right in the middle of the country. This is not a planned detour, as I am already late returning the car. As though called by sirens hiding in the waves of heather, I follow signs until I am on the road that carried me so many times to chimney smoke and spruce and the mushroomy scent of the forest floor I knew for so many years as a child. It’s remarkable how I still know every corner of this place, from the mossy spot at the edge of the heath where the wild boars like to root to the train tracks near the big chestnut tree on the other side of the woods, where my cousins placed coins to be flattened by the trains that came through. I know all the overgrown hollows of World War II dugouts where my mother took shelter from bombs as a little girl. I appropriated the bomb shelters as faerie houses when I was a little girl, too young to understand that my mother took cover in them when she was my age, sirens wailing and bombers flying overhead.

  Now, steeped in memories, both mine and my mother’s bleeding together, I pull over on the empty road and walk out into the heath, the purple blooms ethereal under hovering mist. It is dead quiet, the kind of quiet you experience only in the country, though for me there are the whispers of many ghosts. I no longer have family living here. But this landscape is still mine; it belongs to me, registers as deeply familiar to my senses. This is where we children piled into my aunt’s orange VW bus and drove out into the dark with flashlights to look for wild boars and rutting deer that called out to their mates and locked antlers in battle. As a preteen girl visiting my aunt in the summer, I saw the teenage sons of the Dutch royal family who lived in the palace nearby riding their horses in these woods, and I fantasized that a prince would stop his horse and ask me to be his girlfriend. I get back in the rental car and drive out to my aunt’s former farm in the next village, Kootwijk. I look up at the window of my old bedroom, tucked underneath the eaves, and wonder who sleeps there now. In the meadow where I used to catch frogs, two enormous draft horses now graze. I drive to the two-room schoolhouse where I spent first grade, and where my mother also spent first grade. It has been converted into a duplex. Volvos are parked in the driveways. Potted plants stand defiantly in the windows. The people who live there are intruders, and I hate them.

  My mother has a deep nostalgia for this province where she spent her childhood. I’ve inherited it from her, having spent every summer there while I was growing up and having lived there for a year when I was little. My mother
and I were always missing it. Are always missing it. It’s home for my other identity, the Dutch girl who lives on the heath in a green farmhouse in a tiny Calvinist village. Technically it is my aunt’s home, but the year we live there and all of the summers we spend tucked into its many bedrooms become part of me. The yellow and red clogs lined up in the mudroom, the gooseberries growing along the fence, and the hornets’ nests in the tall grass by the sheep shed. The dirt paths through the forest where we race our bikes, the secret family chanterelle hunting spot behind the old electric building. Here, there is the specific smell of horse manure and Border collie fur mingling with the antique wood of the piano and the damp of the cellar where the onions and potatoes are stored, a smell just as much mine as the smells of home in Los Angeles. I drive around for an hour, then get back on the highway to return my rental car like the tourist I am.