A Homeland Lost, the Birth of a Global Citizen

By Joty ter Kulve - van Os

Translation by Dop Bär

Linggarjati

I loved Mount Cermai. It was ever present when I grew up, just as it was to everybody else in Linggarjati, the small settlement of Dutch people on the slopes of this volcano on West Java. Whenever I returned to Cirebon from Bandung, the provincial capital, I was always eagerly looking forward to the moment when the mountain would first reveal itself. As always, the journey from Bandung is a beautiful trip. Bandung itself is located in a basin surrounded by high mountains. The road from this city to Cirebon winds through narrow mountain passes along alarming precipices. Tropical vegetation is everywhere in lush abundance. The natural beauty of Java is so gripping, it won't let go of you once you've experienced it. It is a country of wild, unprecedented beauty that sets one's imagination soaring with its surprises and mysteries.

Cirebon is a coastal town, surrounded by some of the largest sugar cane plantations on Java. As you approach this town from the direction of Bandung, the countryside gradually becomes flatter. After passing through field after field for several hours, suddenly you are in the hot, boisterous town. Cirebon is a town full of passion, new ideas and revolutionary elements, but foremost it is a typical Eastern trading center. A place where Chinese, Arabs, Indonesians and Dutchmen, outdoing each other in trading savvy, have tried their luck. Several large Dutch trading companies have offices here, since much of the sugar, tobacco and other produce from surrounding plantations and hinterland are shipped from this port. Many of the local natives, though, make their living from fishing. As children, one of the great treats for us was to go along with our Dad on an outing in one of the fishing boats, particularly at night. I well remember the slender, graceful perahu, heaving rhythmically on the waves with a red and green light in the mast, the Indonesians bending over their oars on either side of the boat. In this city of Cirebon, my father had built his factory, where he made floor tiles and concrete culverts.

Cirebon is hot and humid. For me it always was a relief to leave the city for the cool climate of the foothills and our hometown Linggarjati, When approaching Linggaqrjati, one could already smell the fresh mountain air from afar. Every time we came home on vacation, we always revisited all the familiar spots where we grew up. Mount Cermai once was an active volcano that strewed the region with large boulders. Some of the boulders were so large that it took quite an effort to climb up on them. Even in my youth, the volcano wasn't really dormant. Periodically, a grey plume of smoke would rise from the crater, followed by ashes raining on the foothills, sometimes followed by an eruption. Earth quakes were common; the reason why my father built our house with very solid walls. At Linggarjati, everybody knew everybody, if not from the local school, then from the swimming pool. Most of the people were families of the gentlemen who had their office or business in Cirebon.

The first thing I would do when arriving home from Bandung was to take off my shoes and walk barefoot through the paddies to the nearby river. I would stand there, taking deep breaths of fresh mountain air, mesmerized by the panoramic view. This was the country that my father came to love so much that he never returned to his native Holland. He poured his heart and soul, all his energy, into this country. Linggarjati was his choice to build his home and raise his family, a place he helped develop from its very beginnings. He built the main house and a number of rental bungalows around it; he ran his own water supply from a little waterfall in the hills above the house. The pipes were constructed from bamboo, indeed, but we had running water in the house.

My father was a restless person, always driven by new plans. He married my mother when she was still quite young. She came from an long-standing Dutch East Indies family. One of her great grandparents was General van Rombeek, who was instrumental in the construction of the thousand kilometer long Mail Road along the North Coast of Java. Besides Dutch blood, my mother also had Belgian, Portuguese and Austrian blood in her veins. And we must have had an Indonesian ancestor as well; Mom's dark hair and tinted skin, like mine, was evidence of that. The history of Mom's family was interwoven with the development of the sugar factories around Yogyakarta, one of the major cities of Central Java. My maternal grandfather came from a family of thirteen siblings. As a teenager, in the wild years of the mid 1800's, he saw his father make millions and loose them again. Granddad lived an adventurous life; gambling and hunting were his passion. When he was fifty, he lost all his money, and since that time he and my grandmother lived with us at Linggarjati.

My grandparents' love for nature and animals was evident from the garden around the house. Our garden was always full of flowers and domestic animals, including Knor, a baby wild boar that Granddad had brought home from a hunt one day. Knor had a personality all his own, touchingly dependent when he was small, but as he matured, the call of the wild became strong. I remember he escaped twice and was caught only with the help of the whole neighboring village. The third time he disappeared, we let nature take its course.

Then there were at least twenty cats roaming in and around the house, but they all belonged to Atmo. Atmo came to work for my grandparents when she was fourteen, and she developed into a superb cook. She had the reputation of cooking the best rijsttafel in the neighborhood. In true Dutch East Indies tradition, everybody was always welcome to join us at the dinner table. Atmo had an ingrained belief that cats were holy animals, that they would bring good fortune. So she adopted any cat or kitten that she found. They all slept in her room at the back of the house.

My grandmother came from a devout Catholic family. Her mother was from Zeeland, the southern-most province of the Netherlands, and her father was Portuguese. He built the first ice factory in the East Java city of Surabaya, that produced large blocks of ice used for food conservation. He married my great grandmother on the condition that she would leave the church. Grandma told the story how my great grandfather destroyed all of her mother's Catholic icons.

My father died in 1933 of renal failure. I was six years old at the time and remember how I thought that my mother, who was just thirty years old, would never overcome the loss. The crisis of the depression of the '30's threatened to bankrupt the factory, and besides her three small children, she also had her parents to care for; an extraordinarily heavy task for a woman who had been raised in a extremely protected environment and had not been allowed more than basic schooling. Be that as it may, I got to know my mother by the ways she always managed to survive, even in times of crisis. The fact that we later survived the Japanese concentration camps was due to her courage and resolve.

Her marriage to my father had not always been easy. He was driven by a restlessness that drove him from one project to another. He would sometimes go on business trips for many weeks, leaving Mom alone in Linggarjati with us three kids. Or he would be sized by a new plan, like an electricity network or a drainage system for the city of Cirebon. Or he would come home on a weekend with two hundred Boy Scouts in tow for whom Mom would have to find accommodations and also feed them. My father's death must have been an enormous shock for her. As a six year-old, I of course, didn't understand everything, but I do remember how she, at his deathbed - he was wearing a white cloth around his head at the time - had to promise that she would give us a good education. Bizarre indeed, but I remember she also had to promise him that when we grew up, we would not be allowed to use lipstick and powder. He probably meant that we should be "raised properly."

The people at Linggarjati doubted whether my mother - an "Indies" woman - would be able to raise us properly. This probably spurred her even more to raise us as best she could. Towards that goal, literally and figuratively, she sacrificed anything and everything. By Dutch standards in Indonesia, we were definitely poor. She provided for us by giving piano lessons and by taking in children from the outlying plantations as boarders. It was for the sake of Cora, my older sister, for whom it was time to go to high school that we moved to the provincial capital Bandung. Until that time, we were in the small local school in Linggarjati. I remember walking home from school one day (it was quite a walk to and from school), when we heard a scary sound in the sky and a big thing flew over us. When we came home and excitedly told what we had seen, my Dad explained that we had seen our first airplane.

This time though, the trip that brought Cora and me home to Linggarjati from Bandung in 1942 was not for a vacation. The Government had announced a state of siege. Mom and our little brother, Wim, had already preceded us to Linggarjati when her two brothers, Totok and Boy, whom, since my father's death, had been running the factory, were drafted into the army. The factory in Cirebon now had to be run by Mom. When more and more news about the advance of the Japanese via China and the Philippines reached us, Mom thought it safer to bring us home as well. Thus, reluctantly we packed up our schoolbooks, never thinking that we would not set foot in school again for the next 3 years. It was 1942, and I was fourteen. So there we were, in Linggarjati. No school now, so we spent our days at the pool and took long walks through the jungle. The fact that the Japanese were getting ever closer didn't really register with us kids at the time. The only image I had of them I got from Atmo, who described them as a swarm of thousands upon thousands of locusts that once they alight, would destroy everything. That gave me a nauseating feeling, because I had a life-long aversion to insects.

For us at this time, the war seemed remote. And anyway, life became very busy at Linggarjati. Several families from Cirebon and the surrounding plantations had been evacuated to our village. We organized treks into the mountains for all the newly arrived children. In addition, since Granddad's bridge-playing buddies had all been drafted, Granddad - never to be thwarted - recruited Cora and me and even little Wim who was only eleven, as his bridge partners. This, of course, took the necessary time for training.

As the days went by however, our uneasiness increased, reminiscent of the ominous, stifling quiet before a thunderstorm. It was a nerve-wracking time for the women. Without their husbands, and not knowing what tomorrow would bring, they bore the sole responsibility for themselves and their children. To make matters worse, with the Dutch forces having their hands full, the Indonesians in Cirebon had started a rebellion. It began as small group, but within two days the hordes had swelled to hundreds of Javanese running amok. Destroying everything they met on their way, they moved up the hills in our direction. The women and children at Linggarjati were preparing to run and hide in the jungle. When they were within half an hour from our village, a Dutch police force halted their advance. This expeditionary force had been hastily mobilized and it literally saved our lives.

One day, what we had feared so much actually happened. It was a beautiful late afternoon, the time of day when the worst heat was over and the birds and the insects prepared for the night. In the tropics, the hour before sunset and the early mornings are the best parts of the days. These hours, cool and heavy with the tropical fragrance of flowers and plants, make you understand both the wisdom and patience that are so characteristic of the people of the East. As my sister and I were walking along the only paved road of Linggarjati, we suddenly saw three heavy motorcycles approaching. They were ridden by soldiers in uniforms of a color that was different from the color of the uniforms worn by my uncles. They were wearing dark glasses, so we could not see their eyes. In a few moments they had passed us, but my instinct told me that this was the beginning of a frightful nightmare. I remember trembling like a leaf and running home, where I burst into tears.

The days that followed were terrifying. We remained literally glued to the radio. The Japanese shock troops had landed in Indonesia and we could expect them any day in Linggarjati. As our anxiety increased, so did the tension around the house. Rows ensued between Granddad and Grandma, as well as between Mom and the wife of her brother who had arrived from the Netherlands two years earlier. Then the news reached us that the Dutch forces, the Royal Dutch East Indies Army (KNIL), after one week of desperate resistance, had given up the fight…

When the first shock of the news had passed, Mom decided it was time to get organized. Her first instinctive decision was to bury all Granddads' hunting rifles to avoid accusations that we had taken part in any active resistance. The whole family was put to work. Wasil, the gardener, was told to dig a deep hole in the back yard. Granddad greased and wrapped his beloved rifles and one by one handed them to us. It was a nerve-wracking morning. One by one we slid out of the house with a rifle and ducked into the bushes. I was one of the last, and just as I got out of the house, I heard the tread of heavy boots and rifles being cocked. Mom cried out; bad luck would have it that an advance patrol of Japanese soldiers caught us red-handed. I froze; the first thing I remember after that was that a Japanese soldier kicked the rifle out of my hands and roared something in a language that I didn't understand.

War

My heart was beating in my throat; my mind was a jumble of deadly fright. but there also was inquisitiveness. There was plenty of reason to be scared; what we had heard about the treatment of civilians by the Japanese was horrible. Stories of atrocious violence and rape had been quick to circulate. But Grandma's grey hair saved the day; respect for the elderly is deeply ingrained in the East. She showed no fear when she positioned herself in front of the family. The soldiers probably thought that we had had the intention to attack them. We got slapped around badly, until Mom had the bright idea to ask them: "Do you speak English?" Thereupon one of them started to interrogate her in broken English, and the situation was soon clarified. And our rifles were obviously not loaded. The leader of the detail ordered house arrest for us, and soon they were gone as quickly as they had appeared. Still, this short confrontation had a very profound effect on us. Our lives would never again be the same.

By that time, food supplies had already become scarce. Wasil and Atmo were our only contact with the outside world. From them we heard that a Japanese garrison had been established in Linggarjati; in fact they were billeted in the large house built by my father. Previously, when Mom and we children had moved to Bandung, Granddad and Grandma and the uncles and their families had moved out of the main house into the smaller bungalows.

In the weeks that followed, we were driven by the same fears and instincts that have lived in every woman's heart since time immemorial when armies roam the country. The Japanese attack troops were rough; by now they had years of warfare behind them, often without much sustenance, and they would eat anything they could lay their hands on. During the day we felt relatively safe with Wasil and all the villagers in the vicinity. At night, however, we barricaded our house.

In spite of the dire situation, I do remember an entertaining incident in this period. Fortunately, children are not easily overwhelmed by sorrow and violence. I'll never forget the incident with the fish. Our Dutch settlement was built on the slopes of a densely wooded valley with a lake at the bottom, which was fed by a number of natural springs. Part of the lake was screened off for use as the swimming pool that was the pride of the local Dutch people. Indonesians were denied access to the pool; a sign at the entrance read: "Prohibited for Natives and Dogs". It was a beautiful lake, surrounded by tall trees. Especially attractive were the hundreds of large, blue fish, declared holy by an old Javanese legend. The legend warned of a sure death for anybody that dared eat these fish. You can imagine how shocked we were when we heard through Wasil and Atmo of the scandal that the Japanese had at once caught and eaten all the fish. I recall that I was eagerly waiting for days on end for the news that they had all died… Nothing happened, however, although Atmo predicted that they would loose the war because of this desecration.

How did the villagers deal with all this? What were their feelings? For them as well, there was the language barrier. Further, they were Muslims and had totally different norms and customs. Did they see the Japanese as their liberators? Did the Japanese allow them to pray the required five times a day? After all, the local Indonesian population were pious Muslims. There is a myth about Islam and Linggarjati: In the 16th century, so the story goes, when Java was being converted by Muslim clerics, nine Imams came to Linggarjati, climbed the volcano to a sacred place on the mountain where they discussed the strategy of the spread of Islam throughout Java.

