Darkness in Paradise: Memories of Onno Vandemmeltraadt from His Youth in Indonesia During Wwii

By Gloria VanDemmeltraadt

Onno VanDemmeltraadt was born in the Dutch East Indies and was six years old when the Japanese occupation of World War II began. In Darkness in Paradise, author Gloria VanDemmeltraadtOnnos wifetells her husbands story from the unique view of a young boy in the midst of darkness in his paradise.

In this memoir, Gloria has captured both the horrors and humor of her husbands early life in war-ravaged Indonesia. This recollection shares memories of fierce Japanese soldiers bursting into his familys home, and later having one of them teach him to fish. Visions, such as Onnos family running down the street with mattresses covering their heads as bullets fly by them, are stark. The stories tell the pains of war, but are filled with hope. Inspiring both tears and laughter throughout, Darkness in Paradise reveals layers of human compassion during the awful times of World War II.

Praise for Darkness in Paradise

What a wonderful first-person read. Onno has such a magnificent recall of facts I felt like I was there with him during many of his adventures. Told from a childs point of view, its about a country affected by WWII, and the subsequent Japanese occupation of Indonesia. You get a sense of the diverse cultures of Indonesia, both the native inhabitants as well as the mix of people from Holland who immigrated there. The many transitions of place, culture, and age are all brought to life.

Connie Anderson, Author, When Polio Came Home

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Feb 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781480815407

Gloria VanDemmeltraadt

Gloria Jane Tyler Shigley Cannon VanDemmeltraadt is a self-described “Gray-haired grandma, who’s survived a number of life-style extremes and still manages to ride the bumps and smile through it all.” She describes memories like sifting flour. The original product is one thing, but when it is sifted or strained through a screen it falls below in a new form. Memories are sifted through the minds of everyone who shares the same event, and the resulting product is changed forever. “Musing and Munching” is a unique collection of memories and menus that VanDemmeltraadt has put together to share stories of her life. She overlaps these stories with a wide variety of foods and recipes that have followed her diverse life path. As the stories unfold, readers will both laugh and cry and mouths will water. This charming volume will find its way to many a kitchen shelf where precious cookbooks are saved. VanDemmeltraadt lives and cooks in Minnesota with her husband, Onno.

Book preview

DARKNESS

in PARADISE

Memories of Onno VanDemmeltraadt

From His Youth in Indonesia During WWII

Gloria VanDemmeltraadt

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Copyright © 2015 Gloria VanDemmeltraadt.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Editing and proofreading by Charlene Roemhildt, Meg Corrigan, and Connie Anderson

Cover photo by Gloria VanDemmeltraadt

Back cover photo of Gloria and Onno: Used with permission from ©Lifetouch, Inc.

Archway Publishing

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.archwaypublishing.com

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4808-1539-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-1540-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015901862

Archway Publishing rev. date: 02/11/2015

Contents

Maps

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1 My personal story

Chapter 2 The War

Chapter 3 The Bersiap

Chapter 4 Fleeing to Holland

Chapter 5 God, the Queen, and Holland

Chapter 6 Return to Indonesia

Chapter 7 The Spirit World

Chapter 8 The End and the Beginning

Epilogue

Glossary

References

About the Author

Maps

FigAIndonesiamap.tifFigBJavamap.tif

Reproduced with permission from the Lonely Planet website

www.lonelyplanet.com © 2014 Lonely Planet.

Preface

How and why this story came about

There have been thousands of books and articles written about World War II and its worldwide effects. However, in the U.S. particularly, I’ve learned there isn’t much information about Indonesia in the history books. At my family’s urging, I decided to capture my own memories of growing up in Indonesia during the war, and of living in Holland as well.

Many documents portray the WWII years as only gloom and doom, and with no question it was a terrible period of hardship and suffering for my family and for millions of others. I want to also share memories of a happy childhood in beautiful and lush surroundings in the country of my birth. The Dutch East Indies, as it was known at that time, was paradise to me.

For the most part, my memories are upbeat and happy because that is my nature, which I believe I inherited from my father. Even under dire circumstances I have always found, as he did, there is something to laugh about as well as to learn from. The experiences and lessons learned, and more so the caring environment provided by loving parents, brother, aunts, uncles, and cousins, helped instill in me a confident and optimistic view for a happy future.

