Tempo Dulu

By Annick M. Doeff

This book is a diary of the events in Indonesia at the beginning of World War II as seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old Dutch girl. It describes events not much talked or studied about when dealing with WWII. There are many stories and studies that deal with the German concentration camps and the Holocaust in Europe. This is a story of the other concentration camps across the Far East and specifically the occupation by the Japanese of the Dutch East Indies. The author describes her experiences leading up to her incarceration in some of these concentration camps as well as her relationships with her family and friends .The period covered is between 1941 and 1945. It is a moving story, akin to The Diary of Anne Frank that took place in Holland, but in this case, the story is set in the Dutch East Indies. It is remarkable in its vivid description of the events and in the sharpness of her memories that took place some sixty years ago.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Feb 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9781466915008

Book preview

Contents

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

EPILOGUE

GLOSSARY

Asie, Asie, Asie,

Vieux pays merveilleux des contes de nourrice

Où dort la fantaisie comme une impératrice

En sa forêt tout emplie de mystère.

—Tristan LeClère

Asia, Asia, Asia.

Marvelous old land of fairy tales

Where fantasy sleeps like an empress

In her forest full of mystery.

CHAPTER I

An Asian Childhood

Tarakan, 1935

Dayaks, their gaze riveted on the dense drooping foliage around them, creep silently under the heavy Borneo jungle canopy. They inch their way forward, step by laborious step, swinging each leg slightly around before putting it on the soft, leaf-composted forest floor. Anything that might make a noise, dead twigs or dried fallen fruit, they carefully avoid lest they scare away their evening meal. Experienced hunters, their presence goes unnoticed by the jungle creatures below and the birds above, all dozing peacefully in the midday heat.

It is the best time of day for hunting and the Dayaks, the muscles on their bare shoulders in taut anticipation, carry their spears in their hands ready for use in a split-second moment. Boar’s tusks hang from strings around their necks, amulets for hunting success. Around their waists hang the proud trophies of inter-tribal warfare: shrunken, leathery-looking human heads with a thick mop of hair still attached to them. The hair cushions sound when the heads gently sway with each step the Dayaks make.

Suddenly, the jungle canopy springs to life. Birds flap their wings frantically as they swoosh from branch to branch. Like trumpet blasts, their raucous vocalizations announce a strange occurrence. A small boy, maybe six or seven years old, appears out from nowhere and hails the Dayaks. They stop in their tracks at the sight of this light-skinned creature the likes of which they have never encountered before.

Hello there, the boy says in Dutch, my name is Pim and I am lost. Can you help me?

Pim is my older brother and our family lived on Tarakan, a small island near the northeast coast of Borneo. Until 1948, it was part of the Dutch colonial empire known then as the Dutch East Indies but now called Indonesia. My father, a mining engineer with the Batavian Oil Company, a subsidiary of Royal Dutch, was stationed on oil-rich Tarakan where I was born among the Dayaks, the indigenous tribes of Kalimantan.

Although the Dayaks by then were weaned from their nasty headhunting habit, they continued to be associated with this practice in my imagination long after my family moved to Sumatra when I was four. Old sepia-colored photos show that in Tarakan we lived in a fairly large house on stilts. The reason for this I never knew. We didn’t live near the beach nor had livestock to keep safe. One picture taken in front of this house shows two dark skinned female servants clad in the traditional garb of the time, a sarong and kebaya (a white long sleeved blouse).

One servant cradles a baby, her dark skin accentuating the lightness of mine, while the other holds the hands of my brother, Pim, and my older sister, Eveline. I’d like to think that these maids picked me up when I cried and walked around patting my back and softly crooning to me when my mother wasn’t around.

I know that the White wisdom of the day dictated that one should let a baby cry lest it becomes spoiled; that crying was good lung exercise. Did the maids follow their own instincts as a way to silently rebel at the imposition of White ways, ways so alien to their own? I hope so since the maids look solemn, as if the responsibility for three white children entrusted to their care weighs on them.

Despite our early departure, the Dayaks of Tarakan skulked around in my imagination from early on and were as vivid as if they danced in front of my eyes.