The first concern of the Japanese occupation was to get the economy up and going again. Indonesia's riches in oil and agricultural products were an important factor in their war strategy. To be able to sustain their campaign, they badly needed Indonesia's natural resources and produce. Most of the planters were soon released from the prisoner of war camps and ordered back to their plantations and factories. The civil administrative system, with the help of the Dutch-trained Indonesian clerks, was soon functioning again.

We were surprised at the solid knowledge of the country that the Japanese turned out to have. It was said that their maps were often more accurate than our own. Later it became evident that they had been gathering information for many years through thousands of small shop holders that had quietly established themselves all over the archipelago. Much later I learned that the nationalistic Japanese power that conquered much of South East Asia was the result of an internal revolution by young Japanese officers. This group murdered all the conservative leaders that were against Japanese military expansion. The aim of this new regime was to establish a Greater Asian Commonwealth. The expansionist war they waged was considered by many as the only solution for their overpopulated country. Their survival depended on the natural resources of their neighboring countries.

Another matter that became a concern in those days was the independence of Indonesia. The first signs of this were becoming evident. We had never before been confronted with this concept of Indonesian independence. For me, Indonesians consisted of Atmo, Wasil and Siti. It was as natural that they should serve us as it was to have three meals a day. The easy Japanese victory over the Dutch pushed us from the colonial pedestal that we had occupied for the previous three hundred years. Soon, the Indonesians began to be aware of some other instances where the Dutch had not been infallible. From one day to the next, their attitude towards us changed and we were forced to face what they really thought of us. In our particular case, that realization was brought about by an incident that was characteristic of those days. We had always had a good relationship with the local village Headman. He used to visit us regularly to report what went on in the village. The fact that on such occasions he would squat on the ground and we were on chairs had never struck me as being wrong. I therefore, vividly recall the visit of the Headman after the Japanese had conquered the Dutch. He took a seat in a chair! I remember how indignant I was; how dare him! In all this, the Japanese, who were also giving them all kinds of authority since they themselves were busy on other fronts, encouraged the Indonesians.

Meanwhile, the Japanese had quite a problem with what to do about us Dutch. All the men, including my uncles, were imprisoned in concentration camps, and none of the women had any income. Soon, the occupying forces made the decision also to intern all women and children in concentration camps. When the first news about the camps began to trickle in, we fervently hoped that the war would be over by the time our turn for internment came in our remote settlement.

Meanwhile, this involuntary "extended holiday" for Cora and me became extremely boring. We had read all the books that we could lay our hands on. It was not safe anymore to wander off into the forest, and we didn't dare show ourselves to the Japanese that were garrisoned at Linggarjati. Wim enjoyed himself by stalking wild boar with a spear. Ever since the Dutch with their hunting rifles had disappeared, wild boar were becoming quite bold. Their feeding territory had extended to the very paddies behind the house. This had become a serious problem, given the scarce supply of rice.

Then we received the news that the first batch of women from Linggarjati had to report for internment. Aunt Corrie, my uncle Boy's Dutch wife, her baby Loulou and her two-year-old daughter, Pam, were among them. For us it was more complicated. According to the calculations of the Japanese, Granddad and Grandma were 25 % Dutch, Mom was 50% and we kids were 75% Dutch. The Japanese turned out to have accurate records for that. For the time being, we narrowly escaped. Nevertheless, our situation was becoming untenable. At least in the camps there was some protection. At Linggarjati we were at the mercy of the Japanese soldiers.

One day, Mom, together with Cora and me, were summoned to the headquarters of the Kempei Tai (the Japanese Gestapo) in Cirebon. There she was told in no uncertain terms that she could return to Linggarjati, but Cora and I (17 and 14 years old) would remain as "women of pleasure" for the Japanese soldiers. This was a terrifying moment indeed. My mother refused to leave us, whereupon the commander barked at her that she would be shot on the spot. But Mom was steadfast in her refusal and told them they could have us only over her dead body. We were locked up in a cell, but then a miracle happened: They let us go.

It was, therefore, with some relief when one day two Japanese came up to our house and told us that Cora, Wim and I were going to be interned. It was the turn for the "75% Dutch group" of people. By now it was definitely safer for the Dutch women and children inside the camps than it was for those outside. My mother and grandparents were to stay in Linggarjati. This was a heart-rending situation. On the spot my mother told the Japanese that she wanted to be interned with us. Grandma decided to come as well; Granddad actually wanted to stay, but he realized that on his own he didn't stand much of a chance to survive, and decided to come as well. He had a premonition though, that he would not survive the camp. Just two Dutch persons remained at Linggarjati, a Mrs. Vernède, a Chechen by origin, and her 17 year old daughter Nel.

The following twenty-four hours were a nightmare. We had been ordered to appear the next day in Cirebon with one suitcase each. Of course we tried to pack as much as we could into that one suitcase. Then there was the heartbreaking farewell with Atmo, our nanny for as long as we could remember. What would become of her? And of Wasil? Much later we heard that just because he had worked for us, he had been murdered during the anti-colonial war. Siti, the other help in the house, we did find alive when we visited Linggarjati some forty years later. We said our goodbyes to the places that were dear to us, the places where we had grown up, the veranda where we used to drink coffee in the mornings, Mount Cermai and our dogs that we were so attached to. Wasil promised to take care of our property and houses; Siti offered Atmo a place in her house in the village. What happened to her twenty-some cats I don't know. Never did I imagine that it would be forty years before I saw Linggarjati again. The farewells made me feel like my heart was being torn into a thousand pieces.

We took our last bus ride down to the coast. As we got nearer to the city, the heat felt oppressive. Soon we were at the big square in front of the Japanese Military Police building. The square was packed with long rows of mothers and children sitting on their suitcases in the hot sun. But more than the burning sun, it was the fear and the anxiety about what the future would bring that choked our throats. All around us were groups of Indonesians. It seemed like they were all staring at us. Nobody said a word. Some mothers were at a loss as to what to do with their small children who were obviously upset by everything that was happening. Finally, we were loaded onto trucks and herded onto a waiting train at the station - destination unknown. Everything that had always seemed so important disappeared. All the fences that used to separate us became hazy, just as fast as color fades with dusk falling on a disappearing era.

I don't remember the train journey except for the sobbing of a mother sitting next to me. At the very last moment her daughter had been ordered to remain behind and would end up in a bordello for the Japanese. And she was not the only one.

What I remember next was our arrival in Bandung the following day. Again we were loaded like cattle onto trucks. Our destination turned out to be K.R.S. Camp. The barbed wire and split bamboo fence with the tall gate that would house us for an indefinite period, hid from us what we were to expect inside. I can still see it in my mind's eye, the long lines of women and whining children in the murderous mid-day heat. Some kind of tired resignation had come over us; one cannot endure tension indefinitely, but the sickly feeling in my belly remained. That feeling would slowly wear away by the daily routine in the camp, only to be replaced by the gnawing hunger that would never leave us in the coming years.

Then the tall bamboo gates slowly opened.

The Concentration Camp

I had never been in jail, much less in a concentration camp. I only had some vague notion of long barracks, mean guards and lots of barbed wire. I had never thought, however, that my memories of those oppressive years in camps, as I now recollect them, would be an experience based on living in a totally disjointed society that could, in a matter of weeks, bring civilized people to a near-barbarian level. The uncountable eyes that had been peeking through the split bamboo mats fence when we were still waiting outside the gate, already gave us an unpleasant feeling. When we entered the camp, the shock was indescribable. It was not only the sight of this totally neglected fenced-in town part of Bandung, but most of all, it was the expression on the emaciated faces of the camp occupants that made me shiver. Perhaps this was the only moment in our concentration camp experience that I could still see the situation objectively. After a few days I would become part of it.

With our arrival, however, the moment came when we could embrace Aunt Corrie, Pam and Loulou, who had been in the camp for some months. It was shocking to see their condition. My aunt, who had been a substantial woman, was as thin as an alley cat.

There was great hunger for news from the outside world among the women and children that had gathered around. Were there friends or relatives amongst the new arrivals? But the interest seemed unnatural, lukewarm only, a sign of the disconsolateness, which, in the coming years, would surround us again and again. At that very moment, however, we couldn't afford much reflection; we had yet to endure the worst ordeal. The body searches. The Japanese had sternly warned us that we could only carry a very limited amount of money with us. But Mom had been able to lay her hands on much more cash than was allowed. Knowing that we would be searched thoroughly, in a family council meeting we had decided that Grandma, with her gray hair, was to be our only hope. With great skill she had sown a petticoat in which she hid as many coins as possible. I don't know how poor Grandma managed to stay on her feet in the hot sun with all that weight on her. My heart was beating with fright when our family's turn came to be searched; we were all aware of the terrible consequences should we get caught. We managed to position Grandma as the last in line. Each of us was searched thoroughly, our bodies as well as our luggage, that I lost hope that Grandma would get through. But her cheerfulness (which would never desert her in all those years) and firm belief that things would turn out well, didn't desert her this time either. She had sat down on a suitcase and managed to look so old and tired that the soldier inspecting her luggage gave only her suitcase a cursory check. He never even touched her clothing. This money kept us, and in particular my two small nieces of 1 and 3 years old, from starving to death.

Immediately, we were surrounded by a group of teenagers that eagerly offered to carry our suitcases for us. Exhausted after the long journey, we gratefully accepted their offer. Busily talking and answering questions about her husband, my uncle Boy, aunt Corrie showed us the way as we walked to the quarters assigned to us.

K.R.S., a district in the city of Bandung, consisted of large homes surrounded by large gardens. Homes that used to house one family were now used to house nine or ten families, based on an allocation of two square meters per person. Needles to say, there was no room for furniture or beds; we sat and slept on the floor. Our quarters were in a house that belonged to an old lady that had always lived there. She was eighty years old by now, and was allowed to stay by herself in the smallest servant room at the back of the house next to an open drain. This old lady was not only brave; she also spent her days hatching plans on how to obtain more food. It was through this lady that I became a talented smuggler.

Our family, including Granddad and Grandma, was assigned one room. In the room next to us were housed a mother with her three children. Soon we came to know our neighbor in the room across from us, the wife of a sea captain and her two small daughters. Another room housed the three children of a planter and their mother, as well as the wife of a government official and her daughter. The annex housed the family of a Singaporean dentist and the earlier mentioned old lady with her two small dogs. We were the last family assigned to these quarters, and it was quite an event. Everyone wanted to know how the war was going and what our chances were. Besides, everybody knew that new arrivals usually had a few food supplies with them and by then, there was no more butter or other extra stuff to be had in the camp. When we opened our suitcases, it dawned on us why all those teenage girls had been so eager to carry our luggage: all the food items had disappeared..

It was a shock to hear the course language that some of the camp inmates used, and the rude manner in which people interacted. Within one week however, we ourselves were just as bad. Every once in a while, a long row of emaciated men would enter the camp under guard to do some of the heavier work that needed to be done. However, there was never a chance to talk to them.

There was, however, a semblance of order in the camp. Every house had a headwoman who had the difficult task of dividing the meager food rations. In the camp, it was a case of life or death whether you got one yam or only half of one! The headwoman also had to keep the peace in daily fights between mothers and their children, as well as amongst the women themselves. Sometimes it took the children's intervention to separate their mothers. Tempers and tension were so great that two of the houses in the next street over, had been made into psychiatric wards.

Every morning at six, the occupants of each street had to stand to attention and be counted by the Japanese, after which we had to make a deep (sixty degrees) bow to them.

We youngsters were immediately recruited for camp chores. This meant delivering bread and fruit for breakfast and delivering the evening meal. We brought the food from the central kitchen to the headwoman of each street, who in turn would distribute it to all the headwomen of the houses. For the midday meal, one member of each family had to stand in long lines at the camp kitchen to pick up their rations in a pot. Breakfast was a piece of bread made out of tapioca and water; in the beginning, I was told, there sometimes was some sugar and a little cube of butter with it. The midday meal consisted of a small handful of rice with some cooked vegetable and a piece of tofu or tempeh. The evening ration was a bowl of tapioca porridge. You got up in the morning hungry and you went to bed hungry. You dreamt about food. Constant hunger made food an obsession.

From the very beginning, Granddad was very unhappy. Everything he had ever lived for, his animals, his hunting, his home, playing bridge; all of that was no more. Life had lost its meaning for him. I remember the "family dinners". Rice was distributed by the spoonful. And woe unto the person who got one grain of rice more than the others. But if Grandma got the chance, she would share some of her meager portion with Granddad. I remember how this used to make me very angry. I couldn't see why Grandma had to sacrifice herself for Granddad all the time. Within three months, Granddad came down with dysentery, which became worse with each passing day. We tried to keep him clean as well as we could, but there was never medicine or medical help. We all slept in the same room; the stench became unbearable. At last, when he couldn't get up any more, he was taken to the sick barracks. After a terrible battle with death, Granddad died. We were not allowed to go along to bury him. Only Mom and Grandma were allowed to accompany the body when he was buried at the public cemetery outside the camp. It was forty years later that I visited his grave at the public cemetery in Bandung.

Within a matter of weeks, many of the elderly in our camp died. What struck me at the time, was that it wasn't always the physically strong that survived. Somehow, it seemed that it was those that lived for other people that kept on going. Faith, too, played a role; the ones who were spiritually strong, in the end, were the ones who survived.

We youngsters, suffered from the total lack of direction in our lives. There was no more school. The Japanese had forbidden any sort of education or sports; all books had been confiscated. The future was a black hole. We had to live in close proximity with others under the most difficult of conditions. I will never forget those days; I got to know myself, and I learned to distrust human nature in general. In that concentration camp, all facades dropped. The good and the bad in people surfaced. The influence that this had on my attitude (later in life, sometimes much to the chagrin of my children) was that I could be, at times, very harsh and direct.

Sometimes, through peepholes in the fence that surrounded the camp, I tried to see what was going on outside the camp. I saw people hurrying past on bicycles, motorbikes and in cars. I asked myself if any of those people had any idea of our condition. When I see images of some of today's refugee camps on television, the same feeling of desperation wells up in me. I remember coming out of that same kind of inhumane hell. Innocent people always get hurt in wars. Displaced persons sometimes come to a point where they can't take it anymore. Some make it, some don't. That is another lesson of war.

