* * *
Wars don’t emerge out of understanding, compassion, or reason, and they are rarely simple, much as we would like to entrench ourselves in clearly delineated ideology. As I write this, Syrian men, women, and children flood into Western nations to escape a tyranny based on “us and them” thinking in their home countries, only to find themselves on the other side of “us and them” discrimination in the countries of their refuge. Neofascism is on the rise globally, with far-right political parties gaining power in multiple countries. Huge segments of the population are poised to enter into another violent global battle based on simplistic dichotomous thinking. Racial tensions, religious tensions, and class tensions all are increasing again. Already, a whole new generation of children are suffering the wounds of war and persecution that they will pass on to their children in turn. Some of them, when their families try to flee violence to other countries, are separated and placed in youth detention centers while their parents are prosecuted as undocumented immigrants, causing further trauma. This is why it matters that we lay bare the whole complicated, conflicted snarl of the past, examine our preconceptions, and try to do better. My family is just one family with transgenerational trauma. There are millions. It’s time to talk.
Eerkens’s family on front steps in Benkulu, Sumatra. (left to right): Aunt Jo holding Doortje, Grandfather Jozef Eerkens Sr., “Aunt Soer” with Fieneke, Grandmother Elisabeth holding Sjeffie (Jozef Jr.) 1935.
Doortje and Sjeffie playing with a baby tiger, Bengkulu, Sumatra, circa 1933.
Grandmother Elisabeth’s students with family (in front, left to right): Fieneke, Sjeffie, Doortje) at graduation, prior to family’s departure from Bengkulu, 1936. (Courtesy of Collection Tropenmuseum, National Museum of World Cultures. Creative Commons license 3.0)
The family around the car, circa 1937.
Sjeffie and baby brother Keesje, Semarang, 1938.
Swimming in Old Tjandi, circa 1938.
Aunt Jo visits the Eerkens family in Semarang, 1938.
Eerkens kids with babysitter “Elly,” 1938.
Fieneke, Doortje, Grandmother Elizabeth (behind), Sjeffie, and neighbor Friedl, circa 1938.
Grandfather Jozef Eerkens Sr. and his children, Semarang, circa 1938.
Tropical Eerkens children eating mangos. (left to right): Keesje, Doortje, Fieneke, Sjeffie, Madiun, circa 1939.
Grandfather Jozef Eerkens Sr. rowing a boat on Lake Sarangan with children, circa 1940.
Cousin Kees (left) arrives in April 1941 from Bolivia to go to school. Less than a year later, he will be interned in Camp Lampersari with the rest of the family, and then Camp Bangkong men’s camp with Sjeffie (right).
(left to right): Sjeffie, Cousin Kees, Fieneke, Doortje, Madiun, circa 1941.
Eerkens family home on the Ingenluijflaan 49 in Madiun, 1941. When the Japanese invade a year later, their officers will occupy this home.
Grandfather Jozef Eerkens’s tin cup for his daily ration of food in the camp. Medium apple for scale.
Rare photograph from inside the internment camps. Women on kitchen duty cooking rice in a giant cauldron over open flames in Camp Lampersari. (Courtesy of Valentin Schreiber, Creative Commons license 3.0)
School buildings in refugee camp Kandy after the war as families fled Indonesia with the help of the Red Cross during the Bersiap/civil war, Sri Lanka. The Eerkens family stayed there approximately five months before being repatriated to the Netherlands in April 1946.
Eerkens family back in the Netherlands, Eefde, circa 1948.
Sjeffie in the aeronautics club, Eefde, the Netherlands, circa 1948.
Sjeffie and new friend on the Edam, heading to New York, September 1950.
Sjeffie visits the grave of “Aunt Lien” in Kalibanteng memorial cemetery in Semarang, Java, in 2015. Aunt Lien, a close friend of the family, died in Lampersari Camp at age thirty-six.
Sjeffie visits his former men’s prison camp, Bangkong, for the first time in seventy years. The facility is now a school, and beautifully landscaped and maintained. Semarang, Java, 2015.
Grandfather Adrianus Cornelis de Kock and Grandmother Maria Catharina Barto, prior to marriage, 1931.
Elsje at the lake in hand-knitted bathing suit, circa 1941.
De Kock children during the war. (left to right): Hannie (behind), Elsje, Pim, Bert. Woods near Apeldoorn, circa 1942.
Great-grandparents, Arie and Bertha Barto, cycling on the bridge with Hannie and my grandmother, their daughter, circa 1942. The bombing of this bridge would later take their lives.
The bridge in Zutphen after the bombing, 1944.
House of great-grandparents, Arie and Bertha Barto, after the bombing that killed them both. Zutphen, the Netherlands, 1944. (Courtesy of Photo Collection Stedelijk Museum Zutphen, Nederland)
The Nieuwmarkt neighborhood ghetto surrounded by barbed wire during Nazi occupation in Amsterdam, 1942. (Courtesy of Charles Breijer, collection Stadsarchief Amsterdam)
Hatchet Day, the Netherlands. Girls suspected of having relations with German soldiers and other suspected collaborators are shaved bald and paraded through the streets at gunpoint. April 1945. (Courtesy of William van de Poll, Creative Commons License 3.0.)
Arrest of my grandfather (center, with arms raised) on April 17, 1945, during Hatchet Day, Apeldoorn. (Courtesy of Henk van Veen Sr.)
The House of the Red Pan in winter. Hoog Soeren, the Netherlands, 1947.
In the garden of the Red Pan. (left to right): Loes, Hannie, grandfather Adrianus, Elsje, the elderly Mrs. Parqui, whom they helped care for during the summer in exchange for low rent. Hoog Soeren, the Netherlands, circa 1947.
