A Long Journey: From Concentration Camp to Freedom in America

By Hans H. Schallig

This is a story of a three-year-old caught up in the horrors of World War II. The "quiet time" in the Dutch East Indies, now called Indonesia, was replaced by the ravages of war and Japanese concentration camps. We spent three and a half years in three horrid camps. My mother was responsible for three children, including myself and Grandma. We ate any creeping or sliming creature trying to stay alive until we were saved by two atomic bombs.

The Indonesians declared independence on August 17, 1945. Our family was then endangered by murdering youth gangs who roamed the island of Java. We could not go back to our plantation. My father saw handwriting on the wall and immediately began the process to immigrate to the United States. This was very difficult since we were stateless. He was arrested and jailed for allegedly being a Nazi sympathizer without any due process.

We finally received the requisite papers to board the American President Lines ship The Jefferson. We sailed to the United States in March and arrived at San Pedro in April after a five-week journey at sea. Our family experienced culture shock when we finally came ashore.

My long journey is a story of all the funny things I did as I grew up, including adventures in a Dutch colony and learning to be an American. You will have fun when you read my exploits with successes and many surprising endings. We hope that you will appreciate the American dream I realized in my long journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781639615551

Book preview

A Quiet Country

My story begins by describing a tranquil period before World War II touched the Dutch East Indies in 1942. This archipelago has been a destination for centuries by many nations since it harbored vast resources ranging from spices to oil to precious metals. It saw migrations of people from India, Arabia, and Europe searching for fabled spices and ultimately to colonize it. It became a target for Japan as a source for fuel and metal as we shall see later.

A one-horse carriage clip clopped its way along a country road on Java. A dense jungle came right up to the edge of the unpaved road. Its canopy overhung it, almost forming a tunnel of twilight. It was dusk, and total darkness was to follow quickly as is usual in the tropics. It’s almost as if a curtain is drawn in front of the sun. The carriage stopped as the coachman climbed down to light the little kerosene lamps on each side. He climbed back onto the carriage, and they resumed their journey. My grandmother and grandfather were on the way back home from a party and business in town.

The carriage rocked suddenly when the horse reared and refused to go forward for no apparent reason. No matter what the driver attempted to do, it just would not go any further. My grandfather finally decided to return to town to stay overnight and attempt to resume the journey back to the estate the next morning. The next morning, they found out that a tiger had made a kill on the roadway and that they would have possibly faced extreme danger. It was something that the horse must have sensed. My grandmother told me this story when we visited her at her dairy in Cheribon. Aunt Gusta did not refer to this episode in her story.

Plantations dot the hill country along a chain of mountains the length of many of the islands in the Dutch East Indies. They were carved out of a dense jungle. The country was very tranquil before the war. The Dutch East Indies was not touched by World War I. There was no general unrest or fear to travel anywhere anytime. It was a quiet and peaceful archipelago as its people went about farming, tending their crops, and performing all those myriad little things to make a living and to provide comfort for their families. I don’t remember much of that because I was not born until 1939. I include a photograph of a pastoral scene that evokes the peace and tranquility in this chapter. Many who came from the Indies used to employ a phrase, tempo dulu, which means something like the old time.

Many Dutch people who lived in those times have fond memories of the quiet and peaceful countryside of West Java. Many miss the lifestyle and the peace that they enjoyed before the war. There are times that I wished that things were different so that we did not have to leave for the United States. I definitely miss all the different and delicious fruit and foods. That is not to imply that my life here in this great country was not as enjoyable. Life there was different entirely.

It is difficult to relay mental images, odors, flavors, ambiance, or experiences. As I begin this conversation with you, I will be telling you our family’s story against the backdrop of political and historical events. It is a fact that we really do not know whether our accumulated knowledge and memories have been placed there by actual experience or by overhearing conversation of our elders when we were younger. What I will be writing about are my life experiences as best as I can recollect starting from when I got my first slap on my rear end by Doctor Tan Bun King who delivered me at the home of my grandmother at her dairy in Cheribon.

