‘The society in the Dutch East Indies was very stratified. My father was a full-blooded Dutchman who came to the Indies as a bookkeeper on a plantation in Sumatra. He married an Indian girl, my mother. She was the daughter of a Moluccan mother and a full-blooded Dutchman. That meant that we belonged to the second layer in colonial society. So under the layer of people who are all thoroughbred, or totok, goods.
My father couldn’t stand the bad treatment of the coolies on those plantations in Sumatra. He had a tremendous sense of justice. That’s why he left there. He eventually became a bookkeeper with the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL) in Bandoeng, on Java.
He received a relatively small salary. And that was quite tight with a family of six children. So when we moved to Bandoeng, he agreed with a single colleague who owned a house that we could live in that house, in exchange that man would receive free board and lodging. But this man, Mr. Nunumete, was an Ambonese. And from then on he would sit at the head of the table at our meals and would say to my mother, “I would like some rice, ma’am.” That must have been a huge humiliation for her. He was, after all, just a native in my mother’s eyes. That lasted for a few years, until Nunumete got married and went to live somewhere else. I never saw him again.
men’s camp
War with Japan broke out at the end of 1941. The Christian high school I attended closed and on September 4, 1942, I was the first of our family to receive a letter telling me to report. As one of the youngest – I had yet to turn 17 – I ended up in a men’s camp. After that I spent more than three years in different camps.
My father was called up a month later and he ended up in the same camp with me. I liked that. When we later ended up in a larger camp, Baron Herman van Karnebeek, who was chairman of the camp leadership around Jakarta, Buitenzorg and Bandoeng, decided that the whites should be separated from the browns.
For the totoks it was a huge humiliation to be mixed with Indians
After all, it was an enormous humiliation for the totoks to be mixed with Indians just like that. That meant that I was separated from my father on the grounds of color.
Bow
I was just trying to survive. I had signed up to work for the kitchen. I did heavy work. Chopping wood and lugging water. I was a really strong guy and could do as much work as two others. Before that I got some extra food. I was never really hungry because of that, but I was constantly hungry. I will never call the Japanese ‘Japs’. They tried to take good care of us, for example we were vaccinated against cholera. And I have never experienced violence. Well, I’ve had a few slaps. And I was beaten once when I traded a sheet for eggs with a native. But there was no structural violence.
I also don’t understand the fuss about bending. When I bowed to a sentry, he always bowed back. The Dutch found it difficult to bow to an Asian. Because they had been brought up to think that those Japs, those crooked legs, couldn’t aim and couldn’t fly with those goofy eyes. Well, they shot our planes out of the sky like rotten pears.
Oh, I’ve been in a camp. But I didn’t really experience the war.’
A version of this article also appeared in NRC Handelsblad on 30 December 2021
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of December 30, 2021
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