result was an increasingly lopsided public memory war. By the early 1970s the dominant popular understanding, among both the general public in the Netherlands and, apparently, survivors themselves, was that internment under the Japanese had been fully as horrific as the experiences they associated with wartime in the Netherlands, perhaps even worse. It had been, according to this picture, uniformly hellish: three and one half years of extreme deprivation (especially starvation), characterized by extreme violence and all the tools of violence in the hands of diabolical Japanese intent on exterminating Westerners; the experience had been severe enough to scar victims, especially children, irreparably. A few former internees pushed back against this perspective, which they saw as the product of blatant and often dishonest exaggeration, describing it as full of inaccuracies and outright fabrications. The most prominent of these critics was the writer Rudy Kousbroek (1929–2010), who published the first of many pieces (though not a memoir) on the subject as early as 1971 and who coined the term East Indies Camp Syndrome (Oostindisch Kampsyndroom) to describe what he believed was a kind of hysterical need to sensationalize—indeed lie about—the Indies wartime experience.
Lanzing’s 2007 memoir is the most polished and important of his several contributions to this long-running polemic. Its origins lie in the understated and thoughtful collection of “autobiographical notes,” carefully worded and copiously footnoted, that Lanzing published in 1980 in a prominent Dutch journal of letters. Lanzing argued that his own experience as a young boy in wartime Java had not in fact been traumatic and had little in common with the dominant popular view. Far from it. From what he had perceived through a child’s eyes, he understood that rather than unrelieved hell, life varied a great deal from camp to camp and from one period to another; even the food situation and hunger levels ranged widely, and in any case were not, until the last months of the occupation, nearly as dire as widely depicted; discomforts, overcrowding, and poor hygienic conditions were undeniable, but many of the problems of camp life were caused or exacerbated by the Dutch camp leaders and internees themselves. As for the Japanese, they were seldom seen and in any case did not appear to have been guilty of the innate cruelty and barbaric behavior commonly reported and believed. Indeed, Lanzing went out of his way to show that in his personal experience even Sone Kenichi, perhaps the most notorious of all Japanese internment officers (executed in 1946 as a war criminal), had displayed shades of empathy and humanity. It had not always been an easy time, Lanzing concluded, but it had paradoxically afforded him great freedoms (“no school, no shoes, no parents”), a certain amount of excitement and adventure, an unusual coming of age that, in retrospect, was an integral part of the colonial childhood that he felt it a privilege to have experienced. The same points are made in the 2007 memoir, but in the framework of a broader, richer, and more chronological narrative, from which the author draws more pointedly critical conclusions.
Both works have attracted hostility. Lanzing has been labeled, among other things, an implicit collaborator (“pro-Jap”), an enemy of national and social solidarity, a person with anticolonial sentiments (as a bad quality), and a disturbed person suffering from “Jap-camp-child syndrome” who is “stuck in pre-puberty characterized by egocentrism.” Reviewers have suggested that his work ignores or trivializes the suffering of others, is merely an outdated and vague gesture rather than anything substantive, flies in the face of the demonstrated real-life experiences of thousands of children and adults who were interned, or—perhaps as devastating in its own way as any other criticism—amounts to nothing more than a “silly book.” (A few, to be fair, found the memoir vaguely “compelling,” or “interesting,” for details not found anywhere else in the literature.) The more extreme reactions are obviously highly emotionally charged, and the rest often appear to ignore or misunderstand precisely what Lanzing is or is not saying. But their nature is serious enough, and Lanzing’s mission to correct the record important enough, that they deserve at least brief comment here.
A prime set of concerns has to do with historical accuracy. Memoirs are not history, of course, nor memory truth, and certainly the idea (from which Lanzing draws much inspiration) that the child’s view of things, being presumably free of adult preconceptions and expectations, reflects a more authentic memory, may be more literary than historical and is in any case open to serious question. Nevertheless, it must be said that from a historian’s perspective the picture of Dutch internment presented in Lanzing’s memoir is in fact considerably closer to that of careful scholarly assessment than is the dominant popular version, especially that found in literature and the cinema. He is certainly correct to highlight the variability of conditions according to time, place, and individual circumstances, for example, particularly where the infamous Cideng camp—invariably considered representative, which it emphatically was not—is concerned. (In Java alone there were initially over one hundred different camps, later consolidated to about thirty.) And his account of the Japanese presence, actions, and intentions in the camps is not out of line with most evenhanded research on the subject going back as far as Van Velden’s classic 1963 work on the internments. Few serious scholars of the Japanese occupation today would have any basic quarrels with Lanzing’s 1985 generalization, of which the memoir is intended to provide an illustration, that
the clichéd image of cruel “Japs,” with constant rapes, deliberate liquidations of Europeans, and three straight years of hunger, death, and destruction, with people eating sand and grass, and guards playing macabre games with the [European] women, and so forth—as if this was the daily reality of the internment camp—is, I maintain, false. [Life in] the average [civilian] internment camp was characterized by boredom, quarrels and disputes [among internees], uncertainty, incomprehensible regulations, lack of privacy and hygiene, hopelessness, and also, toward the end, a shortage of food.
Lanzing is also reliable where important specific details are concerned. To take only one example, he is right to emphasize that Cideng camp was not an armed fortress and did not have watchtowers manned by machine-gun-armed guards, contrary to the claims in Jeroen Brouwers’s Bezonken rood (Sunken Red) (1981) and many other works, including those by a number of former internees there. A few similar points may be slightly in doubt, such as whether the Cideng camp fencing incorporated barbed wire. Lanzing, who took part in the original construction, says it did not; another internee, a young adult tasked with repairing the fencing (perhaps after Lanzing had left), has reported that it did; photographs taken at war’s end are for several reasons slightly in doubt. These kinds of contradictions are common in camp histories and often cannot be resolved with complete certainty. But the basic point is sound: even the worst of the Japanese internment sites for civilians was far from the Nazi-style prison bastion it has been widely depicted as resembling. Seemingly a comparatively small matter, though one of some importance if rigorous truth-telling about the internment experience is at issue. (As an aside, it should also be pointed out that Lanzing certainly wasn’t the only person at the time or later to think that many of the Dutch trials at the war’s end condemning Japanese to death as war criminals were vengeful and less than just, and even Allied representative Laurens van der Post, in a 1985 letter, said he believed Sone was a man with “an individual sense of honour and decency” whom he had “tried very hard to prevent . . . from being executed as a common criminal.”)
It is perfectly reasonable to ask whether, if Lanzing’s account is fundamentally credible and accurate, the same or similar information and views have been expressed in other survivors’ autobiographical works, and if not, why not. The answer to the first part of the question is that they have, but infrequently. The corpus of personal documents shows enormous variety and remains incompletely studied, so generalizations about them must be tentative. But there were diary writers who clearly made an effort to question gossip and avoid extreme opinions or descriptions, perhaps out of fear of retribution if their writings (which were forbidden) were discovered, but also because, it would seem, they believed that keeping a balanced and realistic view was a key to survival. (By contrast, memoirs composed after the war, sometimes many decades later, by those who had been interned as adults seem more often to show heightened emotions, inaccurate information, and intensely anti-Japanese sentiments.) Memoirs by ex-internees who spent childhood years in the camps are in large part compromised, sometimes seriously so, by the authors’ efforts to supplement their own limited memories (many were very young) with information