I remember how our neighbor, the lady with three small children, tormented by hunger, chased something in the yard, wielding a kitchen knife,. She was after a smallish frog from which she cooked soup for her children. We collected all the snails that we could find from the open drain behind the house. They were slimy and disgusting and had to be boiled three times in clean water, but we ate them. We woke up hungry and went to sleep hungry. I later met a woman who suffered terribly and lived with guilt for the rest of her life because she hadn't been able to withstand the temptation, and she ate her child's portion of food. That child died in the camp. But there were mothers such as Mom, who, from the little bit they had, would give an extra bite to her children. What a nightmare this period must have been for mothers, not being able to feed and protect their children. Then there was the constant, murderous anxiety about their husbands; ever wondering if they were still alive?

As days and months went by, theft became a major issue. Each of the inmates had been allowed a small plot of the garden to grow some vegetables such as tomatoes and peppers. Theft got so bad you had to pick the tomatoes green lest someone else did so first. Theft from the camp's main kitchen was rampant, and us youngsters who had to take the food to the various streets, also made use of any opportunity that presented itself. But the elderly and mothers with young children who were on their own, had little opportunity to get something extra for themselves.

There was some light in the darkness, however, like the secret English and French lessons that a school teacher gave us, in spite of the danger to her own life. The fact was, however, that many of us only thought about how our next of kin and we could survive. Under these survival conditions, the thin layer of civilization soon disappeared from most people. Constant hunger and uncertainty of our future made it difficult to remain a good person. After the war I heard stories of women that did everything in their power to keep the Japanese from breaking their spirit. At one women's camp on Sumatra, there was a group of women who at the same time each day, sang a song inspired by the "Our Father" prayer. A movie was later made of what went on at this particular camp. Whenever I hear this song, I am still gripped by throat-choking emotions. It is at such moments that I am reminded: The Spirit Prevails.

A terrible moment came when the Japanese announced that all boys of ten years and older were to be transferred to separate camps. Again, I thought that Mom would not survive this ordeal. Physically she was thin as a reed and all that we had gone through must have strained her nerves. She had never been a physically robust person, and Wim was her favorite. But it turned out she had seemingly inexhaustible reserves of mental power and courage, as she kept up a brave front. Moreover, she had recently been elected to be the headwoman of the house and the fact that we and others needed her, left her little time to think much about herself. I remember that day as if it had just happened yesterday. All those small and emaciated boys grouped together on the square, the high bamboo gate in the background, the barbed wire and the immobile, emotionless Japanese. Cold and mean, that's how I saw those guards. Besides the bewildered look on the faces of those boys, there was an air of resignation, too. The preceding months of camp life seemed to have given them maturity beyond their years.

We handed Wim the last of our money and I gave him the only ring I had. He later told me that even during the most dire periods of hunger he did not sell the ring. He wanted to be able to give it back to me one day. I still have that ring.

During the next two years, spent in two more camps, we never received any sign of life from him. How devastatingly sorrowful and scary this murderous uncertainty must have been for Mom.

By now the lack of food had become acute. Money was all gone, and most women started illegally to trade their last possessions, much of which was men's clothing items, with Indonesians outside the camp. We mostly wanted cooking oil and duck eggs as we traded. The Japanese had hired some Indonesian guards, and the trick was to find out which guards could be bribed. We never received any news from the outside, but we suspected that the conditions there weren't all that rosy. Our house happened to be well located for our smuggling activities. Behind the house, a drainage ditch ran under the fence. Because the ditch had to pass under the road in a culvert, it had to go deeper. We never considered escape by this route; it would be dangerous for a Dutch woman on the outside anyway. Next to the ditch was the small room of an old lady with her two small dogs. In the dark of night, her room became a busy smuggling center. The risks were considerable; at the least, you were shaved bald, stood up in the burning sun for hours on end, and then be locked up without food.

The mostly small and lithe Indonesians would enter the camp through the ditch. They would carry their trading goods in a basket on their heads. We would meet them behind the house and further negotiations would take place out of sight in Mrs. T.'s room. In spite of our great need (or perhaps because of it) haggling was still the rule. Soon the nightly trading became more extensive; sometimes there were more clothing items than could be traded in one night. Our family usually ended up with extra food. Once my little niece was fed so many eggs that it made her sick. But it was a nerve-wracking business; the possibility that someone would snitch and the Japanese finding out about it was ever present. Mom would not go to sleep when we were outside, waiting for hours on end in the middle of the night until the Indonesians would deem it safe to enter through the culvert under the road.

One night we heard pitiful cries and shots; the Japanese had caught the Indonesians red handed at the culvert. They were executed on the spot. Intensive searches of the houses in the camp followed, and for many weeks the drainage ditches were carefully guarded. We then tried a different way, trying to make contact with the Indonesian guards that patrolled outside the fence at regular hours. After the executions, Mrs.T. had lost the nerve for the contraband trade, so a friend of mine and I dressed in dark clothes and crept across a small open space that bordered the fence in the hope to make contact with one of the passing guards. We managed to attract the attention of one of them. He told us to wait, that he would go find foodstuff. It unfortunately turned out to be a trap. Before long the Japanese came running. I still wonder how we managed to escape, slithering like snakes along the ground. I managed to reach one of the houses and dove into the first bed that I found. A little later a house search was conducted. Punishment followed for the whole camp.

Inside, we had absolutely no information whatsoever about the world situation, or how the war was going. Also, the total lack of any indication about our fate was maddening. The only fresh breath in those days was to walk to the fence after the camp lights had been turned off and listen to the flip flop of the horse-drawn carriages and the footsteps of people that lived in freedom. Freedom, besides food, became such an obsession that at times it made me sick.

After a year and a half at K.R.S., we heard rumors about a transfer. Indeed, soon after, instructions were given that we should be ready in a couple of hours. This time we left without Granddad and with much less luggage. There was great excitement throughout the camp. A lot had happened in this year and a half. We had lost Granddad and had seen Wim leave; we had become harsh and rude and as young as we were, we were mature beyond our years. In all practicality, we had lost trust in what was right. We had learned to fight to get the meager rations on our own plates. All dogs, cats, frogs and snails in the camp had been eaten; it was time to go to a new place.

Bogor

Even the short walk to the station, without fences and barbed wire, was overwhelming. Our eyes darted left and right hoping to see somebody we knew. I recall how the Indonesians in the streets averted their eyes. From the looks of disgust and horror, I realized what kind of state we were in. I suppose we ourselves had become used to our emaciated appearances and festering sores that covered our legs. In the last year-and-a-half, hunger had claimed any non-essential piece of meat on our bodies. Our dresses were threadbare after having been endlessly washed; initially with some harsh soap, later with only water. Because our clothing was so threadbare, we had cut triangles out of dish cloth which we ingeniously tied around our neck and waist with string to cover our shriveled breasts. I suppose we looked like walking scare crows on which someone had hung some pieces of fabric. Since the Japanese had long ago prohibited us from wearing shoes, we went barefoot.

The journey on the train that night and the following day was a nightmare. We were packed so close together in a carriage that there was no place to sit. It was very hot and there wasn't any fresh air because the windows were barricaded. That whole trip we went without food or water.

We had no idea what our destination was going to be or why we were moved from Bandung. After a seemingly endless journey that I'd rather not remember, we arrived in Bogor. This town lies in the foothills, about an hour's drive south of the Dutch East Indies capital, Batavia. The Dutch had named this town "Buitenzorg" which translates as "No Worries". It used to be the country residence of the Governor General. The world-famous botanical garden established by Sir Stamford Raffles during a period when Indonesia was under British rule, is located here. It houses, among others, a remarkable plant that traps birds and insects for food!

At the station we were hoisted onto trucks. The drive through Bogor painfully reminded us how the feelings of the Indonesians towards us had turned to hate and bitterness. Whilst we were waiting in front of the station, the onlookers who had gathered started jeering at us, and as we passed in the trucks, people shouted insults. Some people threw rocks.

It was a relief when the city was behind us and the trucks drove further up into the foothills. It was a beautiful afternoon and nature was so pristine, it helped lift everybody's spirits. Left and right golden paddies stretched up the hills; in front of us the mountains loomed blue. It was as if our courage was given a boost to face the sight of our second camp.

It was a relief when the city was behind us and the trucks drove further up into the foothills. It was a beautiful afternoon and nature was so pristine, it helped lift everybody's spirits. Left and right golden paddies stretched up the hills; in front of us the mountains loomed blue. It was as if our courage was given a boost to face the sight of our second camp.

I can't describe what went through our minds that night. Maybe we were just too tired and miserable. The first thing we did was to try to patch up the holes in the bamboo matting behind Grandma's place to sleep. Our two mattresses were for Grandma and our two little nieces. The rest of us slept on bamboo mats. The first night, my sister Cora woke up screaming. A big rat had sought the warmth of her lap. The only positive thing at the camp was the new commander. On the very day we arrived, he organized us into labor groups to make the facilities more or less livable. Some of us were put to work building a bathing enclosure and digging field latrines for toilets. Another group tidied up the barracks and attacked the tall grass. Of course, we had no tools, and unless you were the lucky owner of nail clippers or nail file, we had to pull up the hard, sharp-edged alang-alang grass with your bare hands till they bled. One of the ladies that worked outside with us was Russian. She told me that she had escaped the Russian revolution. I always tried to work next to her. I had never been anywhere else in my life but Linggarjati, Cirebon and Bandung. The Netherlands I knew only from the Dutch songs that we had to learn at school, and Europe was a complete blank to me. I never stopped listening to her stories about all those foreign countries. She made up for a lot of missed geography and history lessons in school, and because of her, a yearning was born in me to see and get to know all those places. This was also the first time I ever heard about the Russian communist revolution. We left the Bogor camp before the Russian lady did, and I later heard that she didn't survive the camps.

Although the air in the foothills was refreshing, the camp was so primitive that dysentery and cholera epidemics soon stuck up their ugly heads. Cholera patients should be isolated, but that was obviously an impossibility. The consequences were disastrous. Every day we buried a few women and children, wrapped just in pandanus matting. And there was hunger, hunger, and hunger. One day, whilst we were working in the yard of the house, the camp commander was eating. He called me over and made me squat next to him. Then he found much pleasure in throwing me something from his plate. I was so hungry that I ate anything he had tossed on the ground. It was at this camp that I was afflicted with dysentery, which kept on bothering me for years and was only properly cured much later in the Netherlands.

How happy we were therefore when we learned that Bogor was only a transient camp, and that we would be transported to Batavia, the capital of the country. The Indonesians later changed the name of this city to Jakarta. It was a relief to arrive at Camp Kramat in Batavia. As was the K.R.S. camp in Bandung, the Kramat Camp was a fenced-in neighborhood of the city. Batavia is a port, and we later learned that several women's camps were located in coastal cities, as the Japanese intended to relocate the camps on other islands. We also learned that that ships overloaded with women and children had been bombed at sea. Later, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki put a stop to that.

The conditions at the various camps in and around Jakarta depended to a large extent on the Japanese camp commanders and their henchmen. At the Cideng Camp, for instance, the conditions were horrible. The women and children were subject to the whims of a hard-as-nails psychopath who took pleasure in maintaining a reign of terror. At the Kramat Camp we had the same camp commander from Bogor, assisted by some other Japanese. They were billeted in a house just outside the camp. Sometimes they drank a lot of sake, and their drunken brawling could be heard in the camp. Sometimes they would still be drunk when they conducted the morning roll call. I remember one day they ordered a group of us girls to clean their house. After the work was done, we were locked in one of the rooms of the house. I was terrified. We listened to their drunken laughter and feared for the worst. Luckily we were left unmolested; they were probably so drunk that they forgot about us.

One day, an impromptu small party was held. Some of the girls were the lucky owners of harmonicas, and we had a rare good time of song and laughter. Unfortunately, one of the Japanese guards happened to be patrolling our part of the camp and, boy, were we made to feel the consequences! Over and over, we were slapped in the face hard, and then baked in the sun the next day for the entire day.

As well as the camp commander, there were his three minions. One of them was Nakamutso, who in civilian life, had been a clerk in an office. Then there was Porky because this man had features resembling a pig. Finally, there was a Japanese that looked more like a Westerner. He later told us that he had an American mother and that he was an avid fan of Gary Cooper. With most of the Japanese we spoke a smattering of Malay and with the Gary Cooper fan we spoke some English. I had the feeling that he didn't much like guarding a women's camp, and it was he who, a few months prior to the end of the war, betrayed to us the fact that Japan wasn't doing too well. This was the one and only news we ever had about the outside world. All those years, without radio or newspapers, we never had any idea how the war was going or whether we were ever going to leave the camp.

Nakamutso was a knit-picker type of person who kept us at work all day long. The camp was relatively small however, so there was not much outside work. We had four groups of about twenty girls who had to work from six in the morning till six in the evening. We had to clean the house of the Japanese and dig trenches. Then he had us fill in the newly dug trenches and dig new ones for lack of other work. We made barbed wire barricades and reinforced the bamboo and barbed wire fencing around the camp. We also planted vegetables in the little square in the center of the camp. I remember one crop of a kind of bean that made everyone in the camp sick. We maintained the streets, and when the delivery trucks with rice and tapioca came in, we had to carry the heavy sacks to the storage warehouse. Often the sacks were filled with a mess of mildewed, maggoty corn. If a sack happened to tear open, it was a feast; we would steal as much as we could smuggle out undetected. Once, when they couldn't think of anything else for us to do, they had us dig a pond. It was heavy work and most of us were sick. I continuously suffered from dysentery, and my legs were covered with sores, some of which were a centimeter deep. Even today, the scars on my legs still show.

The Kramat Camp consisted of three parts. One part was housing for Dutch men who worked for the Japanese. Their families were allowed to stay with them. Another part of the camp was for a group of women who, voluntarily or not, had lived with Japanese men. We had to bring those women food from the camp kitchen but were prohibited to talk to them. I remember one fairly young woman with very sad eyes who sometimes took the food from us. Voluntary or forced, it sure was a sad bunch.

