All Ships Follow Me

by Mieke Eerkens

  Meanwhile, I drift from Amsterdam to Massachusetts to the San Francisco Bay Area to Iowa City for four years to get a master’s degree and teach, before moving back to Los Angeles and then back to Amsterdam. I’m trying to find home, in every sense of that word, but I know that no one place can be that for me. I know my parents wish I would come back to California more. I know it’s a catch-22, that the more I stay away, the more estranged I become, and the more I feel the urge to stay away. I know I should cherish the time with them. But it’s difficult to be there at Thanksgiving or Christmas in a strange, half-unpacked house. It doesn’t feel like home.

  My brother has dealt with our sense of homelessness by focusing on his own family and home, and he is an avowed minimalist, rejecting consumerism and clutter in rebellion against the pack-rat behavior of my parents. My sister is a psychologist, trying to understand our family’s trauma that way. She and I talk about our continued wish for roots. She has a husband and a child now, but still we dream about buying a house in the Netherlands, and reminisce about our house in Los Angeles.

  Unlike my married siblings, with lost love in my past but no partner and no child, I am untethered. I keep drifting like an old balloon that is leaking its helium, occasionally attempting to touch down with people who feel like they could be my kin, but it doesn’t stick. I seek out local woods wherever I go so I can walk the trails; I feel most at home there. After my nature walks, I emerge into neighborhoods, and as I stroll home in the dimming evening, I peer into the windows of families sitting down to dinner, doing homework with their children, playing piano, watering their houseplants, lives framed in window after window like paintings in a museum. Every morning, compulsively, I check the real estate listings and take copious notes, searching. Amsterdam studio near tram! Petaluma cottage needs TLC. Goosetown charmer just ten blocks from downtown. Perfect for a family! Won’t last. Priced to sell! This home has so much potential!

  18

  WORDS

  Woodland, California, 2013

  It’s in my parents’ current home in Woodland that I find the Dutch-English dictionary my father still has from Indonesia, one of the only surviving items from the camp. I pull it off the shelf. My father comes over and takes the dictionary from me. The title page has been torn out.

  “I stole this in the camp,” he says. “I was pushing the cart around the camp, collecting the contraband books for the Japanese officers, and I saw this dictionary lying on top. I got it in my head that I needed to learn English, that it was urgent.” He laughs, embarrassed. “So I stuffed the dictionary down my pants and hid it. It’s so ridiculous,” he says. “I thought that when the American soldiers came, they wouldn’t know we needed help unless we told them. And I was afraid they would leave us there because we wouldn’t be able to speak their language.” He laughs again and shakes his head.

  My father dismisses the theft of the dictionary as ridiculous, but here is the dictionary, in his bookcase in California seventy years later. I am struck by what that actually means.

  It means that when his camp was finally liberated by the Americans in September 1945, my father carried that dictionary with him out of the opened gates and to his mother’s camp. He carried it while fleeing rebels with guns out of Semarang. He carried it on a Red Cross ship to Ceylon and on to the Netherlands after the war. He carried it across the Atlantic to New York. He carried it on that Greyhound bus for three days straight from New York City to Berkeley, California. He carried it through dozens of boardinghouses as he put himself through UC Berkeley to earn a BS and then an MS and then a Ph.D. in physics, working the Alaska gold mines in the summer and Petaluma chicken farms in the winter. My father is terrible at articulating for me the details of the war or how exactly it still moves inside him, but he carried this little Dutch-English dictionary all of that way, and then through two marriages, four children, and five houses. My father carried this dictionary the way others carry the Bible.

  I’m unbelievably moved, especially as a writer, holding this dictionary and knowing its journey and the salvation it represented to a child, and then to the man who carried it with him. I return to the microscopic penciled diaries of the boys in my father’s camp that I read in the archives. I return to the privilege of communication. And then I return to this moment:

  My father hoards corks. He has done so my entire life. I open the drawer in Woodland, and they are there, dozens of them, as surely as there is toilet paper in the bathroom and food in the fridge. Once, fed up with the clutter in my parents’ home, I became irritated and began to empty the corks into the garbage, snapping at my father.

  “Come on, Dad, this is madness. You don’t need all these corks. Why are you wasting a drawer with these? This place is a mess.”

  But he flew into a rage, scooping the corks back out of the garbage. “Don’t you throw these away!” he fumed. “You wait. One day you might need these!”

  Irked by the complete illogic of such a statement, I responded, “What the hell are you talking about?! What on earth would I need an entire drawerful of corks for?”

  “To burn the ends to make charcoal to write with!” he blurted out.