Above all else, as demonstrated by my mother, there was unwavering faith in a loving God’s protection and guidance, which continues to bring me peace.

My heartfelt gratitude goes out to my wife Gloria. Without her talent, tenacity, and insistence to put my story on paper, it would never have happened. Thank you Gloria, for helping me put my memories in writing.

Thank you to my children, Mark and Jennifer, for your motivation and support, and also to my extended family for blessing further chapters in my life. These chapters begin where this story ends, with my move to the United States in 1961 along with my first wife Marjanne, who passed away in 2003. Perhaps one day these chapters will be documented as well.

I fully understand that everyone has different memories of the same events, depending on how we see the world. This story is told from my perspective, as truthfully and clearly as I can make it. If it is different from the memories of others who lived the same events, I can only say that I hope to hear your version someday.

Throughout the document, some names have been changed because it is not possible to locate descendants of some of the people whose stories I tell. All of the stories are vital to the collective whole, and if some names are not familiar to those who shared my past, there is a reason.

May you enjoy this story as much as I have enjoyed bringing it to you, and may God continue to bless us all.

Onno VanDemmeltraadt

Introduction

Early history of my fatherland

As early as the 14th and 15th centuries, explorers from different nations traveled the world in search of new territories to exploit for trading purposes. Trading companies in the Netherlands focused their attention primarily on the Far East. Southeast of Malaysia, west of the nation of Papua New Guinea, northwest of Australia, and bordered by the Indian Ocean in the west and the Pacific in the east, they discovered an enormous tropical island paradise. It was the world’s largest archipelagic collection of isles, consisting of 18,110 islands rich in oil, tin, copra (the dried kernel of the coconut used to extract coconut oil) and spices. The region also was an important trade route to China, thriving in trade of spices. Initially, the Dutch traders settled only on Java, the most densely populated island. Over the centuries, they increased their influence, establishing an army and gradually placing the whole archipelago under its authority. They called the new colony The Dutch East Indies.¹

Prior to 1800, the VOC*, the Dutch trading company, dealt mainly in sugar and tea. It had plantations all around the islands that are now known as Indonesia, and had a great deal of power in the country. The VOC, however, went bankrupt in 1800 and ceased to exist. There was French involvement at this time, too, when Napoleon occupied the Netherlands, and even under the French, the Dutch continued to colonize the Dutch East Indies.

*From Wikipedia®, The Dutch East India Company (Dutch: Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC, United East India Company) was a chartered company established in 1602, when the States-General of the Netherlands granted it a 21-year monopoly to carry out colonial activities in Asia. It is often considered to have been the first multinational corporation in the world and it was the first company to issue stock. It was also arguably the first megacorporation, possessing quasi-governmental powers, including the ability to raise an army (of conscripted soldiers, not forced) to wage war, imprison and execute convicts, negotiate treaties, coin money, and establish colonies.

Statistically, the VOC eclipsed all of its rivals in the Asia trade. Between 1602 and 1796 the VOC sent almost a million Europeans to work in the Asia trade on 4,785 ships, and netted for their efforts more than 2.5 million tons of Asian trade goods. By contrast, the rest of Europe combined sent only 882,000 people from 1500 to 1795, and the fleet of the English (later British) East India Company, the VOC’s nearest competitor, was a distant second to its total traffic with 2,690 ships and a mere one-fifth the tonnage of goods carried by the VOC. The VOC enjoyed huge profits from its spice monopoly through most of the 17th century.

After the VOC, there eventually came another Dutch company, called HVA, which stood for Handelsverengiging Amsterdam. This trading company was established in 1873. The HVA was instrumental in the Dutch East Indies in cultivation of sugar cane, coffee, cassava and sisal. It was once one of the largest colonial companies in the world, and in 1928 they had 36 companies and 170,000 workers in the Dutch East Indies.