For sure, it was not easy for all the women in the camp to be separated from their husbands for such a long time and deal with the torment of uncertainty about their destiny. I, sixteen years old at the time, didn't know much about sex, but I do remember I thought it strange how some of the women were showing masculine tendencies and started love affairs with lady friends.

A few of the houses were assigned to a group of nuns. They always wore their habits and tried to live more or less by the rules of their order. They assisted in the kitchen and with the distribution of food. Every morning and evening they would appear with us at roll call, always managing to look neat and tidy. The Japanese largely let them be. Many of us enjoyed illegal, secret lessons from the nuns. My once weekly secret English lesson by one of the nuns was the highlight of the week. Many decades later, when I was living in Twente in the eastern part of the Netherlands, when talking to the mother of one of my daughter's friends about Indonesia, she mentioned that one of her aunts, a nun, had been an inmate of the Kramat camp and had secretly given lessons there.

The morale in the camp didn't improve any as the years went by. You lived and slept packed together. The room assigned to the seven of us had to be shared as well with two elderly ladies. There was so little to eat that the smallest amount, more or less, would lead to fights. Many of us had chronic dysentery and sores that never healed.

We didn't know that the war was coming to an end; we did notice however, that the Japanese in their house just outside the camp, had started drinking more and more. It was a tenuous period; the slightest trespasses would be harshly punished. House searches were a daily occurrence. We were baked for hours in the hot sun while the Japanese took apart our rooms and searched our meager belongings. One day, they found something again, and the whole camp was punished. The evening meal was cooked, but when dinnertime came, they forbade its distribution. At eleven o'clock that night, the food was thrown away. How I hated them at that moment! I was part of a group that had to do chores in the central kitchen that night, and we found a chance to steal some food and finally eat something.

The news about the end of the war came quite suddenly. We noticed that the Japanese had started wearing large sunglasses as if to hide their faces, and they didn't show themselves as often as before. The commander had the whole camp gathered, and announced in a short address that his country, Dai Nippon, had decided to end the war. The fact that atom bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, after which the Japanese surrendered, was something we heard much later, and definitely not from them.

The fact that the nightmare of all those years had ended didn't immediately register. Some of the inmates were so sick and weak that they were apathetic. Everybody rushed to seek information whether husbands, children and family members were still alive. Through the Red Cross, the news and lists trickled in very slowly. Everybody was prepared for the worst. Fear, sorrow and happiness that came with any news was felt throughout the whole camp. Of course our thoughts were about my kid brother, Wim, but communications between cities was still very poor and exchange of news was sporadic. For the sake of our own safety, the Japanese had asked us not to leave the camps yet and the gates remained hermetically closed. It didn't matter to us anymore; it now was a matter of counting days.

Food improved immediately. The Red Cross provided us with rice and canned pork; we could suddenly eat as much as we wanted, which, of course, is what we did and had to bear the consequences. The canned pork was probably the only stock of food the Red Cross had at the time, but our stomachs had shrunk so much that we got very sick, unable to digest the greasy food. We probably should have first been fed a diet of fruit and vegetables, but I suppose that the Red Cross also didn't quite know what to do with all those hungry camp inmates. Even today, some sixty years later, one still occasionally reads that foodstuff dropped in disaster areas goes to waste because it is not clear exactly what the conditions on the ground are and what sort of provisions the recipients really need.

In the camp, the general preoccupation and endless topic of discussion was about plans on how we would again make the Dutch East Indies the paradise that it used to be for us before the war.

Slowly, the evacuation of the camp got under way. We all had to complete long forms and indicate in which city we wanted to be resettled. Mom decided to go to Bandung in the hope of finding Wim there. A few weeks later we received word that a special train would take us to Bandung the next day. We were finally, truly, going to be free!

I have often thought of those years in the Japanese concentration camps, and wondered what enabled me to survive. Part of the answer, of course, is my mother's selfless care and sacrifice on our behalf. She sacrificed comfort, food, sleep and everything else that we might survive. Possibly our survival was the primary motivation that kept her alive.

But another factor in my own survival was an experience I had before the war when I was about fourteen years old. We had moved to Bandung so Cora could go to high school. But on our holidays we would return to our home in Linggarjati.

On one particular holiday at Linggarjati I was walking by myself in the paddi (rice) fields not too far from our home. As I walked, I felt something in the depths of my being-perhaps in what some people call the "soul"-speak to me. I had never experienced anything like it before. It was as if God was saying to me: "You belong to me. I will be with you always." A sense of peace came over me. I was not frightened, but felt that this experience was quite natural. That sense of God calling me, holding me, leading me has never left me. It's been the thread throughout my life. It is undoubtedly the overriding factor that enabled me to survive the hell of the concentration camps…an experience that was to come sooner than I had any idea. As I left the camp, and especially in the following years, I was grateful for that experience in Linggarjati, and for the anchor it has been in my life.

Freedom?

I'll never forget the first day out of the camp! In the preceding weeks, visitors from outside had been permitted into the camp and we made new friends, children of Dutch East Indies families that had not been interned. It was a chaotic period. The Japanese had arranged for transportation to the station, but just before departure, my new friends invited me to come eat at their house first, and then they would drive me to the station to catch the train. My newly found freedom had gone to my head and I went with them without telling my mother.

That first day out of the camp was a mind-boggling experience. The streets, the people, the traffic…the whole world caught me off balance. At their house the rijsttafel was ready on the table. I think they must have enjoyed watching me eat. I must have inhaled everything, I just couldn't get enough. In those first few months after the camp, it seemed like we could never eat enough, like barrels without bottoms.

In all the euphoria, I completely forgot the train, until one of the boys mentioned that we had only ten minutes to get to the station. After a wild drive through Jakarta, I ran onto the platform only to see the train leaving. It was to be the last train leaving for Bandung; in the fighting that erupted two days later, the railroad tracks to Bandung were destroyed. The platform at the station was packed with Indonesian onlookers, and their eyes, looking at the train leaving with Dutch women, were not filled with compassion or sympathy. An all-compelling fear suddenly gripped me, and I had the intense desire to run after the train and be with my family. Instinctively, I felt that an end had come to our ordeal. I started to run after the train, but my new friends held me back, pulled me into their car, and, driving like mad through town, we seemed to keep up with the train for the longest time. Luckily the train stopped for some reason. The driver stopped the car; I hopped out and jumped on board the train. Once on the train, I found my mother who had been desperately going from car to car looking for me, fearing that I had been left behind in Jakarta. Once again, luck-or perhaps something unseen-was with me.

This was not my last adventure. In those days, we were so overwhelmed by the feeling of freedom that it made us do the craziest and most irresponsible things to convince ourselves of this newly found liberty; that no one could forbid us anything. Also, I was now a seventeen year-old girl who had experienced three years of fighting for survival…a far cry from the fourteen year-old I was when the war started. In any case, that was very much my state of mind, which at that point, continuously put me on a collision course with my mother. More so, because it had been us youngsters who had done all the heavy work in the camps, and we had become used to being the ones setting the pace.

The journey to Bandung went very slowly, as the train had to stop frequently due to sabotage to the tracks. But finally we arrived in Bandung where we were met by a small delegation of the Red Cross. Nothing had been organized for us, so there we were…no place to stay and no money. But we did have one address, a Dutch East Indies family that Grandma knew. The Dutch East Indies people, like us, are people of mixed blood. In the Netherlands, even today, the distinction is unclear; we're referred to as "Indies people" or "Indonesians" when people talk about the Dutch East Indies people as a race.

I wondered what the family we were about to visit thought of us when we turned up in their front yard. An emaciated group of five pitiful-looking women dressed in rags, and carrying two babies. But they invited us in and immediately served us a hearty meal, the first meal we had eaten together as a family. They let us eat in peace, and then we bombarded them with questions about the preceding years. Many of the Dutch East Indies people had remained outside the camps, but for them it had not been an easy period either. They had lost their jobs and had to sell their possessions to stay alive. Some of the women found solace with the Japanese. I had a distant aunt who had a child by a Japanese man. After the Japanese left Indonesia, they were never heard from again. For this aunt, the rest of her life was very difficult, as everyone could plainly see she had a Japanese child, and my aunt was therefore tainted as a collaborator.

It was clear that Grandma's friends were not in a position to offer us long-term hospitality. Every square meter of their house was already occupied. Hotels had not been reopened, and in any event, we had no money. This, plus the reality that we were still at risk; fathers and husbands were even now prisoners of war in Thailand or Burma; no Dutch or Allied troops had yet arrived; and on top of all that, the Indonesians had declared their independence from Holland. So we didn't know where to go. Mom even wondered if it wouldn't have been better to stay in the camp. But, in the darkest hour, the telephone rang. It was my mother's cousin who had heard we had been released from the concentration camp, and that we were now in Bandung. He offered us two small rooms at the annex of his house, which we gratefully accepted. The rooms were just large enough for us to stretch out and sleep in, and that was really all we needed. The central kitchen of the Red Cross provided as many meals as possible for the large number of displaced people without money, such as us.

A few days after our arrival in Bandung, a tall young man stepped into the room. Mom saw him first. It was Wim!! The reunion was indescribable. Wim had grown taller by two heads, and the small boy we had seen leaving the K.R.S. camp was gone forever. Like all of us, he suffered badly from edema (a condition of abnormally large fluid volume in the circulatory system); his face was puffy and his legs were badly swollen. What struck me most of all was the expression in his eyes; at fifteen he was no longer a boy, but a grown man who had survived the misery of war.

All this time Wim had been in a boy's camp at Cimahi, just outside Bandung. To obtain food he, too, had reverted to smuggling. He told us that the Japanese caught him and a friend. They punished him by putting him in a barrel that was nailed shut, and, in the burning sun, the other boys had to roll him back and forth from one side of the field to the other. He was left in the barrel for eight hours. The whole camp, as a deterrent, was denied food that day. About a year earlier, he had nearly died from malnutrition. He said that the medical personnel, such as they were, had already given up on him. But a friend smuggled in food from the outside, and Wim managed to claw his way out. A few weeks prior to Wim's finding us, he and the other prisoners had been allowed to leave the camp, and he had been trying to get information everywhere about our whereabouts. That day he heard about the transport from Jakarta, and he hoped we were on it. This was confirmed through the Red Cross, so he started looking for us.

Those first weeks of freedom went by in such a rush that I can't remember much about what happened, except that at night, we danced on the dirt floor of one of the boy's camps, accompanied by the scratchy music of an old record player placed on the ground. Meanwhile, the confusion in the city became worse from day to day. It started with incidents of Indonesians insulting the Dutch, which would lead to fights. We did not take the Indonesian's declaration of independence from Holland seriously at all. To us, it was just a small group of rebels who were misusing the opportunity of Indonesia's liberation from the Japanese. The fact that the Indonesians wanted their independence was something that we simply could not fathom. Why we, as Dutch East Indies ethnic people who had ourselves, at times, been subject to a greater or lesser extent to discrimination, why we were so blind to that nationalistic desire, is another story.

We were all waiting for the Dutch army to return; they would surely have the situation under control in a matter of days, or so we thought. But the Dutch army was nowhere in sight, and the animosity increased day by day. The rebellion had evolved into a real war in which the Indonesians had occupied half of Bandung. Both sides were shooting and killing each other. The guns and ammunition came from having disarmed the Japanese. It was a wretched and senseless war in which the demarcation line daily moved back and forth. One of my friends, who was not older then seventeen, was always to be found in the midst of the skirmishes. One day, he crept into the Indonesian's zone in order to take down an Indonesian flag that had been hoisted on a house; the Indonesians discovered him. We found his body later in our part of the city, his body practically beyond recognition.

We no longer felt certain about our own lives. For weeks now, we had been running from one house to another. One night we looked out of the window and saw that the house was almost surrounded by people with guns and machetes. Without hesitation we ran to a nearby hospital, leaving everything behind. This was the last stand of defense for all the families in the neighborhood. Women and children came running from all directions. I was carrying one of my small nieces, while trying to drag Grandma, who couldn't run very well, behind me. Grenades exploded and shots rang out; a girl near us dropped, fatally hit. The Indonesians had torched the houses near the hospital. Thanks to a change in the wind direction, we were safe from the fire. We thought that the Indonesians would come storming into the hospital at any moment. A priest among us gathered us around him, and he read us our last rites so as to prepare us for death. No one thought we would survive. Somehow, Wim and I had found rifles, and we had taken position next to an open doorway. That's how we spent the night, sometimes nodding off. Every time we opened our eyes we would see the red sky, and heard the whooshing sound of the flames. I don't know how we got through the night.

The next day, British troops marched into Bandung, and we were saved. They had been rapidly transported to help the Dutch. Their first action after saving us was to sanitize part of the city so that we at least had a safe place. At first, together with many others, we were housed in an old school. A zone of "no-mans land" was established to divide the city. Part of that zone ran nearby the school, where we saw the Ghurka soldiers with their long beards patrolling. During the daylight hours, we were guarded from minute to minute. Ironically, we had to barricade ourselves in the classrooms at night to protect ourselves from those same Ghurkas who were supposed to safeguard us, but who were, instead, on the prowl for women.

Soon, public order was improved to the extent that we could leave the school. We were assigned to a house that had been vacated by a family, which had left for the Netherlands. Wasil, our gardener at Linggarjati who had taken care of our houses all these years, found us in Bandung. When he heard that the war had ended, he and a friend started looking for us. They had walked all the way from Linggarjati, and he told us that not much was left of the factory and our houses. But they also told us that, luckily, Atmo was doing well. Not long after, Atmo also arrived and came to live with us again in Bandung. Much later, when Mom and Grandma departed to the Netherlands, Atmo went to live with our Uncle Joop. Uncle Joop had opted for Indonesian citizenship and was the only one in the family who remained there permanently. Atmo told us the tragic news that upon their return to Linggarjati, Wasil and his friend were killed by the revolutionaries.

