All Ships Follow Me

by Mieke Eerkens

  Altogether, the subsequent psychological effects on the family De Kock could have been worse. From recent documentaries on NSB children we learned that others suffered even worse than we did.

  It seems as though this visit to look at our family history was a final step in integrating our past into our present lives. From this point forward we can continue down the track without Gordian knots, and with some life lessons.

  In the Netherlands, there has been a new movement in the last couple of decades to speak openly about what was done to the families of NSB members after the war. Dutch books such as Wrong and No Good (2010) by Koos Groen, along with documentary films featuring interviews with children of NSB party members and allies of the German occupiers who tell shocking stories of deplorable treatment, have only recently started to appear as the country finally seems ready to talk in a more nuanced way about a deeply painful and traumatic period in their history.

  In an article for the Historisch Nieuwsblad titled “The Last Taboo in the Netherlands: NSB Children,” Bas Kromhout wrote, “Many children of parents who were ‘wrong’ during World War II feel themselves as outsiders in Dutch society. Even in the extensively documented history of the occupation years and their aftermath, they still come in last place.” Kromhout’s observations are based on the first real study done, in 2002, on the effects the war had on children of NSB members. He wrote, “For the first time, children of ‘wrong’ parents have been systematically surveyed on such a large scale. The results don’t lie: a large group of children of NSBers have serious struggles to date due to their parents’ pasts and the social rejection they experienced after 1945. Even though they are not guilty of the crimes committed in the name of the NSB, they still feel tainted.” The study concluded, among other things, that among the 229 now-adult children of NSB members surveyed, almost all had been “bullied and cursed at by classmates and neighborhood children” during the war, and:

  • 75% had difficulty developing and maintaining relationships

  • 16% were interned behind barbed-wire fences, while 24% were put into children’s homes or foster care

  • 42% made a traumatic escape to Germany [during and immediately after the country’s liberation] and 10% went into hiding

  • 75% of their parents did not reintegrate into Dutch society, causing the children to withdraw from society as well

  • 59% felt their educations had been stifled as a result of their parents’ affiliation and 49% their career opportunities

  • 85% suffered from psychological and psychiatric problems, including extreme fear of failure, social phobias, depression, and/or suicidal ideation and attempts

  • 57% experience the national day of remembrance for the victims of the Nazi occupation on May 4 as an extremely difficult day

  • 92% felt they had paid a high price for the pasts of their parents

  Kromhout further shared some of the specific difficulties that those who were surveyed added, and the stories all have the same thread running through them. One man called May 4, the Day of Remembrance in the Netherlands, when the city observes a minute of silence and lays wreaths for the victims of the Holocaust, “the most terrible day of the year.” He felt he must show his respect by going to Dam Square in Amsterdam, where a ceremony is held. “To show that I feel awful about what happened. I felt all alone between the people; I thought they could see it by looking at me.” This man was an infant when the war ended. This year, I found myself in Amsterdam on May 4, and I too walked to Dam Square alone to stand among hundreds of people, tears welling during the minute of silence. Afterward, I laid a flower on the monument for the dead, and astonished myself with the level of guilt that I, generations removed, felt about the past. In Kromhout’s study, a woman who has lived in the same village in the Netherlands her whole life and was the teenage daughter of NSB members during the war speaks of her struggles with the Day of Remembrance too. “On that day, [the congregation] won’t let me sing along with the choir in my church.” More than half a century later, she is still being punished for her parents’ sins.

  The study goes into depth about how the NSB children have been specifically traumatized, identifying common issues caused by a number of mutual triggers. The first is the shared sense of duty to keep the family secret, and I realize that this too is a trauma that is passed down to subsequent generations. I am breaking the taboo by publicly acknowledging our family history, but for decades I didn’t dare talk about it. I remember the classmate who said all people who had anything to do with the Holocaust should have been killed, and recall my secret shame. When I began working on this book and submitted my application to an artists’ residency, I wrote that if chosen, I would be working on a book “about my father’s internment in a Japanese concentration camp and my mother’s experiences in Nazi-occupied Holland.” I deleted the last half of that line and inserted: “… experiences as the daughter of Nazi sympathizers in WW II Holland.” The cursor blinked. My stomach knotted. I deleted that line. Inserted: “… experiences in an orphanage after her parents were arrested as Nazi sympathizers in WW II Holland.” I deleted that line. Inserted: “… experiences in Nazi-occupied Holland.” My cursor blinked at me. Liar. Liar. Liar. Why couldn’t I just write it?

  The second common trauma among the children of NSB members is the often inadequate warehousing of these children while their parents were interned. Many, like my mother, went to children’s homes or foster care, but a number of them were also interned in camps. The separation from their families, as well as mistreatment and hunger after the war, affected many NSB children.

  In addition, most families experienced financial ruin. Like my mother’s home, their homes were sometimes looted before they returned from internment. If they had rental homes, their possessions were sold or taken by landlords. They struggled to find work, as people were reluctant to hire former NSB members. Many families were homeless because landlords would not rent to them, and ended up in government-appointed housing. The ensuing poverty resulted in a tangible trauma for many of the children. My mother’s family was comparatively lucky to get to live in the summer cottage in Hoog Soeren, and my grandfather very lucky to get a job in Amsterdam, though he would not be allowed to teach again.