It was the Dayaks who made Pim a hero in my eyes. Family legend had it that Pim (nickname for William), then maybe seven years old, wandered into the jungle one day and disappeared. Night fell. A search group was sent out but came back without him. As I grew older, the legend came to life as I imagined my brother surrounded by fierce-looking Dayaks clad only in skimpy loin-cloths, their faces painted in white and ochre and their noses pierced by a porcupine’s quill, no doubt a palimpsest of the many photos from all parts of the colonies which I must have seen. As time went on, the various versions of Pim’s escapades became more and more embellished, fanning my imagination. I became convinced that my brave brother unflinchingly faced those Dayaks, long spears ready to exercise what they were wont to do when facing their enemy. With all the charm he had, and he had a lot of it, he managed to persuade them not to behead him. Instead, I imagined, they took him to their Dayak village where indeed he was finally found safe and sound. Not only was he none the worse for this experience but, according to family legend, was actually loathe to leave his newfound tribal family.

I have no idea how long he was actually lost but however long or short it may have been, it was enough to make him my childhood idol whose word was gospel. All extracurricular knowledge came from him, which could make me tingle with excitement or anticipation, force me to reject what I firmly believed or put me in an anguished despair. As we grew up, his often variable but always nonchalant rendering of what had transpired only fueled my admiration.

One afternoon, when Pim and I were shooting marbles in a sandy patch, he suddenly stopped. Peering intently at the sand, he bellowed, come look what the marbles drew! Surveying the crisscrossed trajectories of the marbles’ paths, I was dumbfounded.

What do you mean? I don’t see any picture.

Can’t you see? It looks just like a longhouse.

A what?

A longhouse, you dumbbell, is a Dayak house where they all live together. Don’t you remember that I stayed with the Dayaks for a while?

Did I ever but his insult deserved a retort. Didn’t you tell me you slept outside with them?

Ah well, that was just for the first night. After that I slept in their longhouse.

Putting wounded pride aside, I now saw a chance to learn more about his legendary adventure. Boy, you must have been scared to death when you saw those head hunters.

Nope, not a bit, he replied, shrugging his shoulders. I was lost in the jungle and glad to see them. I was lucky, too, since they were hunting and could easily have mistaken me for an animal. Hey, I could have been roasting on a spit and gobbled up. Can you imagine that? You’d never have known me.

Poking me in the ribs, he laughed uproariously at his own joke, then continued his tale. When the Dayaks spotted me, they surrounded me and stared at me for a long time as if I’d fallen from the sky. They started to touch my face and my hair then fingered my clothes, my shoes and my socks. It felt a bit weird at first but then I figured that they had never seen a kid like me so I started to laugh and they started to laugh, sort of. He imitated their snorting laughter that made us both double up with laughter ourselves.

What happened then?

The Dayaks took me to their village where everyone came out to stare at me. I tried to talk with the kids, but they squealed and ran away. What they were afraid of beats me. Maybe they were afraid that I would behead them?

Hiccupping with laughter at his own joke, he continued spinning a tale that I believed as if it were a pronouncement from the oracle at Delphi. The Dayaks made a big bonfire and roasted some meat on sticks.

What kind of meat?

I have no idea and didn’t care. I was hungry and it tasted good.

What did you do then?

I went to sleep outside with two men. It was so dark, you couldn’t see two fingers in front of your eyes, and all kinds of weird noises came out of the jungle.

My question reflected what was my most feared animal at that time. Were they tigers?

Maybe.

You must have been so scared! I would’ve been.

With disdain coating his voice, he spat out, Bah, that’s because you’re a girl and a knucklehead. Why should I have been scared? Remember, I was with Dayaks. Do you think they are afraid of the dark or of the jungle?

In time, the Dayaks retreated from the realm of my imagination, but not before also endowing Pim with the mantle of authority. Whatever he told me, I believed without question and I did whatever he asked me to do as the price not only for his acceptance, but to become one of his gang of friends of which he seemed to be the leader.

When I was about four, we moved to South Sumatra, to Pladju, where I grew up. Sumatra is the fifth largest island in the world and is bisected by the Bukit Barisan, a massive mountain range dotted with more than ninety volcanoes from the northwest to the southeast.

Pladju was a small, gated company town and my baby sister, Henriette Elisabeth—Yettie for short—joined our family there. Built near a refinery and on the banks of the Musi river, Pladju resembled an American suburb with its tile roofed, spacious bungalows and neatly manicured lawns and gardens. It had its own hospital and general store, as well as a company-subsidized elementary school and a country club with a large swimming pool, tennis courts and a golf course outside the compound.