  The shouted phrase hung there between us for a moment, pregnant with its absurdity. I was confused by his statement, and I think he felt embarrassed. He turned away and muttered, “Just stop meddling in my business.”

  “Fine, but that’s ridiculous, Dad. You have an entire drawerful of pens, too,” I said, shaking my head. His thinking seemed so obviously to have come from a place of deep trauma, not easily combated with reason. But I remembered the camp diaries I read.

  13 Sept. Boys fr Lampersari arrived. 19 Sept. J Kramer died. 28 Sept. Won’t lend my pencil anymore. Getting too nubby. 1 Oct. Can’t think straight. Have the runs. 29 Oct. Have malaria. Pencil just nub now.

  When the prisoners’ pencils were gone, they burned the ends of corks and wrote with them. I recalled the burning of books, the forced propaganda postcards, the drawings on cigarette papers, the forbidden school lessons in the camp and ABC’s written in the dirt with sticks. So I closed the drawer with the corks, and the corks remain part of our daily lives, even if we never use them.

  That clear moment of regression into a prisoner’s mentality comes full circle and connects to this moment when I stand in a living room in Woodland, holding a dictionary. It’s another puzzle piece filling out the big picture for me. Words. Communication. Expression. Things also to be hoarded and guarded in case someone tries to take them away. Corks and dictionaries are part of my father’s survival kit.

  I am a collector of old books, and I hold the dictionary to my nose to breathe in that particular scent of aged paper. I marvel at the fact that I am holding it in the present day. It’s not a small object to travel with. It has substantial weight. Its endurance is remarkable. My hand smoothes over the pages. “Why is there a page missing, Dad?” I say, referring to the dictionary’s absent title page. Again, he laughs sheepishly, and takes the dictionary out of my hands. “It had the previous owner’s name on that page, so I tore it out.” I wait for him to tell me more, but he doesn’t elaborate. He flips through the brittle pages slowly, then hands the dictionary back to me. I notice that on the inside cover, next to the torn-out title page, is my father’s name. Resolute. Defiant. Handwritten in ink.

  I often think about how my own choice to be a writer might have stemmed from the repressed silence of my parents’ respective wars, because I knew that we were different and that there was a sadness that ran through my heritage, but it was never articulated. I want to examine everything about my parents’ experiences, to try to understand things, and to communicate them. I feel myself intensely connected to a complicated lineage that I want to do my best to put into words. I also feel some sense of duty to tell the narratives of people who are so close to their trauma or their shame that they aren’t able to articulate it themselves. I am the generation that can dig through the muck and give them a voice after so many years of sile
nce. My writing is a form of reparation, for myself and for them. While interviewing my parents and their siblings for this book, I watched as the other shoe dropped for my mother, as feelings of anger and grief and recognition of what had been muzzled by shame rose in her and were finally allowed to be explored. Her brother Rob wrote to me, “My mother emphatically and repeatedly told me, when I was not yet ten years old, to keep to myself any political opinion I might have or come to develop, and keep shtum, because [sharing] it was a dangerous thing to do.” The silencing was both implicit and explicit for them. I can fight to prevent the same mistakes and trauma of the generation that came before us, and tell the stories they can’t to the generations who come after us to remind them to pay attention. And if we believe in fighting for better, then we need to look at the past. By that I mean to communicate to those who feel they have been abandoned in their losses: We’re right behind you. All ships.

  19

  THE SURVIVORS

  Though my mother was the child of an Axis power collaborator, and my father an Axis power victim during World War II, this is only a surface difference. Their war experiences have more commonalities than differences. And hundreds of thousands of people like them went through similar traumas. But despite these hundreds of thousands of victims, the children of war, their stories aren’t often told. The fact that the Japanese government had POW camps for military prisoners is fairly well known. But the fact that they had brutal labor camps for civilian prisoners including women and children, where thousands of innocent people were starved to death, is something that seems to have slipped through the cracks of common knowledge. Likewise, the internment of collaborators and sympathizers of the Nazis at even the most minor levels of involvement after the war ended has also historically been left out of the main narrative. What happened to the innocent children of these collaborators, the trauma that many of them underwent after the war, was never even considered for decades, and they were often too ashamed to call attention to the fact that they were struggling. While the direct victims of the Nazis had government-sponsored therapy and organizations to help them attempt to recover from their trauma beginning immediately after the war, for a long time it was not acknowledged that the children of collaborators were indirect victims of the Nazis too.