The spice trade was a large part of the activities of both the VOC and the HVA, as there are specific spices that grow on certain islands that are valuable all over the world. This led to the early name of The Spice Islands, by which the entire area was once known. For example, cloves, nutmeg, and mace grow only on a few islands in Indonesia. There are also cinnamon, turmeric, vanilla, ginger, and cardamom, which is in the ginger family, plus of course, the sugar, coffee, and tea plantations on Java, Sumatra, Borneo, Bali, and other islands. In all, there are more than 18,000 islands, thousands of them small and uninhabited, which make up the whole of what is now Indonesia.

Having been set up in 1602, to profit from the Malukan spice trade, in 1619 the VOC established a capital in the port city of Jayakarta and changed the city name to Batavia (now Jakarta). Over the next two centuries the company acquired additional ports as trading bases and safeguarded their interests by taking over surrounding territory. It remained an important trading concern and paid shareholders an 18 percent annual dividend for almost 200 years.

Weighed down by corruption in the late 17th century, the company went bankrupt and was formally dissolved in 1800, its possessions and the debt being taken over by the government of the Dutch Batavian Republic. The VOC’s territories became the Dutch East Indies and were expanded over the course of the 19th century to include the whole of the Indonesian archipelago, and in the 20th century would form the Independent Republic of Indonesia.

The independence which is alluded to was claimed in August 1945, but was not official until 1949. Chapter 3, The Bersiap, explains this further.

Developing the land

Originally, only the ports or cities in the Dutch East Indies close to the sea were developed and colonized by the Dutch government to carry on its spice trade. Jakarta was one of the first ports on the west side of the island of Java, and Surabaya on the east. Eventually the Dutch saw the need to open the backlands of the islands, and for that they needed to go into the wilderness and build roads. This was a huge move forward in developing the country. According to Wikipedia®, the Dutch East Indies colonial government, from 1810 to 1825, designed and built the De Groote Postweg, or Great Post Road stretching 1,000 kilometers (about 622 miles) from west of Jakarta to East Java near Surabaya on the eastern coast.

This was an enormous undertaking, with the mountains, volcanoes, and jungles all through the island. Surabaya is at sea level and is hot and humid, but farther up in the mountains it is cooler and more bearable, so the road-building might have been a little easier. This is a good area for the plantations, and the road opened up possibilities for plantations which produced sugar, coffee, tobacco, and tea, as well as spice plantations.

The main representative of the Dutch government in Indonesia was called the Governor General, and he was the head of the business or organization which took over after the demise of the VOC.

As Dutch school children in the Dutch East Indies we were taught that this colonial government was wonderful and they built the road that opened up the interior of Java, and accomplished all sorts of advances for the country. In reality, these people were brutal. For example, they used local people from the villages to build the road along the way. Here is my understanding of how it came about:

The bosses of the project would go to a village and say to the village mayor, Assign 15 or 20 men to do the work, and your responsibility is to build the road from this point to that point. They’d go to the next village and tell them the same thing. Of course, the villagers were not accustomed to building roads; their daily routine was planting rice and making a living for their families. There was probably a little training involved, but soon the diplomats went away and left the workers to build the road.

The diplomats came back in a couple of months to see the people had accomplished only a minor percentage of the work to be done. The bosses listened to the people’s excuses of so and so getting sick, or having too much to do, or whatever. The bosses then told them to find others who were not sick or too busy and have them do the work. In addition they said, Because you didn’t get the work done, now you have to do an extra half mile.

When the bosses came back after another three months, the people were only 50 percent done with the original amount of the work. They had more excuses that the children had been sick, there was not enough food, and so on. So the leader of the bosses said to his sergeant, See that high tree over there? Go get the mayor of the village and hang the man.

The sergeant did what he was told and there was a public hanging of the mayor. Then the leader turned in his saddle to the man who was second in command of the village. He said to him, Now you are the mayor of the village. It is your responsibility to complete the work which has been assigned from here to there, plus you have another half mile.

Not surprisingly, three months later the work was done.

Ultimately, this helped all of the people in opening the country for better use of the land, but at great cost. While the work got done, it was done in a brutal way.

Java is only one of more than 18,000 islands of Indonesia, but it was the first to be colonized and developed. For reasons unknown to me, the Javanese through the ages have been the dominant class among the natives. Eventually, many or most of the other islands were colonized in a similar way. Sumatra, for example, is much larger than Java, but it was colonized later.