Not long after that the Dutch troops arrived, and animosity burst loose in all seriousness. (I later learned that my future husband, Henk ter Kulve, was amongst the Dutch troops). Most of the boys soon appeared in military uniforms, and we girls manned the telephone exchange and transport pool. We couldn't leave Bandung, as the fighting continued all around us. One evening, we had the foolish notion to organize a party in an empty villa just outside town. That party didn't last long, as shots being fired caused us to run for our lives.

The military Administration tried to evacuate as many women and children as possible to The Netherlands or Australia. Mom didn't think much of the idea. Maybe she was hoping to be able to salvage some of our property; she had never been to Holland, anyway, and had no idea how we would be able to make a living there. Nor did we have family there. The only person she decided to let go was Wim. He badly needed to go back to school, and before his death, my father had arranged an insurance policy for him to study in the Netherlands. Cora had meanwhile passed her typing exam and had taken a job as a secretary at the military headquarters in Bandung. It was her salary that bought groceries for the family. I was not able to work; the dysentery that had plagued me through the years had returned in all earnest. For a time, I was too weak to do anything. In fact, this chronic condition was only finally cured after I had immigrated to The Netherlands.

There was still serious fighting taking place. We, of course, hoped desperately that the Dutch military would gain the upper hand. We had no idea of the worldwide political upheaval that had taken place during our internment. The rise of Asian nations and the ending of the colonial era had all passed us by. Before the war, politics were never much discussed at home; life was simple and, of course, we were quite young at the time. Like most Dutch, we considered it a matter of course that we were the bosses, and were convinced that we would be able to regain hegemony. Our families had lived in the Dutch East Indies for three hundred years; we had built cities, roads and plantations, and considered that, by rights, we had earned our place. We considered ourselves the best of colonials. The fact that the Indonesians had a different point of view, that they thought that, indeed, we had managed the country well, but had not done anything to enable the Indonesians to govern themselves, was beyond our comprehension. The reality that discrimination hurts, we Dutch East Indies people understood all too well; but that the Indonesians would feel the same way never occurred to us. The arrogance of the Caucasian race dominated politics for a long time.

Then the time came, at least in the Netherlands, of enormous feelings of guilt about our colonial past. This was followed by a period when we gleefully reprimanded the Indonesians if we thought they were abusing human rights. There is still a debate raging these days as to whether the Netherlands should apologize for our colonial past. In my opinion, the debate should concern the equality of human dignity, not the color of one's skin. Did we support the Indonesians in their search for the dignity of independence? Did we treat them with same respect we expected them to have toward us? Later, much later, when I met people in an international context, I began to realize that it is a person's dignity that should be respected, irrespective of skin color or class.

But in the middle of the fighting between the Indonesians and Dutch in Bandung in 1945, we thought that the Dutch troops would soon reestablish security and order. Yet, weeks turned into months, and the fighting only intensified. The resistance was much fiercer than anticipated. Added to this was a fact we were unaware of at the time; the United States, Britain and the United Nations had a thick finger in the pie. For many countries, it had become obvious that the colonial era had come to an end once and for all. This idea did not register at all in the little country of Holland. The Dutch had no idea how to cope without their colonies; the phrase used at the time was: "Indië verloren, rampspoed geboren" (The loss of the Dutch East Indies would be the beginning of disaster). Before the war, thirty percent of the Netherlands' Gross National Product came from Indonesia.

Meanwhile, the Royal Dutch Army, the Dutch East Indies Army and British troops, were positioned in Bandung. Many women and children had meanwhile been evacuated to Holland, Australia and other countries. The women and girls, who still lived in Bandung, had ample opportunity to make up for all those lost years in the camps in respect to dating. I didn't speak a word of English, but that didn't stop me from having fun at the parties at the British officers' club. I once heard a British officer say to one of his mates: "Dance with her. She's a lovely girl, but stupid as a rabbit" That much I did understand.

Some of the dates I went on were quite perilous; dancing in the bush while bullets were flying in all directions. I remember that however late I came home, Mom had always stayed up, even if it was five a.m. I was so blinded by wanting to catch up with the real life of a seventeen-year-old girl, nobody could stop me. I partied too much, drank too much, and basked in all the male attention. In the midst of the on-going war, life seemed like one big party.

Cora had more sense. She fell in love with her boss. Berend was an officer in the Royal Dutch Army stationed in Bandung. It was love at first sight. Because of the uncertain situation (Berend could be ordered to the front at any moment) they decided to get married as soon as possible. Mom was at a loss where to get the money for the wedding. A pig brought the solution. Some time ago, a Chinese business relation from the past had given us a piglet. However, the animal ate so much that Mom had decided to sell it. The sale paid for the wedding. The wedding was beautiful; one of Dad's oldest friends, Uncle Bob Bär was Cora's witness. After the ceremony in church, there was a great reception at the impressive villa of the former army commander. A honeymoon was out of the question; to go out of town was too dangerous.

Cora and Berend had found an empty house and had scraped together some furniture. To have their own home was a true blessing for them. When they drove home after the wedding reception in Berend's jeep, they got a nasty surprise. All the furniture had disappeared. They later found out that an Army Colonel, being under the impression that the house was empty, had had the furniture removed.

That left only Mom and me and, of course, Grandma, in our family. My lazy life started to bore me no end. Here I was, seventeen years old and I had yet to finish my second year of high school. Suddenly I got scared; scared of what would happen when the war ended. I decided to go back to school at the lyceum in Bandung. The Department of Education had made it possible to catch up with the curriculum by means of accelerated courses. It certainly wasn't easy, after all those years, to sit in class and do school work again. But for me, it was serious business. In one year we got through the curriculum of two years, and, in my case, three years. It was an enormous effort, but in 1947, I graduated. I was starving for knowledge. One of my teachers was a minister, and he accurately identified the emptiness, the questions and the confusion in my life caused by the years of internment camps. He inspired me to study and not to yield to difficult circumstances. It was through him that I became a member of the Reformed Church. This gave a certain context and underpinning to the experience I had while walking in the rice fields of Linggarjati when I was fourteen. Quite a step, although I don't recall having told anyone about it at the time.

Now what? There was nothing else to do in Bandung except to find a job as a secretary. The war was raging; there was talk about a second full scale Police Action. It was not possible to move around the city as you pleased. Our possibilities were very limited and, moreover, we didn't have much money. I occupied myself with sports and going to all the parties. A distant cousin of Mom's, who had remained free, ran an automotive business. He taught me how to drive and let me use his red sports car. On Sundays I drove to church in the red sports car with the top down. And there always were enough young officers and dates to enjoy. We made some perilous short trips out of town. In those confusing days, you just did it, you didn't think.

That's also the way I decided to immigrate to the Netherlands. What happened one night gave me the final push. We were at the officers club, and a new troop movement to the front had been announced. There was heavy drinking and I had too much to drink. When I woke up the next morning, it was clear to me that this could not go on. I had to get out of there and lead a normal life.

At the breakfast table, I announced to Mom that I was going to the Netherlands. Poor Mom, I never stopped to think what would become of her and poor Grandma. Wim and I both in the Netherlands; Cora and Berend would probably soon leave to Holland as well. The only thing she said was: "How do you intend to accomplish that? I can't pay for your passage.".

My resolve stood, and a few days later I packed the few clothes I had. After saying goodbye to Mom, Grandma, Cora, Berend and small Koos, who had just been born, I was given a ride on an army plane to Jakarta. In Jakarta I heard that on the Johan van Oldebarneveld, one of the ships used to evacuate the Dutch from Indonesia, there was room for young people who were willing to work for their passage on the voyage to the Netherlands. I signed on, and in June 1947, I sailed towards an unfamiliar new homeland.

The Netherlands

The ship slowly slipped from its berth. We were all leaning over the railing as a military band played the "Wilhelmus', the Dutch national anthem. In those few minutes, there must have been many emotions in the masses of people thronged on deck. Some of them had lived in this country only a few years, the last years of which they hadn't expected to survive. For them, the departure to the Netherlands was a return to their normal lives. Others, such as I, were born in Indonesia. Born from families that had their roots here for many generations. For us, Indonesia was our homeland. Holland was the country where you went for a vacation. We knew Holland only from books.

As for myself, I was rather relieved. I had seen and experienced so much, that I now only lived from day to day. I had no idea what lay in wait for me, let alone how I would be able to cope. It was a totally unplanned adventure. I only knew that I had to move forward to the next phase of my life. Just get on that ship, I thought, and I'll see what the future brings. So there I was, all alone, no money, knowing next to nothing about Holland, sailing the waters of the Dutch East Indies. I was a backpacker at a time when backpackers were still unheard of.

Together with two other youngsters, I was assigned to clean one of the large passenger holds where about one hundred women slept in hammocks and on folding cots. This is where we were introduced to Dutch hygiene and discipline. Every morning, the captain would conduct his inspection rounds, and his pointing index finger would always manage to find the most unlikely places that had not seen our brush or mop. When the seas were rough, the work was dirty, as we had to keep cleaning up vomit. But there also was enough time to lounge on deck and enjoy the endless Indian Ocean.

The ship did not call into many ports. After Medan, on North Sumatra, the ship sailed directly to Aden, the port just before entering the Red Sea. We came alongside in the middle of the night just to take on fresh water, so we didn't see anything of this old port. Soon after, we entered the Suez Canal. It was so hot that many of us couldn't bear the heat in the holds, so we slept on deck. As we entered Port Said, countless small boats from which the Arab hawkers offered their goods in all languages, soon surrounded the ship.

In Port Said, an important event took place: the Red Cross distributed warm clothing. I remember being given a hot pink winter coat that was way too big for me. But I was childishly happy with all those new clothes.

The ship's officers had warned us that going ashore was entirely at one's own risk. The Arab countries did not hide their animosity of what the Dutch were doing to their Muslim brethren in Indonesia. Whenever a Dutch ship docked, their had been incidents and most evacuees preferred to stay on board. I, however, had been persuaded by a photographer, named Eimert, to go ashore, together with some others. It became a precarious situation when Eimert tried to take a picture of a veiled woman. Within moments we were surrounded by a mob of angry Arabs, and we literally had to run for our lives.

The clear blue sky and waters of the Mediterranean Sea were a pleasant surprise each new day. Now that Europe was within sight, the impatient countdown of the days remaining began. Most of the evacuees had close or distant relatives whom they could stay with, at least initially. For the others, I learned, temporary shelters had been established. Everybody supposed that Holland would be a beacon of rest after all the stormy years we had gone through. In fact, Holland itself had just gone through an extremely difficult period and a hungry winter. Little did we realize that the Dutch people hadn't the slightest idea of what we had gone through. In fact, the people in the Netherlands were trying to cope with their own war trauma, and were not waiting for us to tell them our sorry stories.

From on board the ship, I had sent Wim a telegram notifying him of my arrival date. He was already living as a student in Utrecht, and I expected him to come meet me at shipside in Amsterdam. Finally, we entered the North Sea Canal through the locks at Ymuiden. Of course, I was aware that Holland was flat and low, but it was quite an experience to be on that big ship high above the surrounding boulders.

So this was Holland. The quay was packed with relatives and friends, and impatiently I tried to spot Wim among all those people. Disembarking took some time, but finally, I set foot on Dutch soil.

Surrounded by people hugging and greeting each other, I went looking for my kid brother. But there was no trace of him. For the first time since leaving Indonesia, I felt very lonely and abandoned. It seemed to me that I was the only one there who was not being met by someone, and I had practically no money in a strange country. Suddenly it turned dark and cold. It was as if God had abandoned me. (Reading back what I just wrote made me understand how rejected asylum seekers, roaming in a strange country, must feel.)

The only thing I had was Wim's address, and it seemed best to hop on one of the busses, provided by the government, that was going in that direction. On the way, the bus stopped at small villages, and it was touching to see how family and friends welcomed the people who disembarked. Finally, the steeple of the Dom at Utrecht rose from the somber countryside. I was the last passenger on the bus and I had given the bus driver the address. We seemed to drive endlessly through the streets of Utrecht trying to find the address. After asking for directions several times, the bus driver gave up. He told me the address that I had given him didn't exist, and that I should try to find it by myself on foot. For the first time I came face-to-face with the fact that not all Dutchmen were happy to see us arrive. They themselves had just survived the German occupation, and now there were three hundred thousand more mouths to feed…most of them without money or a roof over their heads, all of which meant an extra burden.

When the bus driver was about to put me out on the street, it suddenly dawned on me what I had started… I saw myself lost in a totally strange city in my thin tropical dress. I had become so accustomed all these years never to step back from any challenge or adventure; I had always managed to land on my feet. When I had decided to go to Holland, I was so sure that I would be able to manage as well, never realizing that it was a totally strange country with which I would have to cope with.

The driver must have seen that I was very scared because he restarted the engine and continued the search. This time I was lucky, we found Wim's address in one of the labor housing areas of the city. How happy I was. The landlady that rented rooms in her house to Polish laborers, and where Wim had a room as well, looked me over and told me that Wim was in England, and therefore probably not aware of my arrival; there never had been a telegram. She told me I could sleep in Wim's room for now. I don't remember how I got through those days or whether the lady fed me. She must have, for I don't remember being hungry.

Just after the war, I had met my teenage sweetheart, Huib. He and his sister had evacuated with their parents to the Netherlands soon after, but we kept writing each other. I don't remember how he got my address, but there he was one day on my doorstep, inviting me to visit with his parents in The Hague. So luck was smiling on me again. Huib's father worked at the Department of Education, and through him I learned that the Dutch Government was providing aid to the children of repatriated Dutch families to get scholarships to study for a university degree. A scholarship meant an income, and on the spot, I decided to study Dutch East Indies law at Utrecht. In September I enrolled at the State University in Utrecht.

