3. About my parents and the war

 

Readingtime: 12 minutes

 

 

I was born in 1965 in a place X somewhere in the Netherlands, as the youngest of three daughters of Gerrit and Anna van den Burght. My father Gerrit was born in the Dutch East Indies, in Medan. My grandfather was a general practitioner there. When the war against Japan broke out, my father was just nine years old. Grandpa was taken away with the prisoners of war to, as my grandma and dad found out much later, Singapore, destined for the dark wilderness of what was then Burma. My grandfather survived the horrific time in the camp because he was put to work as a camp doctor. Thus he was spared having to work in the bush to clear the way for a railway line in the most appalling conditions. But many died in his care. The Red Cross parcels were stolen by the Japanese guards. The drinking water was filthy and contaminated with all kinds of diseases that mainly cause diarrhea. There was never enough food.

 

My grandmother was locked up in a camp on Sumatra with her two children, my father and his sister, and many other Dutch women and their children. My father's sister died there of diarrhea. She was only four years old.

I never understood how these people found the strength to pick up their lives again after the liberation. Why on earth would you still want to go on when you have been treated so brutally? How do you come to terms with such injustice? To lose your child and still keep going. Not to give up. That damned human resilience, the amazingly strong will to live.

 

After the war, back in the Netherlands, no one asked them what they had been through. No one took care of them or comforted them. Everyone had suffered. The Netherlands had been through the occupation, the famine. The people here had to cope with their own suffering. Let's go! Keep going. Contribute! We have to rebuild. And so my grandparents went to work. Just like everyone else. Grandpa started to work for an old GP in place X and after a while took over the practice. My grandmother did the paperwork, just as she had done before the war in Medan. 

 

I only ever knew my grandparents to be quite tubby , but in those days they were both skinny as a rake. In the attic of their old house there was a cardboard box with worn black-and-white photos in all sizes. Large portraits in soft focus of demure girls, modestly looking down on their hands, robust grave-looking boys, standing next to some column with a plant on top and minuscule prints of groups of people in unfamiliar places. As a ten-year-old girl, there was nothing I liked better than rummaging through that box and asking my grandmother about the people in those pictures. Usually she would say, 'I don't remember, dear', with a sigh and a sad look on her face that I, the happy teenager, didn’t understand. But there were some photos she did want to tell me about. Like the photo of Grandma in her wedding dress, surrounded by lots of people but without Grandpa.

                    

‘I married by proxy’, she said.

‘You have to understand that grandpa was already in Medan. He went to work in the hospital there. During our engagement I was in Holland and we could only write to each other. A letter like that could take up to a month.’

I found that wildly romantic.

How old were you then, grandma?

‘I was just 19 when I got married. It wasn’t very nice, really. My uncle Cees played grandpa, but of course I didn’t marry him so he held a glove. The glove was actually grandpa. Do you see?’ When I heard that, I laughed out loud and my grandma laughed too. We sat there sobbing with laughter. So funny, getting married to a glove.

 

'Why didn't Grandpa come home to marry you Grandma?'

'Oh dear, that was much too far away. You had to take a boat, the journey would take weeks. We couldn't afford that either, such a long journey.’

‘But couldn't you go to grandpa's and get married there?’

‘Heavens no. You couldn't just leave your home to be with your boyfriend. It wasn’t considered proper. You had to get married first. That was the only way for my parents to be sure that I would be looked after.’

I looked at my grandmother in admiration. What an enormous adventure. Marrying someone you could only write to and then travelling by boat for weeks on end to a country on the other side of the world. Away from your mother, away from your friends.

 

There were a lot of photos of my father as a baby, a toddler and a pre-schooler. Being held by the hand by the ‘babu’ (nanny), on grandpa's lap, between grandma and grandpa on the rattan sofa on the veranda. A veranda. They were black-and-white photos, but that veranda gave color to my imagination. When I grew up, I wanted a veranda too.

‘Then you have to go and live in a warm country', my grandma said. ‘The Netherlands are too gloomy for such a long roof. The rooms would be darkened all day. Grandma had too much common sense to my mind. I would find a solution somehow, but there would be a veranda.

 

Dad with his little sister on his lap. Poor little Pingie. She would only live to be four years old. I could stare for hours at that little portrait of my aunt who would never grow up. Such a thing is incomprehensible to a ten year old. Grandma would put her hands in her lap and stay silent. 

 

Later, I dared to ask about Pingie once, when I was about sixteen: 'How do you get over it, Grandma? To lose a child?'

And grandma said: 'The camp was so awful. I was actually glad that she was freed from the horrors. I didn't have to worry about her anymore. Fear for your children,' and she was silent for a moment, 'fear for your children is the worst thing.’

She stared in front of her and at that moment she no longer seemed to be talking to me. ‘It was ... a relief when it was finally over,' she said softly to herself. I never dared to ask again. It wasn’t until much later, when I was a mother, that I sometimes felt so much anxiety that I thought I would collapse. Only then did I understand that if it would get any worse, if the despair gets to be so great that you no longer believe in a solution, as it must have been for my grandmother in that horrible camp, death can actually be a salvation. Even if it is your child.