Although the town itself was a completely Dutch enclave, its surroundings were not. Our river was nothing like the rivers in Holland. The Musi, a broad, mud-colored expanse of water, meandered past desas (native villages), kampungs (native towns) and sawahs (rice fields), under the shadow of the massive mountain range. Flowing past native villages with dirt roads, town quarters with minarets, and irrigated rice fields, it went from the Strait of Banka to the east, past Palembang, the provincial capital of South Sumatra, to then disappear into the hinterlands of the west. A true lifeline linking east to west, the Musi swarmed with boats of every type and size, from sleek sampans and squat houseboats to motor lounges, tankers and small cargo ships. As if they had gone amok, boats ran helter-skelter in all directions, curving and swaying around each other and leaving wakes like jet streams in the sky of a busy airport.

I firmly believed that crocodiles lurked beneath the Musi’s opaque brown surface ready to pounce on humans if given a chance. Didn’t the natives call a man who had gone amok and killed or maimed someone a buaya to indicate he was as dangerous as a crocodile?

Despite its fearsome denizens and its color, the Musi coursed through my childhood like a luminous stream. Adventures, treasures, religion and pageantry are all associated with this river. One adventure started on an ordinary walk along the Musi’s banks. On a weekend afternoon when the sun was at its zenith, Pim invited me to come along with his friends to see a captured crocodile. At first I demurred.

"What if it gets loose?

Don’t be such a lafaard. Besides, he may be dead already when we arrive. You know how the inlanders love to tease and poke a captured animal that is all trussed up. Lafaard meant coward. We called the native people inlanders.

Reluctantly I agreed to come along, walking as far away from the water’s edge as I could in case an unfettered crocodile was eyeing me. Debris baking in the sun lined the water’s edge, smelling like fermented vegetation. Maybe even a croc can’t abide that smell and will stay under the water’s surface, was a thought that eased my lingering fear.

I never got to see that fearsome beast, either dead or alive though, because the Musi was about to reveal relics of generations past that lay buried along its shores, waiting to be discovered, to be set free like ghosts trapped in bygone times.

Hey, Pim’s friend Frans yelled. I found a piece of marble with some Dutch letters on it. Come and have a look.

We did, and found several other ones that looked as if they belonged to a monument of sorts. We solved the riddle of the lettered marble pieces when Peter yelled, I know what they are. They’re pieces of a grave stone.

As proof, he showed the cross on the one he had just dug up. The fragments of broken gravestones sticking out of the mud made us look for a cemetery. Had the waters of the Musi swallowed it up? Had headstones from a cemetery upstream somehow fallen or been thrown into the river where they broke up and drifted down, nestling at various places on the way down stream? Neither the river nor the stones gave us a clue but we spun elaborate tales of what might have happened, each more fantastical than the other.

For days, we dug up fragments, some with and others without letters. They were like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that we unsuccessfully tried to fit together in hopes of reconstructing names and dates. Who were they? Where did they come from? Where were they born or where did they live and die? We imagined explorers sailing down the river in search of riches but meeting a premature end at the jaws of crocodiles and tigers. That they could have died of disease simply didn’t enter our imaginations, which were fed by fanciful stories of early colonial times.

No matter how many fragments we dug up, they didn’t reveal their secret until one lucky afternoon, when an unusually large-lettered piece refused to yield to our efforts to dig it up. While rivulets of perspiration falling down our faces nearly blinded us, we frantically dug wider and deeper, oblivious to the fact that the water’s edge was getting closer. Like archeologists, we were propelled by the thrill of an imminent discovery.

Finally the contours of an intact gravestone appeared. With a single-minded effort to safeguard what we firmly believed was a priceless treasure, we carefully unearthed the heavy marble slab and managed to haul it to higher ground. Wiping off the mud, we discovered letters and dates—some clear, some eroded—appeared like messengers from another world. Stumbling upon King Tut’s grave couldn’t have given a bigger thrill than when we were able to decipher and reconstruct a name, a place and dates. The man whose tombstone we had found came to life, no longer stone but flesh and blood. Resurrected from his muddy grave where he had slept undisturbed for over a century, he also became our hero, outshining Flash Gordon and Ivanhoe combined. He also became our friend and we felt responsible for his welfare.

Darkness falls fast in the tropics. In our excitement, we had lost track of time. Leaving the tombstone where it rested was unthinkable, akin to abandoning a helpless foundling. With enormous effort, we hauled the heavy slab to Frans’ house which was the nearest. By now a dear and valued friend to us, the slab was anything but that to Frans’ mother, to whom we proudly showed it. To our great consternation, she reacted as if confronted by the devil incarnate.