What irony! My fellow students in Dutch East Indies cultural studies and law were the last bunch of students to be prepared for administrative functions in the Dutch East Indies. By the time we graduated, Indonesia had become independent, and didn't need Dutch civil servants and judges anymore. In 1946, in the house where I had grown up in Linggarjati, an accord was reached in which the Kingdom of the Netherlands de facto recognized the independence of the Republic of Indonesia. How could I have guessed at that time that now, at the age of 75, I would still be involved with the house of my youth, which has been made into a museum by the Indonesian Government. I consider it a great honor that my brother and I have had a new opportunity to express our love for Indonesia and its people.

It was a joyous reunion with my brother. He had managed to cope fairly well by himself, but he hadn't had much of a home life. Most holidays he spent in movie theaters. I decided to stay with him for the time being, and start looking for a better place to live. Luck was with us, through a mentor assigned to me by a student club to familiarize myself with student life, I was introduced to Mrs. De Jong, a lady who had lived in the Dutch East Indies for a time herself, and was looking for boarders.

First though, I had the most formidable task of convincing Wim. For five years, he had first been interned in concentration camps, and after that, alone in Holland. He had become used to a completely free life-style. He was afraid that he would not be able to adjust to the constraints of normal family life. The same applied to me as well; but nevertheless, I decided to go meet with Mrs. De Jong. It was a bull's-eye hit. From the very beginning she received us with lots of sympathy and a wealth of understanding. She listened to our stories with an open mouth, and understood everything not only from our side, but also from hers. Much adjustment would be necessary. She was an excellent listener and had bottomless patience when we did crazy things or when a mundane situation became too much for us.

I found my field of study gripping from the start, and I fully enjoyed the uncomplicated student life. It gave me an opportunity to make good all the lost years. Because of my interest-free student loan, which in those days was administered meticulously, I did have to sit for all my tests when they were due. However, I managed to arrange the classes I took in such a manner that I had to study like mad for six months a year, and in between, could enjoy sailing, tennis, dancing and student activities. Our Department was closely related to the six-year study for civil administration officials in the Dutch East Indies. Some of our classes were the same. When I arrived, the Indonesian armed struggle for independence was raging, but most of us still thought that our future lay in Indonesia. That's how blind we obviously were.

There was a great divide in the Netherlands about Indonesia. I remember going from house to house with my friend, Puck, to distribute pamphlets urging people not to concede to the Indonesian demands. About that time, the United States, Britain and the United Nations started to interfere with Dutch policies regarding Indonesia. In our opinion, they didn't know about the situation, and the same applied to the Dutch who had never been there, but thought they could and should have a say in the matter. Many of the Dutch East Indies people felt that Holland was too small and constricted, and they decided to emigrate to places such as the United States, and especially to California.

It now occurs to me that all those refugees in Holland must have been a major headache for the Dutch Government. But in the end, it was the tact and understanding of individuals such as our surrogate mother, Mrs. De Jong, that determined whether or not we were integrated into the Dutch society. In my view, with all the foreign immigrants in Holland nowadays, it's no different. Have a cup of coffee together; just being nice neighbors will do wonders in this world.

Ma De Jong's generosity, by extension, applied to all Dutch East Indies friends that we brought home. The Bär family were welcome there; Egbert from South America; Lisa, who was half Dutch East Indies and half Russian. Later on, also Siebe and Linde, with their small family, found a home there. After the war, Siebe was sent out to the Dutch East Indies, but had to return disappointed. They, too, came to stay with us. We all had to adjust and make room. I moved into a tiny little room. How all of us managed to fit into that first floor house on the Jan van Scorelstraat has remained a mystery to me. For all of us there was one bath, but no shower. Ma De Jong thought it absolutely unnecessary for one to bathe every day. For us Dutch East Indies kids, that was difficult to get used to. Whenever the coast was clear for a brief period, I used to take a quick dip bath with a mug or glass in the bathtub just like I used to "mandie" in Indonesia.

Wim and I never discussed the camp years. I don't really know why. I remember not discussing it with any of my new friends either, nor did I ever discuss it later on with my own children. They didn't ask and we didn't tell. "What has passed has passed," is what we thought, and the word trauma had not yet come into common use. We never thought that our past might have been the underlying reason when, later, both Wim and I got stuck.

I was quite fortunate to have found generous sorority and fraternity friends. Their parents were very hospitable, and I spent many vacations sailing on the beautiful Frisian lakes or camping in the lush Veluwe countryside with them.

Still, I always felt that I was different; a feeling that for some reason, has persisted throughout my life. I often felt like an outsider, and was envious of their family life, their sense of security. Was it because I had no money? The interest- free student loan allowed me to pay for tuition and my board with Ma De Jong, but there was no money for clothing, and definitely none for fun. I was embarrassed to tell my friends that I had a very meager student loan and couldn't afford to join them. Fortunately, I was often invited, or a date would ask me out. I think I was too proud to be forthright about my financial circumstances with them. Those were the days when university educations were mostly for the financially better situated people.

Feeling that I was different came to be part of me. I think I myself was to blame for that. Knowingly or not, I walked outside of the commonly accepted paths. On the one hand, this has led me live an adventurous life; on the other, this enormous desire in me to have a goal in life often landed me in a kind of isolation. Of course, it had to do with all the barriers circumstances had erected in me, and were necessary for me to overcome. Even today, at the age of 78, I still have this urge to "get things done." If I perceive or see something that is wrong, I have to try to put it right. I become impatient if I feel that a discussion is senseless or is just "chewing the cud." Luckily with my son, who is just like me, I can have vigorous discussions about significant world issues.

Wim had taken up medical studies, and I sometimes worried about him. Although he had a good brain and didn't have any trouble finishing high school quickly and well, he seemed stuck. He couldn't concentrate on his studies. Through the Bär family he had become a member of the student corps where he made good life-long friends, but where he also learned to drink, a habit he would never loose. He couldn't manage to get his bachelor degree. I didn't know what to do about it. He also had a girl friend, which I didn't know about at the time. Ma De Jong sensed that things were going the wrong direction with Wim, and she arranged for him to get help from a psychiatrist. At this point, things improved. He earned his bachelor degree and went on to become a very able physician.

These were carefree years in Utrecht, but not without some dark clouds. By this time, we were in the '50s and the cold war was hanging over us. The enemy of fascism had been replaced by communism. The parents of the Bär family members, who were our roommates, were still in Indonesia. One of their uncles was in the Dutch diplomatic corps in South America. This uncle felt that the Russian expansion and communism were such a threat, that he managed to convince their parents to have his nephews who were studying in Holland, to immigrate to Argentina. They interrupted their studies, and left for Argentina. Only Ron, who studied theology in Utrecht, stayed. Their leaving for Argentina had major consequences for the rest of their lives and made a deep impression on Wim and me. Many of our other Dutch East Indies friends began immigrating as well.

My graduation coincided with the ending of colonialism. For my co-students studying Dutch East Indies Culture and Administration and Dutch East Indies Law, this was not a very nice development. What were we to do with all the apparently useless knowledge that we had gathered? Indonesia, to us, had become "no entry". I, too, was confronted with this new situation. Should I continue my studies with Dutch Law? The two had much in common. Was there a future for me in the Netherlands? Did I want to stay in Holland?

All this while, Mom had stayed on in Bandung. To earn a living, she had accepted a position as the director for a girl's dormitory. Grandma was with her. We wrote faithfully. Every week a letter went in the direction of Bandung and vice versa. How overwhelmingly proud must she have been when I sent her a telegraph announcing that I had my law degree. The reason that Mom and Grandma had stayed in Indonesia so long after the war undoubtedly had been for financial reasons. She had probably never heard of welfare aid that was available to Dutch East Indies people in the Netherlands. I was so busy trying to graduate, and with my own insecurity about the future, I egoistically never bothered to think about Mom's and Grandma's well-being.

At university, I had met an American student who studied Law at a university in the United States. His parents invited me to come visit with them for a while. I decided that this would be the chance of a lifetime.

First, however, the end of 1951 had seated me across a green table in front of three professors. The final oral exams usually take at least an hour; but after half an hour, the professors stood up and wished me success for the future. I had my master's degree. Within six years after the war, I had managed to finish high school and earn my law degree. I was among those in my class who graduated with highest honors.

Before embarking on the trip to the United States, I decided to take a six-months job as an "au-pair" in Paris in order to learn French. Maybe I wasn't ready to leave Europe yet.

Also, I had a broken heart. In my last year at the university, I had fallen in love with Tom, the personification of everything that I had never had. He came from a well-off family from the expensive area of Gooi, drove a macho motorbike, owned a sport airplane, and wore a beautiful fur-lined winter coat. I thought he was as madly in love with me as I was with him. That is, until the day he saw a photo of my Mom. When he told his parents that I had a Dutch East Indies background, his parents immediately vetoed such a relationship. Exit Tom.

Moreover, this discrimination caused a very deep wound. Racism is just a word, until you are subjected to it yourself. You are not any longer Joty; you have become a color. A color that contaminates, cheep stuff that you better leave alone. I was the second generation to be confronted with this. My mom, because she married my dad, brought the wrath of her in-laws on herself. Just because of her light brown skin. After her marriage, she faithfully wrote her parents in-law every month; she never ever received a reply. Such a pity. Had they taken the trouble to get to know her, they would have found her a unique daughter-in-law; warm, wise and possessed of an uncanny ability to see through people, yet still love them. (Sadly, I never did meet my paternal grandparents.)

In the following years I traveled all over the world. On one of my travels I ended up in Atlanta, the Deep South of the United States. Atlanta was still racially segregated. I once took a bus ride, and I was told that as a white person, I must sit in the front of the bus. The "blacks" had to sit in the back. After that one bus ride, I never again used public transportation in the South. The idea, that should my mother have been with me and that she would have had to sit in the back and me in the front, was simply unimaginable. Such incidents color one's life, at least it did mine. They also have given content to my life. Maybe that's why I have a tendency to take up the cause of the underdog and have risen to the cry to take up arms against any form of oppression.

Fortunately a lot has changed in the world. Martin Luther King fought his people's battles. He convinced America that the basic issue is all about the equality of human dignity; that this should be the foundation of a sound society, not the color of one's skin. Nelson Mandela is another prime example in this respect.

And so it came about, because of Tom and his mother's discriminatory attitude, I ended up in Paris. A friend had given me the address of a Swiss evangelist who lived and preached in one of the "red" (leftist) worker's housing areas of Paris. The missionary had three small children, and he was looking for an au pair. The day before my departure, my friend told me that the missionary was affiliated to an international movement with a nice sounding name: Initiatives of Change. She pressed a brochure about this organization in my hand, but that night I had a farewell party and I never read the booklet. The next day, Wim, plus all my fraternity and sorority club members and friends, came to the railway station to bid me farewell. I boarded the "Mistral" for Paris.

Paris

Even before the train, with brakes grinding and crunching, came to a complete stop at Gare du Nord, the sense of "Southernism" on the platform overwhelmed me. The Frenchmen, gesticulating as they talked, the North African porters, even the windblown debris, transported me back in time to the Far East and made me right away feel at home. Paris, it seemed to me, had the ability to make any foreigner disappear in her folds. Now, sixty years later, the racial riots in the suburbs paint an all-together different picture.

Reverend Garin and his two elder children, Christian and Claire (with whom I have stayed in touch until today), had come to meet me. While both parties checked each other out with much interest, my host welcomed me in a deluge of French of which I caught a few words here and there. Christian, nine years old, was a dandy little boy with a wild mop of blond curls. He later became an ordained minister as well, and some time ago Claire told me that after his retirement, he went back to work as a volunteer in a laborer's district in Paris. Clair had a finely featured sweet face and the same blond hair. The first thing that drew my attention was that they both wore white gloves. This Parisian custom of children wearing white gloves has always remained a mystery to me.

The Reverend loaded the four of us into his Deux Chevaux, the popular two-cylinder Citroën of the French people, and took us on an unforgettable tour of the city. It was a beautiful spring day, and Reverend Garin had chosen a scenic route past many of the monuments: Notre Dame, that magnificent bastion of France, with the river Seine flowing around it and behind it, the lively Latin Quarter; then the Place de la Concorde where the unity of the country was symbolized by statues of all it's provinces; and finally the Arc de Triomphe that depicts the greatness of Napoleon and his vision for France.

The typical Parisian apartment building, in which the Garin family lived on one floor, was located on the edge of a section of laborer's housing in the Eleventh Arrondissement. The Bastille, where much blood had flown during the French revolution, was about a twenty minute walk away. Madame Garin, with the youngest child Isabelle on her arm, welcomed me with kind words. My task was to care for the children. That took some getting used to; I had never even changed a baby's diapers; in addition I didn't understand what anybody was saying to me, much to the glee of the children who constantly teased me about it.

In the mornings I had to take Christian and Claire to school, but Christian usually took the lead because I didn't dare cross the streets in the busy traffic. During these daily walks, I had ample of opportunity to explore the neighborhood. Within a ten-minute walk from the apartment, you were in the Parisian slums. The conditions I saw there were shocking. This was 1951, and the dire shortage of housing caused uncountable numbers of families to live in the same kind of distressful situation that reminded me of the internment camps. For the North Africans in the city, the only recourse was to rent rooms in awful boarding houses for outrageous prices. As I am writing this in the year 2008, during the recent riots in Paris, it turned out that things have not changed much. I had no idea that there were people in Europe who had to live like that. I remember thinking that the camps had been terrible, but after three years, it was over. But for these people, would they ever know a different kind of life?

Through the Garins I met other young Frenchmen; among them a young woman from a privileged family who, just like me, had studied law. We became friends, and I was welcome at their home. She was very dissatisfied with her life, and felt that many things were wrong in her country and the world. Through her, I met other young men and women who were Marxist in thought and deeds. One of them, a nineteen-year-old girl - her father was a diplomat - sold the official magazine of the communist party, "L'Humanite", at the gates of the Sorbonne University. What a strange world, I thought. My friends in Holland had immigrated to South America because of the looming communist threat, and these people wanted to draw communism into their country. It was all quite confusing to me. The change from Bandung to Utrecht had been a major leap, and now I found myself in a world metropolis meeting young intellectuals who were very much into politics. I had never much cared about politics, and certainly didn't know much about Europe. Bit by bit, it dawned on me what the effects had been of the Second World War in Europe. As well, France was busy recovering from the wounds of war.

