Digging for Dutch Roots

Okay, this one is going to get a little more personal. And maybe a tad long. If you’re looking for a travelogue, you may skip this post. But if you’ve ever wondered about missing pieces in your family background, you may find something of interest here. The past few months have thrust me deep into my family history -- and given me a unique window on a still little-discussed aspect of Dutch history.

As I mentioned in my very first post, I’m half Dutch – my mother was born in Indonesia, of Dutch parents. When I learned Dennis had won a Fulbright to come to Holland, I thought for a while about developing some sort of project for myself that would involve learning about my family background. An article, perhaps? Some sort of a memoir? But I rejected the idea. Frankly, I had insufficient motivation for what seemed like a difficult project.  Besides, I wanted to spend the time working on a novel.

But I was interested in meeting relatives, and thanks in part to an uncle who has been amazingly helpful in connecting me to family members – he even came over from Ottawa and threw a dinner in Scheveningen to introduce me and Dennis and the kids to family members (thank you, Anton!) – I have met a LOT of relatives. I mean a LOT. People I never heard of, and didn't know existed. Some who are distantly related to me, some not so distantly. I have met, for instance, two first cousins of my mother that even SHE has never met. And I attended a family reunion in Holten with a couple of dozen people who share my mother's maiden name. You can see in the photo that they flew the American flag in our honor (as well as the Canadian and Belgian flags, recognizing other Lovinks in attendance).

At a certain point, I began to wonder why my mother -- and indeed, her parents, my grandparents -- were so cut off from their Dutch family. In an earlier post, back in April, I mentioned Carla, whose sister Ingrid lived with my family for a year back in the 70s when my mother started med school and needed help with the kids. Ingrid and Carla are from my grandmother's side of the family. When my grandparents settled in Canada -- my grandfather was the Dutch ambassador to Canada at that time, and stayed on when he retired -- my grandmother held onto a few people. My grandfather apparently did not hold onto any.

My uncle has attributed this to "snobbishness." Antonius Hermanus Johannes Lovink, or Grootvader –that’s what we always called him -- was an important man. In the course of his career he served as the Dutch Ambassador to Russia, China, Australia and Canada, and in 1949 he served as the Queen's High Commissioner or Governor General in Indonesia, in charge of overseeing the transition from Dutch colony to independent nation. Is it possible he felt he had outgrown his roots? But he was not exactly from humble origins; his own father was minister of agriculture, industry and trade in the Dutch East Indies. The family that I have met here are, moreover, all people one would be proud to claim as relatives: talented, accomplished, educated, interesting. And very nice.

So what else? Over time,  I have been vaguely aware of an ongoing dialogue in the family concerning my grandfather's reputation. There was a critical biography of him published in the 90s that I cannot read as it is in Dutch. I've "Google translated" the summary that appears on the Internet and even with the bad translation I can understand that he is seen as a man who failed to change with the times, that he retained a paternalistic attitude and that he wanted too much to hold onto the Indonesian colony.

I remember how proud he was of what he accomplished in Indonesia in 1949 -- much blood had been shed there in the years following the war, but now that the Dutch had agreed to transfer power to the Indonesians, the transition was accomplished peacefully under his oversight. And I think he felt this contribution was under-appreciated.

There's more, and it has to do with his intelligence work prior to Pearl Harbor and the Japanese invasion of Indonesia, but I don't really have the skills (or maybe even the desire) to sort it all out. Over lunch this week a dear friend of my uncle's (a different uncle) handed me a document that showed me where I could find evidence on the internet that my grandfather tried to warn the Americans of a coming invasion by the Japanese but was disregarded. It's interesting, but not a line of inquiry that seems helpful to pursue at this point.

What seems to me perhaps the most likely answer to my question is connected to what I am gradually learning is the confused, ambivalent relationship the Dutch have with their colonial past in Indonesia. Trade – and then colonialism – made the Netherlands the wealthy, culturally rich country that it is, but of course the idea the colonials had that they had come to the tropics to “improve” the natives was gradually discredited over the past century. That was progress. But for anyone who was associated with the colonial enterprise, either personally or by family history, changing attitudes must have meant that a proud aspect of family history was now a shameful one.

