Japanese Concentration Camps in Semarang.

When I decided I wanted to spend a few months in Indonesia it was to dig for my family roots.  I was aware that there was another side as well, the family sadness caused by the Japanese occupation of Indonesia, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to go and look for it.  As it turned out the decision was made for me.  By chance the first part of my journey would be spent in Semarang. When I asked my mother about Semarang she was quiet and then she said, “I never wanted to go back to Semarang”.  Waarom niet, mammie? Because that is where the Japanese concentration camp was! 

 

There was no question any more whether I was going to visit the camps. It had been the big elephant in the room all my life.  I wanted to acknowledge it and then tell it that it is time to leave.  And so in the first two weeks I was in Semarang I spent my weekends finding and visiting the camps and the graveyard were most civilian victims of the camps are buried.  And with it I found myself doing more research (thank God for the internet) trying to answer so many questions.

 

Why did Indonesia get involved in WWII? Japanese expansionism in the Asian corridor had started long before the start of WW II in Europe, with their invasion of Manchuria in the twenties and Indochina in the thirties. The occupation of Indochina was met by crippling economic sanctions from the United States and the west, effectively cutting off Japan’s imports of oil. For Japan, the Netherlands East Indies was the best available source of oil for their war effort in China: Borneo and South Sumatra produced more than eight million barrels a year. But it was not just oil they were interested in. They also needed the rubber that was grown in the many plantations. And so Japan invaded Indonesia starting January 10, 1942, with the Netherlands capitulating soon after that. 

At the time of the Japanese invasion of Indonesia my mother, eleven years old, was living on a coffee and rubber plantation in East Java, called Treblasala, near Glenmore.  After the capitulation, the Japanese immediately implemented their policy of cleansing Asia of any western influence.  Dutch money was replaced by Japanese. The Dutch language was abolished.  And Europeans! including my mother and grandmother, were put into military or civilian intern camps.  The mass internment of Totok women, children and old men started in October,1942.

After the capitulation my grandfather, like most plantation owners in East Java, joined the resistance.  The resistance didn’t last long and most were executed by the Japanese early in the war, including my grandfather.  Before that he had managed to send a letter to my grandmother telling her to go register at an intern camp in Malang.  The situation in Indonesia was not safe for Europeans or Indo-Europeans.  For the first year of the war, they were interned in Wijk Malang, a housing estate surrounded by a barbed wire fence. Between November,1942 and January, 1943 about 7,000 women and children ended up in camp De Wijk in the Bergenbuurt (Mountain quarter) of Malang. My mother was in this camp with her best friend Joris de Booy and her family.  In the fall of 1943 they were all transported to camps in Semarang.

 

CAMP LAMPERSARI

I started my pilgrimage with visiting the last camp my mother was imprisoned in Semarang, called Camp Lampersari. 

Lampesari was one of the first model Kampongs (villages) the Dutch had designed for the Indonesian working class in the 1920s.  When the Japanese started the interning of Europeans in camps they would set off parts of a city, just like the getto in Warshaw. Lampesari is now again a working class neighborhood of small little houses with narrow little streets. My host, Erni, went with me.  She was able to ask some of the people around the neighborhood where exactly the camp was.  The young people there were not aware at all that this had been an intern camp but some of the older people did remember and pointed out some of the original houses built by the Dutch and which streets were part of the camp.  It was moving to be there, so very different from what I had imagined.  The houses and the streets were so small.  Difficult to imagine that a single family lives in these houses now, let alone 10-20 people during the war.  But is wasn’t just the overcrowding (there were almost 8,000 people on 1 square Kilometer) that made it hell, it was also the lack of enough food and rampaging illnesses like malaria and typhoid. But most of all, it was the camp commander who was called “de Mepper”.  Everything and anything would provoke him and would cause him to start hitting the prisoners, young, old, sick. It didn’t matter. My mother and her friend, Joris, did everything together in this camp, work in the kitchen, find food, work in the field, clean (there was an open sewer going through the camp).

I thought this was the only camp my mother had been in, in Semarang, but when I talked to her after my visit she told me that there had been another one much, much worse than Lampersari and where she had been before being moved to Lampesari. She couldn’t remember the name but remembered that it was a religious institution.  In the book that I had found in a Dutch bookstore, called Reizen door WWII Indonesie, it mentioned only one religious institution that was used as a camp and that was Camp Bangkong, a cloister.

 

CAMP BANGKONG

When I walked into Bangkong via de church I was struck by a deep sadness.  There was something in the air that felt very heavy. The nuns who are still there were very nice and open. It had a courtyard where boys were playing basketball.  I learned later this was now a school for orphaned boys. I walked through the whole cloister. At the end you were asked to write in a book.  There were many stories there of Dutch visitors about their mothers, grandmothers, uncles, fathers.  Very intense and moving.  As it turned out this was not the camp my mother was in, but I like to mention it anyway.  At first this camp was used for both women, men and children.  Later in the war the Japanese made this into a labor camp for boys and old men.  Boys as young as ten years old were separated from their mothers and sent to this camp.

 

 

 

KARANGPANAS

I visited Bangkong on a Saturday.  When I talked to my mother that night she remembered the name Karang Parnas.  That camp was not mentioned in the book.  I had planned to visit the graveyard, Ereveld Kalibanteng, in Semarang that was specifically constructed to honor the civil victims of WWII. It is called the women’s graveyard because there are so many women buried there.  It has a beautiful monument (and only monument in Indonesia) in memory of the women who died in the concentration camps. There is also a very touching monument for all the boys who died in Bankong.  It says “they were still so young”.  When I was walking through the graveyard I read again the paragraph about who all was buried there.  And there it was, Karangpanas. 