She shrieked, Get that bloody thing out of our yard! Then she explained. You disturbed the spirit of a dead man. He will cast a spell on us and bring us misfortune if you don’t return it to his resting place.

Although puzzled, we were not intimidated by the woman’s woeful prediction since she was part Malay and, like them, very superstitious. With renewed effort, we hauled the heavy slab up from the ground again and went off in search of a more hospitable home for our friend. Alas, at the next house, we found the reception barely better. Though no words evoked evil spirits or other dire consequences, looks certainly did. We were thoroughly mystified.

They’re crazy. Pim muttered. Can’t they see what an incredible find this is? They should be so lucky to have found this treasure.

But it was a treasure only to us. Deflated and tired, we hauled what we considered a find of historical proportion back to the Musi’s more hospitable shores.

Don’t you worry now, Albert said to our new friend and hero. We’ll be back tomorrow and find you another place to rest. I promise.

A chorus of yes, we do too, was the parting prayer as we trudged to our respective homes.

It was long past the time we were supposed to be home. Pim and I dragged our feet through the streets of Pladju, knowing that a spanking awaited us. Pim, ever creative, came up with what I considered to be a brilliant and foolproof idea.

I know what to do, he said, trying to buoy my sagging spirits. Let’s put a book or a magazine in our pants so that we won’t feel a thing when Mama spanks us.

Cheered by the thought of circumventing a punishment we knew would sting, we ran home. Climbing through my bedroom window, a suitable buffer immediately caught my eye. A children’s Bible, the heaviest book in my collection, would be my salvation. It took effort and an extra pair of underpants before God’s word finally was sufficiently anchored to bestow its blessing upon me: a painless spanking. I waddled out of my room, my confidence in my brother’s brilliant idea ironclad. It shattered when my mother yanked my all too visible protection from my underpants and carelessly threw God’s word aside. The spanking remained in my memory as a double whammy. It stung but not nearly as much as my brother’s gloating.

I didn’t feel a thing. Not a thing.

With Yettie’s soft baby-doll pillow invisible in his pants, my hero started what I later recognized was his way of protecting himself by letting me be the guinea pig. When we went back the next day to visit our tombstone, the slab was gone. Our friend had slipped back into the oblivion from which we had resurrected him.

The highlight of every year came by way of the Musi also. On the fifth of December, Saint Nicholas or Sinterklaas as we called him sailed down the river having come all the way from Spain. He was accompanied by a bevy of Moor servants clad in the colorful puffed velvet breeches, shirts and plumed berets of sixteenth-century Spain. We called them zwarte Pieten, black Peters, who acted jolly and threw little ginger cookies at us with one hand, but waved birch rods with the other. They threateningly pointed to the haversacks carried over their shoulder in which you risked being transported to Spain if you’d seriously misbehaved.

The white-haired, bearded bishop, clad in full ecclesiastical splendor, looked otherworldly. A long red velvet cloak hung over his shoulder and the white-crossed miter on his head made him even more imposing. The lace edges of his embroidered shirtsleeves hung over his gloved hands, one of which held a tall crosier. Not only had he traveled all the way from Spain, he had traveled across the centuries. Medieval European pageantry invaded anew the conquered tropical lands where we children, both fearing and revering Sinterklaas, anxiously awaited his arrival each year.

I was five and a half when Pim saw fit to disabuse me of the very existence of this venerable saint who was as real to me as the angels who, I was told, protected me at night. A few days before his arrival, Pim, using his friends as reinforcement, casually declared, You know Niki, Sinterklaas really doesn’t exist. Isn’t that right boys?

Amid a chorus of yesses, Pim continued with this shattering piece of information.

Sinterklaas is bogus you know. It’s really Mr. van Alkmaar who dresses up like a bishop and pretends to be Sinterklaas.

Pim poked his friends in glee when he saw the expression on my face, relishing my confusion. She doesn’t believe me. She still believes he’s real and arrives from Spain. Can you imagine how long it would take him to get here? With a semblance of compassion he added, We really can’t blame Niki because she hasn’t had any geography yet.

To bolster his case, Pim confronted me with other facts that put in jeopardy the good saint’s existence. With doubt still clouding my face, he changed tactics. "Okay, if you don’t believe me, I’ll show you what to do so you’ll see that I’m right. When your turn comes and you stand in front of him, just yank at his beard. It will come off just