I have to wonder, therefore, did my grandfather reject Holland, or did Holland reject him? He was nothing if not a dedicated colonial. He firmly believed that the work he did in the Dutch East Indies, the country of his birth, was for the good of the Indonesian people. This idea must have made him very unpopular in contemporary, postcolonial Holland. To the end of his life he was proud to be a Dutchman, but he never went back to the Netherlands. Perhaps he closed the door on his Dutch family and his sense of belonging in the Netherlands out of a sense of hurt, not one of pride. 

 Women in Tjideng Kamp

There’s another piece of the story that fascinates me. During the war, my mother was interned along with her mother and older brother in a Japanese concentration camp, from the ages of five to eight years old (1942-1945). The camp (one of many) was called Tjideng. My grandfather, who was at the time the director of Dutch intelligence for the region, had been pulled out of Djakarta just before the Japanese invasion, spirited away in the night on a plane to Australia. My grandmother had the option to go with him and to take the children as well, but chose to remain in Djakarta in solidarity with her compatriots who were stuck there. It was not long before the Japanese rounded up all the Dutch nationals and interned them in camps. The camps were not too bad at first, but over the course of three years they became a kind of hell on earth.

My mother doesn’t talk much about her years in the camp, and of course there is much she doesn’t remember because she was so small. When my grandmother talked about it, she used to tell us picaresque stories; adventures in pluck.  How your Granny fooled the Japs into thinking she didn’t have access to a radio. How she taught her children to sing, “We’re not hungry!” so that they would come to believe they were not (a strategy that apparently worked, but also got her in trouble with the other women in the camp who came to think she had a secret food source). How she stood up to the Japs in countless little ways and was punished with frequent head-shavings.

My mother, too, shared some stories. She told us about eating cherries picked out of a sewer, fashioning shoes from tin cans to protect her feet from the hot ground, and the audacious willpower of her older brother, who contracted polio shortly before the family’s internment and was miraculously cured (that’s another story) but who had to exercise relentlessly while they were in camp in order to bring his body back from the brink.

Nobody talked about things like the scars from cigarette burns on my grandmother’s legs –marks of torture, I think because she would not share information about her husband -- that became weeping ulcers in her old age when her legs were swollen from edema. Or about whether anybody was angry that my grandfather left them behind – or that my grandmother chose to stay behind.

My grandmother often told me that I should write her story, and in fact I conducted quite a few interviews with her, both on audiotape and on videotape, but I never really wanted to write the story. I think that’s because I never really thought I was getting the whole story. And to try to learn more felt like breaking a family taboo. Although I have always been fascinated by this piece of my mother’s history, I have also always had an implicit understanding that this was something you didn’t ask questions about.

Nor did you talk about it much. I don’t share this piece of my background with many people, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s my mother’s story, not mine, and I do not wish to invade her privacy. Second, it’s a real conversation-stopper. For some reason, it feels boastful. Telling people my mother survived a Japanese prison camp feels somehow like claiming some kind of extraordinary history for which I cannot take credit. Third, it takes a lot of explaining. This episode of history is not well-known in the States, and people often respond by saying something like, “I didn’t know your mother was Jewish?” (She is not).

The term “concentration camp” is a loaded one, and no matter how bad it was (one in eight of those interned by the Japanese in Indonesia died in the camps -- from disease, hunger, or exhaustion and occasionally from execution), I would never want to seem to be comparing it with going to Dachau or Auschwitz.
But most importantly, I have somehow internalized the idea that you don’t talk about this period. And my time here in Holland is starting to offer me a bit of context for this feeling.

The friend of my uncle that I lunched with yesterday was in the camp with my family. Until he turned 11 that is, when he was sent away from the women’s camp, where children stayed with their mothers, to the men’s camp -- a work camp. He doesn’t really remember it, he says – a prime example of the safety valve of repression at work. It must have been terrifying.

