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by COFEPOW Member
ARIE DEN HOLLANDER
When we (my father, mother, and I ) arrived in Holland from Java in the
late autumn of 1945, after having spent some time convalescing in Singapore,
we temporarily moved in with my aunt, her headmaster husband and their
four children. My parents had grown apart from the effects of three and
a half years of brutality and starvation at the hands of the Japs. They
were no longer the same people who had fallen in love with one another
some years earlier.
I, myself, had by now recovered enough to be able to get around without
my legs trembling with the effort of standing up. At four and a half years
old I should have had the benefit of a loving relationship, but less than
two years later my parents were divorced, after the unhappy marriage was
"blessed" with a second child.
After the separation I, together with my little baby brother, were being cared for by people in Amsterdam I hardly knew, father having been posted back to Sumatra for another turn of military duty. I was one of many kids who had been robbed of three and a half years of childhood behind the barbed wire of prison camps, where rules were many and pleasures didn't exist. We didn't talk about that miserable time: It was not the thing to do, and the countless shocking experiences were buried in our sub-consciousness. Consequently the people in the home country were not aware of what had actually happened. A striking example was a remark made by a kind soul who had spent the war in Holland under German occupation. "We had to make do with ersatz coffee and margarine instead of butter, and everything like meat was rationed," she moaned. "You were well out of it!"
I understand that attitude, they just didn't know….they had not starved, and we didn't say anything. Neither could they understand why I was such a weird child: timid, scared of every aircraft flying over, speaking politely in what was not much more than a whisper and positively terrified of anything approaching violence, even among children outside. If a crust of bread was left, or crumbs fell on the table, I would eat them or put them in my pocket for later, even though I was no longer hungry. Toys were a wonder to me and we received a few, though for a long time I never asked for any. This was something, I felt, one didn't need.
When I was seven, the lady who cared for us married my father by proxy, and we boarded a steam ship to Belawan, Sumatra, to join him. After eighteen months as a family we received news that father's new posting was to be in Holland and the three of us moved into a transition camp for a month in Semarang, from where we could be easily transported to the port as soon as a ship became available.
It was during this month in Semarang that nightmares I had suffered with
from time to time suddenly increased in frequency. My father took me to
see an army psychologist, who could not provide any answers.
It is, in retrospect, interesting to note that the transition camp, although
comfortable and with plenty of food, was surrounded by a barbed wire fence
and guarded by armed military personnel to discourage any marauding Indonesian
nationalists.
We arrived in Holland at the beginning of Winter in late 1950 and moved in with my stepmother's sister and her husband.
My uncoordinated awkwardness would, at times, cause problems and my father, who had been hardened and twisted by the years under the Japs, was unable to restrain himself from becoming violent towards me. This caused quite a bit of friction between him and my step auntie and uncle. When we eventually moved to a home of our own, the relationship became more strained as I grew towards puberty and it was decided that I should spend a few years with another family in another town.
That family was never told that we had been prisoners of the Japs. I found this out years later and I think this was a classical social services blunder. Somebody must have decided that if you ignored a problem, it would eventually go away. It was not until I cut short my education by a year and joined the merchant navy that I found some kind of normality. The often hard life and danger at sea on the small coasters put me in a situation where we had to depend on each other for our survival, which forced me to grow up quickly.
I am sixty-one now and luckily my father is still alive. He and I have
become good friends, but too late. My mother died quite young when I was
in my late twenties.
My stepmother, who incidentally was an absolute angel, died suddenly some
years ago. I was never able to really tell her how much I appreciated
what she had tried to do for us.
Many people think that the only thing Far East Prisoners of War lost
during that time was three and a half years. Think again……
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