 

With the help of my iphone GPS I was able to tell my driver how to get there. It is in a cloister in the hills of Semarang. Actually it is very beautiful.  It was closed when I got there. I walked around it and found a guard whom I persuaded with my hand and feet to open the door. I saw the square where the prisoners had to stand for hours in the blazing sun. Nobody was there, just the guard and me. My mother doesn’t talk about her war experiences (most survivors of Japanese concentration camps don’t) but I have been able to reconstruct a little what it was like through research.  

 

The distance from Malang to Semarang is about 500 miles but the train that took the prisoners to Karangpanas took two days.  It would stop for hours in the searing heat and there was hardly any food or water.  It was crowded and no place to use the bathroom. In the barracks there was a long continuous plank bed alongside both walls. Each person was allocated 20 inch (50 cm) of space. No more space or privacy. The food situation was terrible and you never knew when food would be next handed out. In this camp a lot of the men were already very old, and since they were dying like flies my mother had to wash the bodies.  This camp was closed after about 7-8 months.  All prisoners had to walk, with the little luggage they still had left, from there to Lampersari.

Karangpanas was the worst of the camps my mother was in, but they were all terrible, all across Asia.  By their treatment the Japanese made it clear that prisoners

should have no expectations. They were conquered and they were therefore worth nothing: “as scraps of paper in the wind.

 

 On my last day in Semarang I went back to each of the sites. Giving a face to all the pain and fears caused by the Japanese concentration camps has been very healing.  I hope I can leave them here now.

 

 

Bersiap Camp in Surabaya

 

I wasn’t really sure I wanted to go to Surabaya.  It is Indonesian’s second biggest city, dirty, crowded and is one big traffic jam.  On the other hand there is lot of family history in this city.  My grandfather is buried there and my mother spent the time right after the war in an Indonesian intern camp there.  Just like with Semarang, the decision was made for me.  Erni, my roommate and colleague, told me that after our hike to the top of the Bromo we were going to stay a few days in Surabaya.  I had a chance to visit my grandfather’s grave at the Ereveld Kembang Kuning who was executed by the Japanese at the beginning of the war.  I stayed in the hotel that was the scene of the start of the revolution.  It is in the old Dutch part of town, close to where my Great Grandmother used to live.  Unfortunately, like in so many other cities in Indonesia, most of the Dutch buildings and neighborhoods are very dilapidated and falling apart. 

Why did my mother end up in a camp for a second time? The end of WO II was not the end of fear and violence in Indonesia. The Japanese capitulation on August 14, 1945 created a power vacuum in the Dutch East Indies. Sukarno proclaimed independence on August 17, 1945. When the Dutch government tried to restore authority over the archipelago violence started to break out.  By the end of September, young Indonesian guerrillas called pemudas had begun to take over government buildings and utilities in cities such as Yogyakarta, Solo, Malang, Bandung, Surabaya and Batavia. At the same time, Indonesian nationalists declared a general food boycott against the Europeans, and they cut off supplies of water and electricity to the internment camps where most of them were living.  This period of violence and unrest is called the Bersiap period.  It comes from the battle cry used by the guerrillas and means “get ready”. Cities like Jakarta, Semarang, Surabaya and more became the scene of continues kidnappings, shootings, murders, disappearance. Victims of the violence were mainly Europeans and indo-Europeans.

I knew that after the war she and my Oma were again interned in a camp in Surabaya but I had no idea why. After the Japanese capitulation my mother and Oma left Lampesari Kamp in Semarang.  They took the train to Surabaya to stay with my great grandmother who didn’t need to go into a concentration camp because she was quarter Indonesian.  Unrest was already very high and it is a wonder they actually made it to Surabaya unharmed.  While they were living in my great-grandmother’s house the flag incident happened in the Oranje Hotel, now the Majapahit Hotel. On 19 September 1945, a group of Dutch former internees supported by the Japanese raised the Dutch flag outside the hotel. This provoked nationalist Indonesian militia, who overran the Dutch and Japanese, and tore off the blue part of the Dutch flag, changing it into the Indonesian flag.  This incident started the revolution and heavy fighting between the revolutionaries and the British troops who were there to evacuate Europeans.

 

Shooting started in the street and bullet were flying through the house of my great grandmother. My mother – 15 years old- was hiding under a table. After the shootings had ceased, the pemudas came into the house and told my great grand mother that they came to confiscate the house and the they had 15 minutes to pack a view belongings and than had to leave. They spend 2 days roaming the streets of Surabaya before they ended up in one of the Bersiap camps run by the Indonesians.  I asked my mother if it wasn’t horrible that after 3 1/2 years of imprisonment to end up in prison again.  Her comment was that at least she knew the language and recognized the faces of her captors.  She understood them. 

Being here, and doing all this research I started to realize that the Bersiap period was in some way even more traumatic than the 3 1/2 years in the Japanese camps. Of course Indonesia had to become independent.  It was their country not the Dutch.  But for the mixed blood Dutch Indonesians it was heartbreaking.  They had lived in Indonesia for generations.  It was there motherland. They didn’t know the Netherlands. Yet, they were no longer welcome in the country of their birth and ancestry.  Yet, they were not accepted in The Netherlands either.  They didn’t belong anywhere anymore. And nobody wanted to hear their story.  I like to end this with a poem by Leo Vroman

 

Kom vanavond met verhalen
hoe de oorlog is verdwenen,
en herhaal ze honderd malen:
alle malen zal ik wenen.

 

Come tell me after all these years

your tales about the end of war

tell me a thousand times or more

and every time I’ll be in tears