Camp Life Is Paradise for Freddy. Fred Lanzing

      Introduction

      In its original 2007 Dutch edition, this book did not require an introduction. Fred Lanzing’s compact but powerful memoir of his boyhood in colonial Java, including several years in internment camps during the Japanese occupation, covers territory with which most Dutch readers were at least vaguely acquainted. The memoir begins with a charming and recognizable evocation of tempo dulu (“the good old [colonial] days”) from a child’s perspective but quickly introduces unconventional, even startling, views about what the war and especially the internment camps of the Japanese occupation were actually like. In a concise Afterword the author attempts to explain his outlook and intentions, lest there be any doubt about them. Most Dutch readers, whether or not they agreed with, appreciated, or were willing even to consider Lanzing’s challenging conclusions, were at least still on more or less familiar ground.

      To readers outside the Netherlands and what might be called the Dutch diaspora, however, the same circumstances do not necessarily obtain, and for this English-language edition some additional background and commentary may be welcome.

      Today, three generations after the end of World War II in Southeast Asia (the Pacific War), most of the former Western colonial powers hold respectful but much-faded memories of the civilians who were interned there by Japanese occupation forces. A recent scholarly survey calls them “forgotten captives,” and similar language is found in much of the fairly limited academic, journalistic, and autobiographical work that has appeared over the years. Public interest has been, and remains, on military affairs (including military POWs) and the general fate of the colonies, including the connections between Japanese rule and the rise of local independence movements. And in any case, the war in Southeast Asia remains today vastly overshadowed in Western public eyes by events and people in the war as it played out in Europe.

      A partial and important exception to this pattern is the Netherlands. There, although the European war and the German occupation that accompanied it clearly receive the bulk of public interest, the Pacific War in the then colonial Netherlands East Indies has, despite periodic complaints to the contrary from some quarters, continued to receive significant attention. A major reason for this difference from the rest of Europe has to do with numbers. In the Netherlands East Indies, about 105,000 Dutch civilians were interned by the Japanese—more than two-thirds were women and children. By comparison, there were roughly 8,000 American internees in the Philippines, 4,000 British in Malaya, and fewer than 200 British and French in Burma and Indochina, respectively. Most of the surviving Dutch civilian internees returned or emigrated to the Netherlands at the end of the war, and they were later joined by an additional 200,000 or more Dutch subjects (a majority of whom were Eurasians), who, though mostly not interned, were badly treated by Japanese policies and wartime conditions, and then targeted in the turbulence that came in the wake of the Pacific War, the Indonesian drive for independence. Together these groups, and eventually their children and grandchildren, make up a significant portion of the Dutch population, more than 3 percent in 2010.

      Numbers alone do not tell the entire story, however. From the very beginning of this emigration, disputes arose over issues such as the manner in which the émigrés were received in the Netherlands (many felt it chilly, if not hostile, with little support), the extent to which their experiences were comparable to those of the Dutch in the German-occupied Netherlands, and whether they should be entitled to financial compensation (from whatever source) for property losses, back pay for those who had served in the colonial administration or military, and physical as well as mental suffering. Debate over these and related questions, which was muted at first, became more pronounced at the end of the 1960s, when discussion of what came to be called the “Indies Question” (Indische Kwestie) became more open. At the same time it became entangled with other public debates such as those over the role of the military in the Dutch-Indonesian war (“decolonization”) (1945–49) and questions about memorializing World War II (in both Europe and Asia); these in turn were intensified in one way or another by society-wide pressures such as growing ethnic diversity and rising expectations for the government’s welfare responsibility. The resulting polemical knot came to be referred to as the nation’s onver-werkte (“unprocessed” but also “unassimilated” or “unaccepted”) colonial past and took on the characteristics of nothing less than a struggle to redefine the Dutch national identity, a struggle that persists today.

      At or very near the heart of all this smoldered—and smolders still, seventy years later—the fundamental question of what the wartime experience of the colonial Dutch had actually been like under the Japanese. This is a far more difficult question to answer than might be imagined, especially since “objective” documentation is almost entirely lacking. Whatever historical understanding can be reached must be founded largely on personal sources: diaries (including drawings made at the time), memoirs and interviews written down much later, and literary evocations. Modern historians are well acquainted with the problems of using such sources, which are in this instance compounded by the fact that of roughly 92,000 survivors only at most 1 in 100 (and perhaps considerably fewer) left

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