Let me go back first to before the war to paint a picture of the contrast before and after such a devastating war and to help establish a background for this story. My grandmother on my mother’s side operated a large dairy for its day in Cheribon on Djalan Kosambi 109, or Kosambi Street, at the outskirts of the town of Cheribon in the Dutch East Indies that is now called Indonesia. The dairy was called the Boerderij De Roomkan, which translated means The Cream Pitcher Dairy.

For the sake of brevity and to save printer’s ink, let me shorten the phrase Dutch East Indies to DEI from now on. I found out much later when a book on our genealogy was published that she introduced the Holstein milk cow to the DEI. She also introduced strawberries, which is a natural extension when you are in the dairy business. After all, don’t we need strawberries on our ice cream or ice cream on strawberries? And much later when I typed Aunt Gusta’s story, she wrote that my great-grandmother, her mother, introduced them. What are we to believe?

Mom and Dad were married in 1934 at Oma’s dairy, the center of many of our family’s activities. It was well-attended as you can see by the photograph taken in front of her house.

Most of the guests in this photograph are aunts and uncles of Mom and Dad. The man standing behind Mom, immediately to her right, is my grandfather Schallig. Many of those attending are brothers and sisters of Grandma Pluim Mentz. Grandma Schallig did not like to have her picture taken, so she hid behind one of the pillars. Grandma Pluim Mentz is standing directly behind the tall boy in the sailor’s outfit. Dad’s sister, Dee (pronounced day), is standing behind the couple. On the extreme right are Tante Jis and Oom Ferry Schallig, cousins of Dad. We visited the sugar plantation they administered in 1954.

Bill, Danneke, and I were all born in Oma’s house and as mentioned, was delivered by Dr. Tan Bun King with a slap on my rump. This was repeated often later in my life when I committed numerous transgressions. We will meet Dr. Tan again later in this story. Mom and Dad established their estate on the flank of Gunung Tjeremé, a nine-thousand-foot volcano some distance from Cheribon. They had to travel to town to get supplies and for medical purposes such as when Mom gave birth to us three.

Before going any further, let me go back and include pictures and narrative of Mom and Dad’s early years, starting with Dad. He was born in Batavia on December 1899. A picture on the left is of Dad and Aunt Dee when they were young. They grew up in Cheribon.

Their father, my grandfather, was an administrator of a sugar plantation and processing plant. It may have been the same one that Oom Ferry managed. It is amazing how many of our ancestors were in the sugar or tea industry.

We called grandfathers, Opa, and grandmothers, Oma. I will use these two appellations so that I can save some more ink by reducing the number of letters to three instead of twelve every time I use them.

Mom and Dad talked very little about the past, and we did not think to ask. I seem to remember that we visited the estate when I was really little. I remember that there was a space under the house that was the home of a large flock of swallows, and I remember the smell of their dung.

Mom and Dad mentioned once that Opa and Oma Schallig owned properties in Bandoeng. It was much later when I found documents of the distribution of their estate that I found that they indeed owned properties and shares in Hotel Homann, an upscale hotel in Bandoeng. It is too bad that we did not ask a lot of questions about the past and that is why the short memoir that Tante Gusta wrote is so precious. We know very little of our family’s history, and many of the photographs have no identification or descriptions on the back side.

The war destroyed most of our family pictures. It is a miracle that we still have some of them and that was due to Tante Gusta. She was not placed in a concentration camp.

We will now have a little history of the Pluim Mentz side of our family. There are many additional details in Tante Gusta’s memoir. What I include here are some photographs of Oma, Opa Pluim Mentz, Mom, and Tante Gusta. You can see on the photo of my grandparents on Mom’s side that they were strikingly handsome as were many of the others in the Pluim Mentz family. Many of them had illustrious careers also.

Cheribon is a coastal town on the Java Sea on the north coast of Java. You may locate it on the map I include in this book. It is situated close to the border between West and Central Java. I will use the old names that were used on the map since I have no idea what the Indonesians have done to change them. I do know that Cheribon changed to Tjirebon and now is spelled Cirebon, all to confound cartographers and geography students. The dj sound has been changed to j, like in Jerry. Many other changes in pronunciation and spelling have been made over the years. It is totally understandable that they changed geographic names to better reflect their national language. It is just that I prefer to stick to the older usage.