 

In the last year of the war, my grandfather worked in the sickbay of a camp in Fukuoka, only a hundred miles from Nagasaki. There, the prisoners of war slaved away in mines. After Japan's capitulation, grandpa was taken to Java by an American navy ship, along with thousands of other prisoners of war. My grandfather never talked about what he must have seen, when he was brought from the camp to the ship through the ruins of Nagasaki.

 

On board the naval vessel, they were issued with uniforms that hung loosely around their fleshless bones. Grandpa's belt from those days was also kept in the attic and as children we couldn’t believe that it could ever have fitted around his waist.

On Borneo, these soldiers, who had just been liberated from hell, were told that they were still serving in the Royal Dutch East Indies Army (KNIL) and that they weren’t free to go and do as they pleased. My grandfather almost immediately was put to work in the hospital in Balik Papan. ‘That was really his salvation,' said grandma, 'that he could go back to work right away.’

Nowadays, I rack my brain over this. Over that casual remark by my grandma: ‘Luckily, grandpa could go back to work right away.’ She had seen other young boys who didn’t have a clue what to do with themselves. Aimlessly hanging round in their uniforms until the Dutch government finally decided to let them go. And then what? Many of them had yet to start their education. The government gave them a highschool diploma, the only band-aid they got for over three years of cruel abuse, and then it was up to the young man what he did with it. I have often wondered at what point things become too much for a person. Why did those people have such resilience after that inhumane treatment, whereas these days you get mental help if someone has tried to break into your house? Where is that human endurance stored?

 

Through the Red Cross, my grandmother and grandfather found each other again. My father was almost 13 at the time. Pingie had been dead for almost three years. Grandpa knew nothing until he saw his family again. No message from the Red Cross ever got past the Japanese guards.

I never knew the exact reason for them to decide to return to the Netherlands. Papa said: 'I think they realised even then that things would never be the same again.

Now, being old and mentally exhausted, I think he meant that the country no longer represented happiness, but reminded them of hell. And who wouldn't want to leave hell?

 

In Holland, in the town of X, my father went to school. Grandpa simply brought him to the HBS, which had just opened its doors again. He had to work out for himself how he would manage that, after having been deprived of education for more than four years.  

How he managed, I do not know. We as children were always told how very clever daddy was to have passed the HBS, followed by: 'So you see. You can achieve anything if only you want to'. And that last statement was the law set in stone in our family. There was no other truth. When I had to repeat a year at secondary school and did just as badly the second time in the same class, my father told me that he would allow me until the age of twenty-one to get a diploma. If I failed, I could look for work as a cashier employee at the Hema, for all he cared. For him, that was the most terrifying prospect he could put to his children. In those days, the minimum wage was less then 300 guilders a month, so my father had every reason to worry. I did not even know what the words ‘minimum wage’ meant.

 

My mother grew up in the Netherlands, in a strict Catholic family. I don't really know anything about her family. I never knew my mother's father and mother. Her parents were strongly opposed to her marrying my father, because his relatives in the Netherlands had joined the NSB during the war. They will have thought that could only mean there must be something wrong with the whole family. In 1956, the war wounds were still too fresh, or simply too deep to heal for my father's new parents-in-law. My mother was told never to come home again. 

 

I hardly knew my uncles and aunts on my mother’s side. Actually, most of them emigrated after the war. They went to Canada, South Africa and the United States. For them, the same probably applied as for my grandparents. They were determined to start again somewhere else and once again try to be happy, despite all the hardships they had had to endure in their young lives.

A few things I do know, for example that my mother's mother was sent to work in an office at fourteen and had to hand in her meagre earnings to her parents. Apart from the menacing prospect of a life as a cashier employee, these were the small educational facts that were passed on to us children, when we didn't feel like doing our homework.

 

My mother’s mother also married young, like my other grandmother, and had eight children, one of whom did not survive the war. 

My mother was the youngest of the family. As a little girl, she had watched things from a distance and she suffered the least from the war.

After the war she went to the all-girls secondary school, the MMS. Before they left to other continents, her brothers and sisters had instilled in her the conviction that as a woman you had to be able to earn your own living. Times had changed. It was no longer taken for granted that if a woman got married, her husband was going to provide for her.

 

But despite of the fact that the war had seemed to overturn all relations for a while, some things stayed the same. Women were still subordinate to men. Women were still legally incompetent, like children, and that law wasn’t changed until 1957. When a woman got married, she was fired. A married woman was supposed to take care of her family. She wasn’t even allowed to start a business or set up a foundation without her husband's consent. In 1950, only 2% of married women were working in paid employment. My mother, too, disappeared from working life when she married my father, despite all the invocations of her brothers and sisters. She looked after her husband and children. She was also a member of the Catholic Women's Guild (KVG), did all kinds of volunteer work and poured coffee in the church on Sundays after mass.

 

 Translation: B.Ton