  The fourth common traumatic experience identified in the study is an institutional rejection. Children of NSB parents experienced bullying but report that their teachers and the other children’s parents did little to stop it, and in a few cases actually joined in. Church congregations and groups could also be very harsh toward NSB families. One of the respondents reported that in his Sunday school, “NSB children had to sit apart from the rest and at Christmas they got nothing.” Generally, the understandable anger in the community after the occupation simmered for years, and this was made evident in the open hostility an NSB family could expect in stores, schools, churches, places of employment. The nuclear family often became the only place of security, and society outside, as my uncle articulated it, a “jungle” they should fear.

  Internally, families also became volatile as parents dealt with the stresses. Parents fought, placing blame on each other for their political choices. Parents sometimes emerged from the internment camps for political delinquents with PTSD symptoms if they had been tortured, and the children were also the victims of this if the parents who returned after serving their sentences were not the same parents they remembered.

  Today, we still see the shame and guilt of family members of those on the “wrong side of history,” for whom the war is still very present. In the past couple of decades, they are occasionally interviewed for news programs in the Netherlands, something that would not have been done even forty years ago. NSB children, now elderly, dissolve into tears as they recall their childhoods as the objects of loathing, being teased by both children and adults alike, and not having any way to reconcile their love for and dependence on parents who were deemed evil by their communities.

  In 1981, the first support group for the ch
ildren of NSB members was established, Werkgroep Herkenning, “Recognition Workshop,” though it would not be acknowledged as legitimate until the mid-1990s, according to their website. I know my aunt got great comfort from her membership in the group. In 1988, more than forty years after the end of the war, the first child of an NSB member was interviewed on national television without concealing her identity, and thus began a serious conversation about the real war trauma this overlooked group of people had experienced. To this day, there is still debate in the Netherlands, with some people expressing outrage over the notion that the NSB families could be labeled as victims, but in general, the public has begun to take a more nuanced look at the events of the war and the mistakes made in the postwar quest for justice.

  FORMER POWs OF WORLD WAR II JAPAN TODAY

  The survivors of World War II are thinning as the generation that experienced it firsthand enters old age. The newsletter for the survivors of my father’s camp has faltered as the president and members pass away. Years ago, when I began researching my father’s war experiences, I attended a reunion of survivors and got excellent information from them. They all told me how surprised they were to see a young person there. Survivor after survivor told me, “My kids don’t really want to know about it.” They wrote about my visit in the newsletter, The Bangkonger, and the president of the group occasionally sent me memories from the camp. He told me how touched he was that somebody was going to tell their stories. He died before his story could be shared, as did a number of the men I met at that reunion. I can only hope that the promise of sharing my father’s story, and by proxy theirs, gave them some comfort, because for most of the years following their internment, the world didn’t seem to know or care.

  * * *

  A 2008 report of the Global Law Research Center for the U.S. Law Library of Congress on Japan’s World War II forced-labor compensation cases states, “Japanese courts have been dealing with post-WWII compensation cases from foreigners since approximately 1990. In the cases of POWs, forced laborers, and comfort women, some lower courts have awarded compensation, but most of them have not.” In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court decided the outcome of most of these cases when they ruled that victims of the Japanese war crimes during World War II have no recourse to restitution because of the San Francisco Peace Treaty signed by forty-eight Allied nations on September 8, 1951. The treaty officially brought hostilities with Japan to an end. But with it, the Allied nations signed away their rights to legal justice for their citizens who had been affected by Japan’s war crimes. Further, Japan maintains that reparations were already made, per the treaty.

  * * *

  Japan had paid £4,500,000 to the Red Cross, it claimed, to compensate civilian POWs. This money, a paltry sum to cover all the global victims, never made it to the individual POWs, as it was used by the Red Cross for its operations, including repatriating the POWs. Furthermore, according to historian Linda Goetz Holmes, these funds “were not Japanese government funds, but several million dollars of relief funds contributed by the governments of the United States, United Kingdom, and Netherlands … and sequestered in the Yokohama Specie Bank … by the Japanese government during the final year of the war.” Article 14 of the treaty further states that Japan acknowledges that it should pay “for the damage and suffering caused by it during the war,” but that it is unable to pay and maintain its economic stability. It states that Japan will enter negotiations with countries affected by its occupation to compensate for the “cost of repairing the damage done.”