After the war, he said, there was another reason to forget about the camp: nobody in Holland wanted to hear about it. No matter how bad it was, it didn’t compare to the deprivations of life under German occupation. Hunger winter. People being executed or sent to death camps for working in the Resistance movement. Or, of course, for being Jewish.

Then, after a bloody revolution against which the Dutch fought bitterly, the Dutch East Indies were no more. There is a museum here in Amsterdam called the Verzetsmuseum (Resistance Museum), and it has a room with exhibits about the war and its aftermath in Indonesia. I knew the collection was there but only discovered it at the end of a visit back in January. I didn’t have time then to study it. But I went back there last week and took my time with the collection. It was an emotional experience for me.  Not only were there some fascinating exhibits about life in the colony before the war, from the perspective of Dutch colonials, native Indonesians and Dutch East Indians (people of mixed background), but lots of artifacts and accounts of life in the camps. There was a film reel from one of the camps that showed people cooking over open fires and men who looked skeletal (my own grandmother, 5’8” tall, weighed 90 pounds when she came out of the camp.)

There was also information about the period between Hiroshima, which ended the war with the Japanese, and the transfer of sovereignty from the Dutch East Indies to Indonesia in 1949. This account particularly stayed with me, from a young man who volunteered for the Dutch army, intending to help liberate the Dutch East Indies:

“We’d kick the Japanese out! Japan surrendered while I was still doing my military training. I went to the East Indies anyway, fully convinced that we were needed to restore order and peace. But after a while I began to have my doubts about our military presence there. I thought, darn, perhaps I’m fighting on the wrong side. When I returned to the Netherlands, our street had been decorated.  I always say: “We went as idealists, were received back home as heroes, but later went down in history as war criminals.”

I couldn’t help thinking about the American soldiers who went to Vietnam.

In the exhibit I also found a newsreel from 1949 about the transfer of sovereignty. How strange to see my grandfather, in his white suit, making a speech to a formal assemblage of officials in the palace where he lived, listening to a radio message from the queen, then signing official documents, bowing to the Indonesian representative, and boarding a plane. Following that, a shot of what looks like thousands upon thousands of people rejoicing in the streets as Sukarno comes to the palace.

Over the next decade, the Dutch were forced to repatriate, and hundreds of thousands of Dutch East Indians also chose to move to the Netherlands. I read in the museum guide that the Dutch government did their best to discourage this, as the Netherlands was impoverished following the war, and suffering a severe housing shortage. They were joined by many Moluccans, Indonesians who had supported the Netherlands and were viewed as traitors as their archipelago, the “Spice Islands,” was absorbed by the larger Indonesian nation.

It’s not hard to see how this turbulent time, with the overtaxing arrival in the Netherlands of hundreds of thousands of refugees from the former colony, led to very mixed feelings here in Holland.

By Googling around, I yesterday discovered a book that was published just 2 years ago, in English – by Ohio University Press, of all places – called “Silenced Voices: Uncovering a Family’s Colonial History in Indonesia,”by Inez Hollander.  In the introduction (which is available online), Hollander writes

When I started asking my mother about my grandfather’s colonial past, I met with resistance and denial . . . The fact that the whole subject seemed shrouded in silence made me all the more curious . . . I have come to see this denial on my family’s part as a form of self-censorship, which to some extent plays out in Dutch society as well. The average Dutch person will be able to tell you about the Second World War, the German occupation, the Holocaust, and the hunger winter of 1945, but when you ask him when the Dutch East Indies were liberated [from the Japanese], what exactly happened during the Dutch police actions, and when Indonesia gained independence, that person  may well draw a blank. Colonial history is no longer a standard part of the Dutch school curriculum, and yet almost everyone is familiar with the greatest Dutch novel, Max Havelaar (1860) by Multatuli. This book, which exposed the exploitative cultivation system of the colonial class and the corruption of the Javanese aristocracy, has left such a mark on the Dutch psyche that the consensus seems to be that most everything the Dutch did in Indonesia was evil, coercive, and politically incorrect.

I have ordered this book from Amazon.uk, and look forward eagerly to reading it. It seems I have unwittingly tapped into a strain of Dutch history that is painful, fascinating and still unresolved.