A Daughter’s Journey

Tens of thousands of Dutch citizens were imprisoned in Japanese internment camps in the then Netherlands East Indies during World War II.  Laura Schuurmans traveled to North Sumatra to visit the places where her Dutch grandparents, uncles and father were held during World War II.

Before leaving for Medan, I called my Uncle Hans in Australia to ask him for more information about the camps. He was a teenager when the war broke out in 1942 and, I assumed, would have lots of memories.

“I can’t remember what happened, it was a long time ago,” was all he said when I called.  He sighed, was quiet for a while and added, “I just don’t want to remember what happened.” 

The following morning I boarded a plane to Medan to visit the former internment camps. The only information I had was a bunch of photocopied pages with facts about the camps in North Sumatra provided by the Dutch Embassy, and memories of stories told at home over the years.

For me, after living in Indonesia for 10 years, this was a chance to close a chapter of my family’s history by visiting the place where my father was born.

Before the war, my grandfather was chief engineer for KPM, the shipping line that connected the islands of the colony. My grandmother was of Dutch-Indonesian origin. She was born on her mother’s copra and clove plantation located just outside Manado in North Sulawesi. Her parents died when she was young and, at the age of 9, she was sent to study at a Dutch Protestant boarding school in Semarang, Central Java.

When I arrived in Medan, a car was waiting to take me to the hotel. I checked in, put my bag in my room and headed out. I told the driver to take me to the Belgian consulate; my grandparents lived right next door to it all those years ago, leading a happy and peaceful life until the Japanese landed in the province.

Although the consulate building was still there, all the other Dutch era homes had been demolished and replaced by ugly shop-houses. I explained to the security guard why I had come, and he allowed me to get a brief glimpse inside the compound.

The sight of the three old houses on the large, serene plot filled with colorful tropical flowers and palm trees revived my thoughts about what it must have been like on the night before the war broke out.

                                                 * * * *

My grandmother, who was one-month pregnant, was asleep on a March evening in 1942 when a deafening clamor engulfed the house.  Thousands of men and women, stirred up by the Japanese, marched through the streets of Medan, attacking the Dutch and plundering their houses. “Asia for the Asians!” was the Japanese slogan.

My grandmother and her family escaped through the backyard and spent the night in the jungle fearing for their lives. The next morning they reported to the local police station where Japanese officers were waiting to take them to Pematang Siantar and the Balimbingan hospital that had been converted into a makeshift, overcrowded internment camp.

* * * *

“Is this the Balimbingan hospital?” I asked the security guard. I received no reply.

“My father was born here during the Japanese war and I’d like to have a look.”

The man remained silent. I got out of the car and walked into the hospital, but the guard blurted out, “You’re not allowed in.”

Surprised and irritated that he finally spoke up after ignoring me, I continued walking.

He followed close on my heels; when I stopped, he did, too. I suddenly wheeled around and said fiercely, “Leave me alone,” but to no avail. Discouraged, I walked back to the hospital entrance, the same place where my grandmother looked for her driver in 1942 after receiving a message that he was waiting for her.

But my grandmother hadn’t recognized the man sitting outside because he wore a traditional headscarf that partly covered his face. Then she heard a familiar voice: “Speak Malay, and don’t acknowledge me.”

It was Uncle Henk, a planter and a close family friend.

“I went to your house,” he whispered. “They’ve taken everything, but they forgot the attic and I brought your old evening gowns; you’ll need them to sell in exchange for food if the war lasts long. Here is your silver hairbrush, comb and mirror which the housemaid kept for you. Take this rice, coffee and tea, don’t waste it …”

After telling her not to worry about him, he looked down and rushed into the night. It was the last time they saw each other; he was later shot by the Japanese after trying to escape from the notorious Burma railway. .

Not long after the war started, the Japanese separated my grandmother from my grandfather and two uncles. Able-bodied men were put in labor camps; the women remained behind (older men unfit to work and preteen boys also were put in separate camps).

At the end of November 1942, my grandmother was taken to the delivery room of the hospital. Two drunken Japanese soldiers entered the room, laughed at her and said, “We want to watch the show.”

“Over my dead body” the doctor shouted as he threw a white sheet over her. The soldiers quickly left the room and soon baby Jimmy – my father -- was born.

A month later my grandmother and her newborn son were transferred from Pematang Siantar to an internment camp situated in the mountain resort of Brastagi. In the past, they had spent their weekends there in a hillside home.

* * * *

“Would you know the location of the former internment camp?” we asked a man as we reached Brastagi. He nodded and led us straight to the site on his motorbike. The remains of the camp were still there; the main school building, flanked on its left by another building.

I walked across the large expanse of land and reached the ruins of a house. “It’s haunted,” the man told me. “The Dutch ladies keep on coming back here, even after so many years.”

I started feeling the spirit of my late grandmother close to me as if she was guiding me through the camp. Perhaps she couldn’t let go either. My stomach was empty, but I couldn’t eat; I was thirsty, too, but I couldn’t drink; I wanted to speak, but I couldn’t find the words. All I could do was stare at the grass on which my father used to play, surrounded by imprisoned women.

      * * * * 

Food supplies dwindled with each passing month of the war. All the prisoners were given to eat was cooked rice with some strands of spinach, diluted with lots of water that made it a bland, congealed mess.

One morning, a newly hired Indonesian guard strode through the camp, scaring all the women as he kicked away their cooking cans. He walked over to my grandmother and stopped. He raised his voice, uttered a few words and then bent down.