For me, Paris was a stopgap, a respite from the decision of what I really wanted to do with my life. I decided that for the time being, I would enjoy everything Paris had to offer. My allowance from the Garins enabled me to go to the opera, ballet and visit museums, all of which opened up a new world for me. I really enjoyed Paris and, literally and figuratively, roamed through the city.

During those days, I often thought of the road I had thus far traveled in life: from a nature-oriented childhood in Linggarjati, through a war and its inhuman concentration camps, to Utrecht and a law degree, and now Paris, one of the premier cities of the world. Part of the impulse that took me on this path had been my own choices. In retrospect, I am surprised how I had dared to make such choices, which were based simply on a "hit or miss" chance that things would turn out all right. I had nobody else to fall back on; I had to make do with the means and the people that came my way. This mode of life wasn't making me rich, but it was expanding my horizons and making me into what I like to think of as a "world citizen." The more people I met, the better I began to understand that people don't necessarily have to think the same way or come from a certain background in order to be happy or have a world perspective. In this global era we've all entered, it is the multinational business people, the world financiers and statesmen, and, yes, even the "backpackers" who come close to being true world-citizens.

After three months, I could manage much better in French. That helped me to function better in the busy missionary household. The apartment was tiny. I slept in one room, while Christian, Claire, the Garins and the baby slept in the other room. Other then that, there was a living-dining room. The missionary work brought a constant stream of visitors with it. Mr. Garin had two pastoral assistants, Antoinette and Loulou, both recruited from the worker's section of Paris in which Mr. Garin worked. Evangelical work in the Eleventh Arrondissement (district) of Paris was like trying to grow roses on a barren field. He could just as well have worked in China or Africa. Christian values were ridiculed as "irrelevant" here. Some Swiss sponsors were financing Garin's missionary work, which seemed to go "hand in hand" with many disappointments. This situation, with the small apartment and all else, often became too much for his wife. She sometimes lay in bed for hours with migraine headaches.

Reverend Garin had been an early proponent of the Initiatives for Change Movement, an organization promoting social and national change based on a change in one's personal life and attitude. His motto was: "Changing the world begins with changing yourself." He was dedicated to his goal to convert the Eleventh Arrondissement. I, too, became part of his mission. Thus, as my French improved, I became subject to adaptation of the ideas Reverend Garin was expressing. Years earlier in Linggarati, I had already experienced the presence of a higher directing authority for myself just before the Japanese interned us. Faith, for me, was just as realistic as the sun and the moon, and it was a source of strength, comfort and humor in those wretched camp years. What Garin tried to instill in me in endless discussions that went on deep into the night, was that faith shouldn't stop just at the personal level, but should manifest itself in a commitment to make the world a better place. Having faith, and not taking part in collective activity - at least as he saw it - was not what the Lord had in mind for mankind. Reverend Garin had me accompany him to his services that were held somewhere in a room in the wretched sector of town; services that were attended by scores of people. His sermons mostly were about people, who, through their faith, had made a difference in their family life, community and work. He battled class hatred and communism as totally obsolete concepts. This was 1952, long before the fall of the Berlin Wall. So he did have vision. I was interested in all this, but my French was still too limited to enable me to completely follow all of the discussions, so some of what Reverend Garin had to say simply went over my head.

I did wonder why the Garins had, by now, worked for fifteen years in Belleville, whereas they could have had a much easier life in Switzerland. Both also were, I had noticed, not very robust physically. It had taken them years to win the trust of the workers and union leaders, most of who were either atheist or inclined toward communism.

I did wonder why the Garins had, by now, worked for fifteen years in Belleville, whereas they could have had a much easier life in Switzerland. Both also were, I had noticed, not very robust physically. It had taken them years to win the trust of the workers and union leaders, most of who were either atheist or inclined toward communism.

What I noticed at all these gatherings at the Garin's, was that through respect and the ability to listen well, he managed to create a kind of open atmosphere that was very conducive to communication. Those endless discussions with the Reverend and those gatherings at his home started me thinking. I had survived a gruesome war. I had personally experienced the powerful force of idea rallying a whole nation, even to the extent of the thinking and actions of each individual being dictated by it. I had been involved in the last phase of the colonial era, and seen the painful birth of independence of millions of Asian people. But never before had I encountered Garin's perspective on the connection between the rise and fall of nations and cultures on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the people who form a country, race or continent.

Garin tried to make it clear to me that emerging technological developments were shrinking the globe, and thus continents were now part of a single community with the similar interests. In this context, Garin said, the world's only hope lay embedded in a view of life that can unify mankind on levels that exceed class, race, nationalities, religions and dogmas. In the 1950s, these were prophetic words.

Five decades later, when the Tsunami recently hit South East Asia, we saw that such a vision can become reality. All of a sudden, the many Asian countries became our neighbors. Slowly but surely, we see humanity trying to find new ways that give substance to the reality that if we want to keep our planet livable, we all have to do something about the problems that divides our world. I wonder what those Marxists, who were the focus of Garin's efforts, would think today of the Bill and Melinda Gates spending huge amounts of money on medical care in Africa and other areas where access to medical care is unaffordable.

I wonder, too, what those Marxists would think of the growing consciousness of the large multinationals that business requires a socially responsible component if our eco-system is to survive. This realization of being conscious of the environment is spreading everywhere. In my homeland of Indonesia, I heard about an initiative by the Bupati (the local head of government of the Kuningan District in West Java) that every couple that wants to get married must plant at least three trees on the slopes of Mount Ceremai, an area that has been subject to excessive deforestation.

So, visionaries are not yet antiquated. I can still hear Garin saying: "A change, a new consciousness in man himself, Joty, is the nucleus of this new responsibility for the whole planet!" Garin's thesis-that individuals and organizations should be held accountable for their own actions-would appear to be more relevant today than when I first heard him say it over fifty years ago.

I did not come from an intellectual family. My years in Utrecht were spent trying to get my law degree. I knew pitifully little about what was happening in Europe and the world. In the accelerated courses to finish high school, the subject of history did not get much attention. It was not surprising, therefore, that all this contact with people from so many countries and backgrounds started me thinking. Was this perhaps the answer to my many questions? Was this the solution to the harsh realities of war, poverty and racial discrimination that I had experienced in my own life?

In the Garin family, meditation had an important place. In the 1950s, this still was something new, at least to the general public. Today, with all the young (and old) Europeans trekking through the Far East, meditation has become a popular practice. In the Netherlands today, there even are proposals to teach meditation in schools. Having been born and raised in an Asian country, meditation wasn't a strange concept to me. From my early youth, I had been exposed to mysticism, good spirits, and bad spirits.

Thus, when Garin suggested that I should experiment with meditation myself; this was not difficult for me. Moreover, I am amenable to experimenting with new thoughts and practices. In the Garins' environment, religion and contemplation obviously were part and parcel. Maybe I was curious as to whether I would indeed be susceptible to such an experiment, and maybe get a "line" to the Above? Aah well, with the first experiment I never got a line up; what I did get was a line down. Entirely practical daily things sprang to mind: the matter of a pair of gloves that I had borrowed without asking, and hadn't had intentions to return; an emotional relationship that I had exploited for my own ends. In reality, one small and one slightly bigger thing of no importance. But, it was the start of an adventure that has lasted through a lifetime. Through the discipline of taking the time daily for quiet, to be quiet, I have been able to weather the big storms that everybody has their share of in life; and have been able to reach port safely. Even though many a time I thought: "This is it; this time I'm going to drown."

The "gift" of meditation that I received from the Garins at the Eleventh Arrondissement near the Bastille has been a gift for life. Just like the relationship with the Garins. My husband, Henk, and I went to see them in Switzerland, and they have come to visit us in our former home at Deldenerbroek. I am still in contact with their daughter, Clair.

Meditation, by the way, is not just to find quiet in the storms of life, but also in day to day life it provides periods of rest and balance. Rest to put your priorities in order for the coming day or days. During meditation you'll notice whether you are feeling fine or whether something isn't right. Prayer is the best therapy; for me it is also is a means for correction. I am an emotional person with strong opinions. "Quiet time," for me, works like a catalyst. I learn not to avoid confrontations, but I also learn to listen to what really matters to the other person.

Through the Garins in Paris I met Evelien. Evelien was a jovial and cheerful Viennese. She had studied at the University of Vienna where she also did her Ph.D. Before and during the war, she had been a committed Nazi and had held an important position in the Hitler Youth organization. After the war she had to crawl through the ruins of her ideals. Broken and disillusioned, she met some people in Vienna that showed her different ways; the ways of remorse, forgiveness and solidarity. Not based on race, class or nationality, but based on equality of human dignity. This gave Evelien hope again.

Maybe people like Evelien were the precursors of a united Europe. Maybe in the Europe of today, the Europeans should revisit and consider how the ideal of a united Europe came into being. On the blood, sweat and tears of a torn Europe it was people like Robert Schumann and Konrad Adenauer and many, many others who had dared walk a different road. The idea of a united Europe didn't just fall from the sky. It is the product of hope, common sense and vision after three wars. If Europe and the young Europeans of today learn to find their own roots, perhaps they will find the vision and the will to act together to take on the worldwide problem with which Europe is being confronted today. Maybe this will lead to a vision to solve the constriction points of our planet.

Evelien remained true to her new ideals. She immigrated to South America and has lived there for the last forty years. She married a Brazilian and has two sons.

It was through Evelien that I came into direct contact with an international team of what is now called Initiatives of Change. They coordinated their work in Paris and France from a villa that was owned by Mr. And Baroness De Watteville on the Avenue Victor Hugo in Boulonge, a suburb of Paris. The Watteville family castle is located at Colmar, in the Aalsace. The couple had personally felt the ravages of what two wars could do and decided to dedicate their lives to the reconstruction of France and the creation of lasting peace between France and Germany. Their villa in Paris was located at number 22, Avenue Victor Hugo. I liked coming there. It was a beautiful old house, located just behind the Bois de Boulogne, just outside Paris. During the war, the de Wattevilles found shelter in Southern France. When they came back to Paris, they found their home had been used by a group of collaborators. The beautifully paneled library had been used for potato storage. The rest of the house was in very poor state of repair as well. The family thought they had no option but to sell the place. Instead, because of their commitment to the reconstruction of France and Germany, they decided to make the villa available to the Initiatives of Change organization. This movement was very active in the period of a war-ravaged Europe.

In those years, the de Watteville's villa became an Embassy; a meeting place for industrialists, union leaders, Frenchmen, Germans, North Africans and many others that could meet on an informal basis; where old and young people were being trained to build bridges between opposing factions. Today, that is still very much relevant. What mankind learned after that war - building bridges - should be put to use now. It can be said that Europe has learned a lot; young people of today should not only find ways and means to live with one another, but also with people of other continents and cultures. Sometimes I wonder how all those Asian and African peoples adapted to their white colonial masters that came to their countries. Certainly they must have thought: "Why don't you people adapt to our customs and culture?" This is food for thought in today's world, now that the European continent is subject to an influx of population from other parts of the world.

Switzerland and Caux

The Garins spent their summers back home in Switzerland. The Reverend would substitute in for a colleague in a nearby community. My one-year as an au pair wasn't up yet, so I was taken along. That's how I got to know Palacieux, a small village near Lausanne. Cows with bells, fresh mountain air and solid Swiss. Those are still my impressions in relation to the Garins. Grandpere Garin came to visit often. He looked like a lumberjack with his full black beard and enormous boots.

Of all the people of the Initiatives of Change that I have ever met, the Garins were among the most fervent followers. Because they were so nice to me, this had never bothered me much, although they would insist on living by their principles, which for me, were the most absurd I had ever heard. They were very strict in their interpretations of rules. I remember making a bicycle trip into Lausanne on one of my days off. Somewhere at the lake, I met a nice Swiss gentleman. We danced all evening. I still remember one of the tunes that was played that evening. His name was Rudy. The plan was that I, bicycle and all, would take the last train back to the village. Of course, I missed the last train. No problem, Rudy hoisted the bicycle into his car and drove me home.

The sermon I got at the breakfast table the next morning was something to remember. Dancing all evening and having some Swiss man drive me home was against all rules of proper behavior. The same day, a huge box of chocolate truffles was delivered. Rudy, it turned out, worked for Nestlé. The Garins had me send them back, and I was foolish enough to do it, too! Dancing and flirting were not part and parcel of revolutionaries in 1952, according to the Garins. I, who likes dancing so much! To us, people from the Dutch East Indies, singing, dancing and lots of laughter is second nature. That was the end of Rudy and Lausanne.

Through the Garins I was invited to attend an international conference in Caux, a place in the mountains above Montreux. Formerly the Caux Palace, Mountain House at Caux was a gathering place for people from all over the world, from all races and cultures. What an eye-opener that was; it was like standing on top of a mountain and suddenly being able to see the whole world. My thoughts went back to the Russian lady in the Death Camp outside Bogor, who first told me about all the other countries far beyond my own boundaries. At Caux, I met not only the big wide world, but also its people. The participants at this conference were people who wanted to learn from the past, from the respective histories of their nations, and to dedicate themselves to creating a better world. This is where I experienced my first taste of what it felt like to be a global citizen.

That week in the summer of 1952 in Caux, a big delegation of Japanese arrived straight from Japan. That was cause for me to swallow a few times. It was such a short time ago that I was made to bow daily for their countrymen and emperor. Although the horrors of the camps were behind me and since then much had happened - my wonderful student life, Paris - but when I heard the Japanese language, I felt like vomiting.