Djalan Kosambi is a major road running south past the dairy continuing out of Cheribon toward Mount Tjiremé. Our estate was called Djalak Sana since it was located near a village of the same name. It was established on the slopes of a semi-active volcano, Gunung Tjeremé, one of many volcanoes on Java. The word gunung means mountain. The estate and village were large enough to be placed on the map of West Java. A considerable number of tea, coffee, and sugar estates were established in highlands of Java. Many are shown on the map.

Our father’s estate was much more diversified than other planting tea, coffee, sugar, rice, and citronella oil. The latter was in great demand as an insect repellant. We used it on our arms and legs when we went out to play during the season when mosquitos became a real annoyance during the wet monsoon. He also raised hogs and other livestock to sell and for use by the family and our workers.

The natives do not ordinarily consume meat from hogs since they are mostly Muslim, but I bet that some of them sneaked a pork chop every now and then.

Water for irrigation and for domestic use came from springs using large-diameter bamboo pipes that were joined together. Even though I was very young, I remember that those pipes had little geysers of water coming out of triangular cuts where the plugs had come loose. Each section had a wedge-shaped cut to facilitate removal of partitions in the bamboo. Such leakage also helped irrigate the mountainside.

Waste water from the barns was directed to cisterns to be used for fertilizer on the various crops. I managed to almost drown myself in less than three inches of leftover wastewater from the barns, but my nanny fished me out. Mom told me that I came to the house one time crying about some of the servants, calling me a girl since I had long blond curly hair as you can see from the picture of my beautiful face. What happened to my pretty face since then is not known. I may have fallen out of a coconut tree.

I have illusive memories of odors emitted from those profusely illustrated pages of National Geographic Magazines. I was between two or three years of age. Every time I read older issues to this day, I am affected by that peculiar odor coming out of the magazine that instantly brings back my memory of sitting on the floor going through them. Odors are very effective memory boosters. There were cases during my travels that an odor would elicit memories of other occasions and places. It is amazing how soon I was attracted by literature.

The DEI straddles the equator for over three thousand miles bounded on the west by the Indian Ocean and the east by the Pacific Islands. Some of the largest islands in the world are included in this archipelago. We lived on the island of Java that is heavily populated and much more developed since it is the site of very old civilizations and the primary destination of Dutch settlers. Pithecanthropus erectus, the Java man, was discovered in Central Java. His bones were dated between 1.6 and 1.8 million years ago.

A succession of explorers and traders traveled through this archipelago over the centuries in search of spices and other commodities leaving descendants of many ethnic groups. In the eighth-century Buddhists and Hindus built large temples and shrines, most notably Borobudur, over sixty acres in size. Arab missionaries came later in history, bringing with them the religion of Islam, a religion that is now dominant in Indonesia with Christian and Hindu minorities. The island of Bali is the only one where Hinduism is still predominant.

This archipelago, now called Indonesia, is home of an astonishing number of people, ethnic groups, and a diversity of languages. West Java is home of the Sundanese people who speak a Malay-based language while Central Java has a populace called Javanese. The latter have become the dominant political power in the archipelago. Presidents Sukarno and Suharto were members of this ethnic group. This aspect is of no consequence to this book other than the impact of Sukarno’s communism on us and the Dutch colonists who considered the DEI as their home, so we will leave this for historians and politicos to talk and argue about.

The DEI is rich in plant and mineral resources. It was known even in the sixteenth century as the fabled Spice Islands, Magellan’s destination. It is also known for its gold, silver, copper, diamonds, tin, and other mineral resources, and there were at least three proven and developed oil fields by 1939. Other major commodities produced are sugar, rice, tea, spices, coffee, citronella oil, and copra (a product derived from coconuts). It is no wonder that the Japanese targeted this rich country as soon as they could to gain its resources.

The Schallig and van Balgooy family were involved in the production of sugar, rice, coffee, and tea. Grandma Pluim Mentz, my maternal grandmother’s dairy-produced milk, creamery products, and strawberries. My father operated an estate that produced a great variety of commodities such as citronella oil, coffee, and rice. He sold pigs to the Chinese and a small amount of beef. He