  * * *

  Again, no money from these actions made its way to POWs like my father, but Japan considered its obligations met with the San Francisco Peace Treaty. And yet, beginning in 1994, the first cases were filed against Japan for restitution to the people it had harmed. Per the Congressional report, “The first western POW case was filed in 1994 in Japan. In this case, Dutch POWs and civilian internees sued the Japanese government, seeking damages for their suffering while they were detained by the Japanese military in East Indochina during WWII.” My father was part of this class of plaintiffs. This began many years of debating semantics. The Japanese government had destroyed the records of its war crimes, and if an official record did not exist, the government could not be responsible for reparations. Further, the San Francisco Peace Treaty was used repeatedly to block further action. It also asserted that “claims of nationals of the Allied Powers were ‘abandoned’ by the Allied Powers.” In other words, Japan claims that the failure of Allied nations to pursue the restitution further on behalf of its citizens over the years meant that they were no longer liable and any claims “ceased to exist.” Other cases have been brought by individuals and classes, and emails have been exchanged with lawyers representing class action suits, but ultimately, the United States, like other Allied nations, halted further lawsuits against Japan in order to keep the peace, citing sovereign immunity. Aside from a little over one thousand dollars distributed in 1991 to each survivor of the camps, which was paid out by the Dutch government in lieu of Japanese reparations, my father will never see any compensation for the loss of his home, possessions, and childhood, or for the abuse and starvation committed against him in violation of international law. In 2016, Prime Minister Shinzō Abe of Japan finally formally apologized to the hundreds of thousands of “comfort women” who were systematically selected and raped by Japanese forces during the Japanese occupation. The Japanese government gave $8.5 million to an advocacy group as a symbolic gesture. The hope for further financial or legal restitution for the victims of Japan’s war crimes is now unlikely.

  My father and the men I spoke to from his camp are less interested in legal or financial reparations than they are in recognition. Like all human beings, they seek the healing that comes only from the simple words we all long to hear after being wounded: I’m sorry I hurt you. But getting this apology without a list of caveats undermining the official apology has been a long and bumpy road for survivors. The Japanese government has been extremely reluctant to acknowledge its war crimes officially or as part of its national history. Seventy years after the end of World War II, controversy and conflict regarding the Japanese government’s reluctance to fully come to terms with the past have only intensified.

  Debate continues over whether or not the Japanese government, the Allied governments, and the media have done enough to acknowledge what many in former occupied nations dub the “Asian Holocaust.” Perhaps because of this lack of similar attention to what Nazi Germany received after World War II, most Westerners remain unaware that as many civilians died at the hand of Japan as at the hand of the Nazis, with estimates ranging from a low of 6 million civilians (by political scientist and war historian R. J. Rummel) to a high of 20.3 million (by Werner Gruhl, author of Imperial Japan’s World War II).

  While the Holocaust has rightfully gotten worldwide attention and the survivors and victims have been memorialized in popular culture so that we may never forget, Japan’s crimes during the war have managed to avoid similar widespread attention from the general public. It is only in the past decade that its government has considered removing the names of over a thousand convicted war criminals from its Yasukuni Shrine honoring its war dead. Japan has also had controversy surrounding its history textbooks, which have tended to whitewash the Japanese government’s actions in World War II, with the Ministry of Education rejecting textbooks with references to internment camps, comfort women, and the Rape of Nanking.

  The minimization of Japanese war crimes is being addressed within Japan, however, and past decades have seen leaders take increasing accountability, offering official condolences for its war crimes. But these apologies are often interpreted as half apologies by victims, the “I’m sorry you were hurt by the unfortunate thing that occurred when you offended me” so many people are familiar with, rather than the “I’m sorry I hurt you” they long to hear. Over the years, the apologies have referred to the “unfortunate events,” “regretful error,” or “un
fortunate past” of the war. Emperor Hirohito’s 1984 statement—“It is indeed regrettable that there was an unfortunate past between us for a period in this century”—has turned into Abe’s apology in 2015, which begins by stating that Japan “lost sight of overall trends in the world” after World War I, and apologizes for the “countless losses” “in countries that fought against Japan” such as China.

  I’m struck by that phrase in particular. “Countries that fought against Japan” seems an odd way to describe countries in which Japan was the occupier. I can understand why victims may feel that the apologies contain asterisks and fine print. The language is overtly passive, and Abe describes the countries Japan invaded as “the battlefields [where] numerous innocent citizens suffered and fell victim to battles as well as hardships such as severe deprivation of food,” avoiding using the active voice, as though these countries spontaneously became battlefields on their own. In the speech, he offers his sincere apologies, but only couched within descriptions of the atomic bomb victims and the former POWs of Japan who have come to Japan to pray for the war dead on both sides.

  * * *

  Of course, the United States is guilty of similar resistance over the decades, with Barack Obama being the first American president to officially pay his respects to Japan’s atomic bomb victims with a visit to Hiroshima. Paying respect is not about assigning heroes and villains or creating two sides, but about acknowledging the losses of innocent people caused by war. I still remember the time a Japanese colleague of my father’s visited us in Los Angeles. My father spoke some Japanese to him, and the man asked how he knew the language. When my father told him he had learned it in a Japanese internment camp, the man became very emotional. “I am sorry for what my country did to you,” the man said. My father told him he didn’t need to be sorry for something he had played no part in, but just hearing those words spoken genuinely and with empathy made a big impression on him. I think the mere recognition that something happened to him that deeply altered his life was immensely healing.