At the same time I realized that, given the mode of operation at Caux, a system where all the delegates to the conference also helped with the daily chores of running the hotel, not only was I going to meet the Japanese, I also would have to cook an serve their meals for them! It was very hard for me to digest, to say the least. In every Japanese, I saw a soldier or a camp guard. When I was asked: "Do you hate the Japanese?", I didn't know how to respond. It also was a matter of being ready for the process of coping with my feelings. I was busy exploring the big, wide world. I was enjoying the company of the friends I had made in Paris, some of whom were also attending the conference. Then there were the Americans with their music, plays and films. Every day was a new adventure. From Holland too, there was a large delegation. Leaders from all over the world were being flown in. The location of Caux is beautiful. A small train served the connection from Montreux via Caux to the top of the mountain. Most participants came to "Mountain House" by this train. The building offered room for one thousand guests.

It's hard to picture today what Europe was like seven years after the war. Germany was still in ruins. I visited Germany once in the early 1950s, and literally you sometimes still had to find your way through mountains of rubble. Russia had annexed East Germany and the East European countries. The rest of Europe was trying to recover from the terrible impact of the war. One American minister proffered the opinion that Europe needed help not only with it's physical reconstruction such as the Marshall Plan, but also that a lasting peace could only be achieved through reconciliation of the people. These were prophetic words that are still valid today in 2006. For this minister, this lasting peace had first and foremost to be born in the hearts of the leadership and people of the two sides that had so bitterly fought each other. Wish one-another peace; something the faithful in every religious service are invited to do. "Shalom" for the Jewish people, and during my last visit to Indonesia, I noticed that every greeting is begun with "salam allaikum, I wish you peace."

This American clergyman was convinced that this lasting peace had first to be born in the hearts of the individual people. Is peace between people and nations possible without maturity of character and thoughts? Such a maturity of the spirit is not possible without first falling, getting up, falling again; through willingness to not put yourself in the center of the universe, to learn to listen - something that maybe is difficult without that great commandment: "Love your neighbor like you love yourself". Wow, I am 78 years old now, and so often I still fail at that. Change the world, beginning with yourself. Sounds easy, but to act on this simple slogan needed to be preceded by something within myself, every day anew. And when you apply this in practice among nations, the challenge becomes many times greater. Because then we, in the secular West, would have to care about the welfare of the more than one billion Muslims in the world; and the rich West would have to find ways and means for the seventy percent of the world population that still lives in relative poverty to have the means and support to better their lives.

It has been of great importance for the formation of my personality as a human being that at this crucial moment, so soon after the war, the pain, the hopelessness and the cruelty of the Japanese internment camps, I landed at Caux. It helped me to overcome my trauma by meeting the agony of those years' head on. At the same time, it offered me the vision of becoming a true world citizen. In the atmosphere in that hotel on top of the mountain, you could actually see it happening. You could observe Frenchmen and Germans, often still full of mutual suspicion and hate, meeting one another, starting up a conversation. Before your very own eyes, you could see what happens when people are prepared to lay bare their fears, hatred and bitterness, their often deeply buried feelings.

In one of the meetings I engaged in a very guarded conversation with a senior Japanese couple. I recall him saying as if it were only yesterday: "My wife is like a peach, soft on the outside, hard on the inside. And my whole life, I was like a coconut, hard on the outside but soft inside". What this gentleman told me was nothing special, but it still moved me that morning. I saw a normal, nice couple, and no longer a camp guard. The experience at that moment was therapy for me. The therapy also consisted of meeting people from other cultures, religions and backgrounds that turned out not to be that much different than I am. That was a very comforting thought. Nevertheless, this healing process took place very gradually.

One day, I was asked if I would be prepared to speak publicly about my experience at the camps. I was scared stiff by such a thought, and not the least because everything had to be done in English. With all those Japanese faces in the large conference room, it was no mean feat for me. It was as if my throat was being choked. But, somehow, the words came. I saw myself standing again at the barbed wire fence, the endless desire to be free, the anxious question: Would I ever leave here alive? The all-engulfing hunger, sickness, cruelty and death that were always just around the corner, ready to pounce. The sinking back into savagery and degeneration of the camp occupants. Hungry people face terrible choices.

When I spoke, the audience became extremely quiet. When I finished, I just wanted to disappear quickly. But just as I tried to slip out of the conference room, I stood eye to eye with a Japanese man. He was obviously upset and in tears. He pressed something into my hands. An interpreter later told me that he had been a women's camp guard on Java. It made me confused, touched and nauseous at the same time. I took his gift, but could not bring myself to sit at the table and hear his side of the story. What did it mean to him to wield the scepter in a women's internment camp in a, for him, far away and strange country? What was he thinking when looking at all those emaciated women and children? Not just emaciated, but covered with sores because of lack of vitamins? Or all those children that were crying for food and, as the years passed, stopped crying? Didn't he, at home, have a wife, children?

We were lucky at Kramat that we didn't have a psychopath as a camp commander like the one at the Cideng camp. The camp commander at Cideng turned out to be such a tormenting cruel sadist that it made all the women and children literally tremble. In America later, I met a Japanese physician and his wife, Toyo and Tokiko. With them, it was possible for me to talk. It started by fits and starts, and bit-by-bit the stories came back to me. Both were fluent in English and that was a great help. It is difficult to talk through an interpreter about matters that bring about so many emotions. Toyo and Tokiko knew how to listen and let me talk, cry and seek. A friendship grew and I began to forget that I was talking to Japanese; they had become friends with whom I could share my innermost feelings and emotions…

When I was in the United States in 1954, a group of one hundred young Japanese arrived at the conference site at Mackinac Island in Michigan where I was attending another conference. They represented the youth organization "Seinendan" that counted more than 4 million young members. None of them had ever set foot outside Japan. Also for them, the war was still fresh in their minds. Japan, after all, had lost the war. A lost generation? The organizers responsible for accommodations asked me if I would share a room with the chairwoman of the Seinendan group, a young lady my age. She didn't speak a word of English and I didn't speak a word of Japanese except for some of the swear-words that I had picked up from the camp guards. How surprising life can be! Should someone at the Kramat camp have told me that there would come a time when I would share a room with a Japanese lady on a small island in the United States of America, I would probably have laughed my head off. I didn't just share a room with her; I began to feel responsible for her and her group. We managed to arrange that they could get some Japanese food. I ate with them; breakfast was seaweed with a raw egg.

More important however was that these young people, just like myself such a short time ago, would get the opportunity to meet people from other countries and continents. They had a chance to sense that globalizing world that we have all landed in. For me personally, this was a healthy development. By confronting the past, the healing process had made a start. From there, you go on and give those years a place in your life. By trial and error, I was able to accomplish this by placing the years behind barbed wire in a wider context. The reality is that all of us, together, have become global citizens in an ever-shrinking world. And so, all those that we had to bury at KRS, Bogor and Kramat; all those men and women that didn't survive the camp years, together with those bodies burned to cinders at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, found a place in my history.

Epilogue 1

It was a long way from Linggarjati to Delden, probably my end station… I am now 79 years old, mother of two children, a lovely daughter in law and son in law, and three of the greatest grand kids that a grandmother could wish for. It is for them that I finally, fifty five years later, sat down at my key board and typed the story that I had started to write in longhand just after the Second World War. This story had lain untouched in the same rusty tin suitcase in which I had packed my meager belongings and dared make the crossing to Holland on the S.S. Johan van Oldebarneveld, one of the last evacuation ships to leave the Dutch East Indies. I keep this suitcase as a trophy. The reason for the decision to tell the story was my grandson Diederick. He had a school assignment to write an essay about something exciting his grandparents had done. Thus, the eleven year old Diederick interviewed his grandmother about the Japanese concentration camps. The title of his essay was: "A Tough Granny".

It has not been an easy journey. The road from Linggarjati to Deldenerbroek was littered with boulders and barricades. The student years at Utrecht opened up a new world. My embrace of a new worldview soon after finishing university put me into contact with people that I would otherwise never have met, countries and continents I would never have visited. From Linggarjati by way of Utrecht to Paris, Switzerland, the United States of America, New York, Washington, Los Angeles just to name a few. Continents, countries, people; but when I think back to my roaming years in the grip of a world ideology, I remember people, many people. People from all walks of life, from different cultures and races. Young people, old people; people who in those post-war years were trying to find durable peace. Slogans thrown at you by an ideology, or a commercial, may sound wonderful, may even touch you realistically or emotionally and maybe at a certain point in your life you are ready for it. But to live up to a slogan, a switch has to be thrown in your mind first, your commitment to work towards a different world, an environmentally friendlier world. The worldwide problem of clean water, of poverty. There are, indeed, ongoing efforts, but they require involvement over and above the limits of our own personal interests. One has to make choices, not for a week, a month, a year, but for life.

More than slogans are needed to change the thinking pattern of human beings. Governments know about that. In the Netherlands, roads are overflowing with cars, traffic is congested. Well, says the Administration, we'll just make driving a car so expensive, that people will leave their cars at home,. But will the people do it? We all are co-responsible for this trend of consumerism. What do we have to offer for all the young people, my grandkids? Are we helping them understand the problems that our planet is wrestling with, help them learn to understand and to do something about it? The rich Western world is a massive attraction for the poor continents; do we teach our kids what it takes to accept a Muslim as a neighbor, a Moroccan, or a Pole?

Am I pessimistic? Absolutely not. I had the good fortune - or was it my karma - that on my travels all over the world, I met people that helped me turn that knob in myself, time and again. The page of the hell of the Japanese concentration camps - by meeting with Japanese so soon after the war - did not haunt me as nightmares. My heart goes out to all the survivors of those camps and to all of those, who in this year 2006, are still living in camps. May they find healing and peace in their torn hearts.

Indonesia is again very noticeably present in my life. Three years ago my brother Wim took the initiative to found the Friends of Linggarjati Foundation. The Indonesians have made our parental home in Linggarjati, built by my father, into a museum. It was in our house that the Linggarjati Agreement was reached in 1946. For the Indonesians, the Linggarjati Agreement is a symbol. This is where the proud Republic of Indonesia was recognized, the end of the colonial era. For us Dutch, Linggarjati in the year 2006 perhaps represents a journey through our colonial past. Linggarjati, the moral of our past? A place where young Indonesians and Dutch can learn from the past and build a better future, together. Why not?

Joty ter Kulve

February 2006

Epilogue 2

The following article, written a few years later, perhaps provides a suitable summary to the story of the people who lost their homeland.

The Dutch East Indies Remembrance Center

The year 2008 is going to be a special year for what used to be the Dutch people of the Dutch East Indies, the Dutch East Indies people themselves, the Moluccans and other inhabitants of what has now become the virtual Dutch East Indies…a country that doesn't exist anymore.

It was in the second half of the twentieth century that two thirds of the world's population liberated themselves from their colonial dependence and became citizens of their own, independent nations. By and by, people started to rediscover their past, myths, roots, their history and sense of identity. In the former Dutch East Indies, the demise of the colonial era was beset with huge problems, conflict and tragedy.

After the capitulation of Japan, the Indies population from inside and outside the Japanese concentration camps that had survived the war, were immediately confronted with a brutal colonial war, the "Bersiap" of the Indonesian independence fighters. This period caused many casualties on both the Dutch and Indonesian side.

When it became clear that Indonesia had become a historical and political reality that received worldwide recognition, the relationship between the two countries had deteriorated to such an extent that the former rulers of the archipelago were no longer welcome.

A large-scale migration took place. The former populace of the now virtual country packed their meager belongings and traveled by ships and airplanes to the Netherlands and other distant countries. Also, a large number of Moluccan soldiers of the defunct Dutch East Indies Army and their families had no other place to go but to the Netherlands.

In Europe, the immigrants arrived on a continent that had just managed to liberate itself from a dictator. Everywhere one was confronted with the ruins of war. Europe had to be rebuilt. And that was how it came about that the immigrants from the distant and little known Dutch East Indies, upon their arrival in Europe and elsewhere, buried their sufferings, the atrocities, hunger and death of the Japanese occupation in their hearts. Thereby the war in that distant corner of the earth, even to their offspring, became a forgotten war. Not only did they loose their earthly belongings, also their memories were buried. The Moluccan soldiers and their families did not fare any better; the Dutch didn't know what to do with them and they were stashed away in camps spread around the country.

It is worthy of praise that now, 63 years after the horrors of World War II, the Dutch Government has made the decision to establish a Remembrance Center at Arnhem that offers a place for the memories of all of those that were left behind, but also for the survivors still alive today. A Remembrance Center that will honor all the unacknowledged and drowned sorrow in the Far East.

This Remembrance Center should have a "Wailing Wall", a place where the sighs and sorrow of those years can surround us, the inhumanity, injustice and pain of the Japanese occupation and the colonial war that followed of which we were considered to be the under-lying cause, wails against all the wars that still disgrace our planet. At the same time, the Remembrance Center should include a "Silence Center", a place to grieve, to find inner peace.

A Remembrance Center, however, also offers signs of hope, of strength, of victory: The Spirit prevails. Because we have prevailed. We, the populace of that now virtual country, have settled all over the world. We have rebuilt our lives. Our children have integrated and assimilated everywhere in the world. For behold, the now virtual country of the Dutch East Indies has made its sons and daughters, so sorely tried by tragedy, into global citizens.

Today still, our little planet is beset by real migrations of populations. Our world of today has become multi-ethnic and multi-cultural. And each nation demands recognition and a place at the table of the world nations.

We, the people of the Dutch East Indies, have endured the migration process, we have experienced it bodily. As such, the story of the Bronbeek Remembrance Center at Arnhem, can become a beacon of hope for all those people that are resettling or have resettled in The Netherlands, in Europe and elsewhere.

As first generation ethnic Dutch Indies people, we are proud that after so many years, a Dutch East Indies Remembrance Center is becoming a reality. But also, we are a bit disappointed that after the decision to establish-this Center was announced in 2007 by the Dutch Minister of the VWS Department-there has not been much reaction from the Dutch East Indies people in the Netherlands. As was done at the other Commemorative Centers (Westerbork, Amersfoort and Vught), the whole Indies community should support the Indies Remembrance Center to be established at Bronbeek, Arnhem, and let their voice be heard

Joty ter Kulve

Carla Maria Eijsma

January 8, 2008