“I’m the husband of your laundry maid and she asked me to work in the camp so I can help you,” he whispered. He got up and began shouting again quickly  throwing a small bag of, sugar, vegetables and tea leaves in front of her.

In spring 1945, with the Japanese losing the war in the Pacific, they decided to move the women further south into the vast jungle. Bags were packed, and the long journey of hundreds of women began from Brastagi to Medan, a distance of 60 kilometers.

My father was not yet three years old. He walked for hours, until he could no longer stand, and then his mother would carry him, until he became too heavy to be carried. Then he would sit on her shoulders, until he could no longer sit.

                                                       * * * *

We continued our trip by car another few hundred kilometers down to the last camp in Rantau Prapat.  As the car drove further south, the spirit of my grandmother gradually disappeared behind the mountains of Brastagi.

The sun quickly hid behind the coconut trees. Soon it was dark and I became afraid. I didn’t know why. My mobile phone had no signal and there was a power blackout as we drove on a long, deserted road through the oil palm plantations until we reached Rantau Prapat.

“Perhaps I should sleep in the car,” I told the driver. “I don’t think there are any good hotels and I don’t feel safe here.”

The driver kept silent and drove me to the best hotel in town.  I went to bed, switched off the light, turned it on again and stared at the ceiling until, finally exhausted, I fell asleep. The following morning when I woke up I asked myself why I had been afraid. My father must have been much more afraid. The long walk had taken them to the railway station in Medan where they were put on a train. They were locked in the dark as the train slowly started moving to an unknown destination.

                                                           * * * *

The women were tired, thirsty and hungry. Children were afraid of the dark and started crying as the train moved down south to Aek Paminke, situated close to Rantau Prapat. It was an internment camp consisting only of barracks made from bamboo shields among the rubber trees. The exhausted, despondent women slept together under the bamboo shields as the wind silently blew through the rubber trees at night.

My grandmother’s job was to push a heavily loaded car over a narrow rail. Barbed wire separated her from my father. Every morning, he sat down on the other side of the fence, watching his mother work. Each day he was afraid she would not come back. After more than three years of war, food became even scarcer and women started dying. My grandmother’s job became to bury the dead. Some had been her friends, but many of those she buried she had never met before.  

I felt exhausted, thirsty and lonely as we arrived at the former internment camp and drove through the rubber plantation to Aek Paminke’s train station, the place where my grandmother, my father and thousands of women and children had arrived in the spring and summer of 1945. I looked around, but didn’t know what I was looking for.

We drove around, but I didn’t know in which direction to drive. When I asked about the graves, no one could remember the exact location. I felt confused as I sat down and looked around one last time, trying to comprehend how people could have survived the hardship of this brutal war.

I decided to leave but told the driver to stop at Si Rengo Rengo, a Japanese camp in which my grandfather and two uncles had remained for over a year.

When we arrived, I asked the security guards to let me in, but they said no. They agreed to call a supervisor anyway.  

“There’s nothing to see,” the man at the other end of the line told me, not knowing it was exactly why I had come. “Madam, you’d better leave, our plantation isn’t open to visitors.”

But I did not want to leave. Another man kindly helped me by phoning again, saying, “she really wants to see the place, it’s important to her”. With a gentle smile on his face, he told me to sit and wait for a few minutes.

Two men arrived and we drove down a winding dirt road into the plantation until the road became too narrow and we had to walk. Mosquitoes feasted on my blood and a wild boar made a furtive appearance. Then we reached the camp along the riverside, which had been nicknamed “the valley of the dead”. Thousands of men once lived here in squalid bamboo barracks. I shivered as I walked around.

My thoughts took me back to my telephone conversation with Uncle Hans. I understood why he did not want to remember.

Who could have possibly survived here? Who could have stomached drinking muddy water from the river? Who could have overcome the feelings of despair that lasted for years?

One of the men showed me some of the graves of those who died. I tried to take a photograph, but the battery suddenly went flat, although I had just replaced it two days before. Uncle Hans apparently was not the only one who did not want to remember what had happened here.

My grandmother had talked about living in the internment camps as though it was a normal part of life, and so I had always imagined it as somehow normal, too. After visiting all the camps, I realized it was very different. In trying to close a chapter of my family’s life, I had instead opened a new and painful one. But from this, perhaps, there would be healing.

On the long drive back to Medan, my driver told me of taking people from the Netherlands to the sites. Often they broke down as the terrible memories returned. I was quiet, for I had no words to express how I felt.

We stopped at a Padang restaurant. I had eaten very little over the past few days, but I was still in no mood to eat. I could not let go of my thoughts about the experiences of my family many years ago.

                                                      * * * *

August 1945 brought the news they had been waiting for: the defeat of the Japanese.

The family was reunited, and after a six-week-long sea voyage they arrived in the Netherlands.

But cold weather and a cold welcome awaited them; common Dutchmen often didn’t know the difference between Indonesians and their Dutch compatriots of mixed origin. They also viewed them hostilely as new competitors for scarce jobs. *

The war took its toll in many ways; my grandfather, whose health problems were exacerbated by his time in the camps, died at the age of 41 soon after their arrival.

For my grandmother, a return to her mother’s copra and clove plantation on which she was born, and which she longed for in her heart, would have been too painful. The white sandy beaches and turquoise-colored waters of Manado always remained precious memories she would never forget. But she also never wanted to see them again. 

* At the beginning of the 21^st century the Dutch government paid a small amount of money to all those repatriated. It was a conciliatory gesture for the unwelcome reception they had received. But only a few survivors remained to receive the funds.

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