All of the native people in Indonesia are extremely superstitious and as such, seem to be easily led. The Javanese were more advanced than other tribes in their culture and legends, and they became the most powerful and influential. However, they, too, seemed to easily succumb to the influence of Europeans.

Companies and businesses like sugar and spice plantations were usually led by Dutch or European men. In the 1700s, the VOC military had been sent to colonize the area, establish law and order, and launch local government. Eventually, these men married or lived with local women and had children.

Dutch Names

Dutch family surnames were not required until after Napoleon annexed the Netherlands in 1811.² Napoleon Bonaparte became the leader of France after the revolution at the end of the 1700s, and conquered half of Europe as well, including Holland in the early 1800s. Along the way, Napoleon decided all people needed to be registered, and in order to do that everyone had to have a surname. In those days, only nobility or upper class people had two names, and most common people went by only one.

Not everyone was happy about having to come up with a surname now that they were forced to do it. People determined that most any name would do, and they often named themselves according to their trade or profession, like Baker, Timmerman (which means carpenter), or Boer (farmer). They also used the name of their town. After that came adding the term ‘son’ to the name to indicate the next generation, like Bakerson. Also, many people thought the naming thing was not serious or permanent, and they named themselves humorous names like nicknames.

A man I knew from Zandvoort, a village in Holland, had a name that had carried on through generations, and when I was a young boy, this man named Penis drove a cart through the city selling fruit-ice, like Popsicles, with his name prominently displayed on his cart. This was enough to give all of us young boys fits of giggles whenever we saw him.

The name VanDemmeltraadt originally came from Germany. My family has traced it back to the 1700s. The name came from a town called Demmel in Germany which was close to the Dutch border. Van means from or of and I know the city council is called Raad, and one of the first van Demmeltraadts was a member of the city council in Amsterdam. I think that’s how the name developed, but it all gets pretty confusing. At first the van was considered not important and it wasn’t capitalized, and was also separated by a space from Demmeltraadt. For example, in one of my father’s many photographs of motorcycle racing, he had a big D on his helmet, which shows that the van was not an important part of his name. Actually, in Holland the name is still spelled that way. The name eventually became Americanized, when I decided to capitalize the van, attach it to the rest of the name and it became VanDemmeltraadt. This happened after my U.S. naturalization in 1967.

The Netherlands/Holland

To avoid confusion throughout this narrative, it is important to clarify use of the terms Netherlands and Holland. While the formal name of the country is the Netherlands, most Dutch people and many others refer to the whole country as Holland (even the country’s website is called Holland.com). The Netherlands is a country comprised of 12 provinces, two of which are North Holland and South Holland. The majority of the population of the country lives in these two provinces and this may have contributed to the popularity of calling the country Holland. In any case, it should be noted when I mention Holland in this document, I am referring to the Netherlands.

My family’s roots

My grandfather, Pieter Antonie van Demmeltraadt, was full Dutch. He was born in Utrecht, Holland, in the 1870s before the family moved to Amsterdam. His father was an alcoholic and the man abused his wife. When young Pieter was 17 he could stand it no more, and one day when his father was beating his mother, he grabbed the man and threw him down the steps. After that he was thrown out of the house. With nothing else to do, he signed up for the army of the Dutch colony in the East Indies. Young men got a certain amount of money to sign up for this service, so it was a way for them to support themselves, and it was also quite exciting and a little glamorous for them in the beginning.

Yes, the Dutch and other Europeans went directly to the Dutch East Indies to colonize the area and serve in the army. However, getting there was not as direct as one might think. It was a long journey from the Netherlands to the Dutch East Indies, and with no modern transportation, the only way to get there was to go by ship around the Cape of Good Hope, in South Africa. There was no Suez Canal in those days.

It was a terribly long ocean voyage and they ran out of food and good water and people got sick from lack of vitamins and vegetables and fruits. The journey took many months and any glamour there was in the beginning about the trip wore off quickly.

As a result of the tortuous voyage, the Dutch made settlements in South Africa to provide fresh food and provisions for the ships so they could continue their journey. These settlements grew and were colonies of the Dutch as far back as the 1600s until around 1800 when the South African colonies were wrested away by the British.

As the VOC grew in the Dutch East Indies,