The family back together after the war. (left to right): Grandmother, grandfather, Pim, Elsje, Hannie, and Bert (in back), circa 1947.
Pim, Hannie, and Elsje on bikes after being reunited as a family. Hoog Soeren, the Netherlands, 1947.
Baby Rob is born and the family adopts a dog after being reunited under one roof in the House of the Red Pan. Hoog Soeren, the Netherlands, 1948.
Elsje and her baby brother Rob. The House of the Red Pan. Hoog Soeren, the Netherlands, 1948.
Grandfather beekeeping on a family vacation spot, Kootwijk, the Netherlands, circa 1961.
Elsje as a young woman in Amsterdam, circa 1960.
Elsje and Sjeffie’s wedding, August 19, 1968, Gorssel, the Netherlands.
The de Kock family, grown, after my grandfather’s death. (left to right): Bert, Hannie, Rob, grandmother Maria, Pim, Elsje, circa 1970.
Eerkens family in Pacific Palisades, 1976. (left to right): Elsje, Boukje, Sjeffie, Jelmer, Mieke.
Elsje visits the House of the Red Pan, Hoog Soeren, the Netherlands, 2016.
Elsje visits the House of the Red Pan, Hoog Soeren, the Netherlands, 2016. The house is now owned by the granddaughter of the elderly Mrs. Parqui (Heidi) with whom Elsje played as a child. Here, they reminisce about the past. (left to right): Eva (Elsje’s childhood friend from the village), Boukje (Pim’s wife), Heidi Parqui, Elsje.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was many years in the making, from conception to realization. I had a great deal of help along the way, for which I am immensely grateful. Thank you first and foremost to my parents, Else and Sjef, and my siblings, Boukje and Jelmer, as well as to the extended Eerkens and de Kock families, who allowed me to expose them on the page and gave so freely and generously of themselves when I had questions. In particular, thank you to Rob and Orselien de Kock, Bouk de Kock, Jozien Verschoof, Liesbeth Verschoof, Joost Verschoof, Petra Verschoof, Cees and Metty Eerkens, Willemien de Kock, Hanke de Kock, Sjoeke van der Meulen, Aris van Hoeflaken, Maaike van Hoeflaken, and Frans van Hoeflaken, as well as the late Hannie de Kock, Pim de Kock, and Fieneke Verschoof, for their contribution to my family research. Thank you to the kind employees of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD) and the Dutch National Archives for the hours of research in their libraries. For their gift of time, space, and/or financial support, I�
��d like to express my gratitude to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the James Merrill House, Hambidge Center for the Arts, Foundation Obras, the Stanley Foundation, and the John Anson Kittredge Fund. This book would never have found its way to print without my supportive and hardworking agent, Sarah Levitt, and my amazing editor, Anna deVries, whom I appreciate immensely. Thank you to Sibylle Kazeroid for her copyediting, and to my publicist, Brianna Scharfinberg. Thank you also to all my former colleagues, professors, and workshop cohorts at the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction MFA program who read various parts of this in its earliest fragments, and in particular Robin Hemley, Patricia Foster, John D’Agata, Geoff Dyer, and Matthew Clark Davison for their guidance. Thank you (in no particular order) to Amy Butcher, Kerry Howley, Kristen Radtke, Inara Verzemnieks, Zaina Arafat, Rachel Yoder, Ariel Lewiton, Jen Percy, Lina Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas, Matt Siegel, Cheryl Strayed, Rachel Pearson, Julie Rae Mitchell, Shana Ting Lipton, Bryan Castille, Dorothianne Carr and all “Camp Dot” residents, Huan Hsu, Alice Elliott Dark, Diederik van Vleuten, Franca Treur, and Kyle Minor, for their various words of book-related encouragement, input, and/or inspiration over the years when I needed each of those things to keep going in my writing.
If I included all the people I love in this list, there wouldn’t be room, but know that you are acknowledged and thanked too, for all the things you do to support and nourish me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MIEKE EERKENS’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Creative Nonfiction, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Guernica, among others. She earned an M.A. in English from Leiden University in the Netherlands, and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. Eerkens teaches creative writing online for UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program and as a visiting instructor for the Iowa Summer Writing Program. She divides her time between Amsterdam and California. You sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
A Brief World War II Time Line Relevant to the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies
Map of the Netherlands
Map of Dutch East Indies
Preface
PART I: FATHER
1. Selamat Datang di Indonesia
2. Infamy and Invasion
3. POWs
4. Men over Ten
5. Independence and Displacement
PART II: MOTHER
6. Fascism on the Rise
7. The Occupation
8. End of the War, Beginning of the War
9. Hatchet Day
10. Starting Over
11. Fout in the City
12. Let the Record Show
PART III: COMING TOGETHER
13. The Immigrants
14. Forming a Family
15. Things
16. Food
17. Home
18. Words
19. The Survivors
Epilogue
Photos
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
This book is based on many interviews with the people who survived these events, as well as research in various archives, diaries, articles, letters, and other material. Memory and history are subjective, and any work of literary nonfiction has an element of subjectivity as well. I have done my best to adhere to the truth as I and my sources believe it to be throughout this book, based on the information I have. However, there may be details others might interpret or have experienced differently. In addition, in places I have filled in minor sensory details of scenes, grounded in the historical material available to me, in the service of narrative interest.
ALL SHIPS FOLLOW ME. Copyright © 2019 by Mieke Eerkens. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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Excerpt here from “Little Gidding” from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot. Copyright © 1942 by T. S. Eliot renewed 1970 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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First Edition: April 2019
All Ships Follow Me Page 28