  * * *

  I think it’s important to make public my parents’ narratives for that reason. There are so many victims of war. They don’t always look the way we think they look, just as perpetrators don’t always look the way we expect them to look. It’s controversial to say so, and I’ve grappled with conflicted feelings for years, but I believe that my mother’s parents, while collaborators (at least with regard to her father), can be seen as victims too, a mixture of both. Hitler didn’t arise out of a vacuum overnight. A large percentage of his followers, the ordinary members of the public, were victims of lies and propaganda fed to them by his regime, as well as enormous pressure and intimidation if they tried to leave. Later, they were victims of inhumane treatment as prisoners, before they’d even been sentenced for anything. This is one way in which war isn’t a zero-sum game where there are no shades of gray. The vast majority of people aren’t all good or all bad. Likewise, while I think colonialism was wrong and independence was right, I can sympathize with the individual colonial residents in Indonesia and recognize their loss in being ejected from the only home that generations of their families had known. Again, there is no black-and-white for me here, only a profound sense of sadness, the acknowledgment of which doesn’t minimize the victim status of others.

  Most of all, recognizing these simultaneous realities underscores for me my absolute truth that war destroys everybody, regardless of sides. Refusing to see the vulnerabilities and human flaws of perpetrators—at least at the level of those who don’t directly carry out torture or murder—refusing to see them as human beings rather than cartoon villains, begs for a repeat of war. I write that with the full knowledge of how difficult it is to do that and how my words may be misinterpreted and cause pain. Even at the conclusion of researching this book, there is no clear moral resolution for me regarding my family history, and perhaps it’s fitting that I learn to live in the shades of gray in the middle. As I write this book, political situations are developing across the globe that challenge my own beliefs. There is a rise in white nationalism, and there are increasing attacks on immigrants and minorities in both the United States and other countries. People I know and care about have endorsed candidates and political positions that I find unconscionable, and I struggle to find any understanding of their points of view. At the same time, though it’s incredibly challenging for me, I know that simply writing them off as evil, instead of trying to understand why they believe what they believe and then pushing back against the ideology instead of the person, means I will never be able to reach them to change their minds. I recently watched a program that focused on the Adverse Childhood Experiences test as a measure of how likely people were to have future behavioral issues. The test results reflect the level of childhood trauma of a subject. This is then used to provide “trauma-informed care” to address the behavioral issues. What stood out to me was the notion that as a society, we can better fix behavioral problems when we stop asking “What’s wrong with you?” and start asking “What happened to you?” It clarifies a cycle of perpetrator and victim, illustrates clearly the overlap that can exist between these labels. When looking at my mother’s father, it helps me to view his behavior through this lens. Likewise, it helps me to view those whom I see supporting dangerous ideology in today’s political environment through this lens.

  * * *

  NSB Children Today

  Perhaps of all my mother’s siblings, my aunt Hannie, who was like a second mother to me, suffered the most from the war. As the eldest, she understood the most and felt the greatest responsibility. I hadn’t realized how much it plagued her life until her death. After her death, her children gave me stacks of articles she had clipped out about the children of NSB members, stacks of newsletters of support groups for the children of collaborators called “Recognition Workgroup” and “Child of Wrong Parents,” and special issues of other magazines with titles like What Did You Do During the War, Mother? These all were resources for her that became available only when she was well into adulthood, decades after the war.

  I also learned that long before I visited the National Archives to see my grandparents’ NSB dossiers, my aunt Hannie and uncle Pim, both deceased in the past decade, paid a similar visit and took notes, including of their thoughts on what they viewed. Their notes speak to the complicated pain of having parents who were on the wrong political side in World War II and show how this affected the psyches of that generation of NSB children. Some two hundred thousand children of NSB members never received any psychological care after the war, nor were they considered victims at that time. But my uncle’s and aunt’s written notes give us another perspective as my uncle recounts their discussion in a café after reading the dossiers of their parents:

  The first feeling that came up in us was: Glad that we no longer live in that period; it was an incomprehensible morass in which it was hard to make the right choice—and our parents didn’t succeed in doing so. Naiveté played a role in their choices in the political arena …

  We think the punishment was quite severe for their offenses. On the other hand, we have to remember that in 1945 the situation was chaotic and internment may have saved political delinquents from lynch parties.

  The second generation is made up of the children who have been handed the bill. First, through the fact that our family was torn apart. In addition, we suffered from the fact that on the one hand we felt loyal to our parents, but on the other hand to the victims of the political system that they chose.

  As far as we are concerned, the bond with our parents remained, even as we, retrospectively, don’t endorse their political views. The aggression that prevailed towards the occupier and the NSB partially came to lay on ou
r shoulders. As siblings we had to support one another more than normal, which actually strengthened the underlying bond: Home, inside the family, was our only safe harbor; outside of that it was a jungle.