no more than a dozen or so, make a serious effort to sort out what they knew, thought, and felt at the time from what they learned later from others. Fred Lanzing’s memoir is one of the latter group. These authors show us a less dramatic camp life than popularly portrayed, and one in which children’s lives differ considerably from prewar times: they are freer of adult supervision, have more time on their hands to “play” or do adventurous things, but often take on adult responsibilities and attitudes. They are conscious of the maturity that circumstances force upon them and frequently are critical of their parents and other adults. They acknowledge the scarcity of food but do not see that as a central issue. Most noticeably, the Japanese are not a focus of their concern, much less hatred. In these accounts they are seldom seen and figure less frequently as the barbarous villains many of their parents often saw, and more as part of a vaguely uncertain and often puzzling human landscape. The children do not spend much time looking back to prewar days and longing for a return to them, or expecting a particular future.
The memoirs that come closest to mirroring Lanzing’s view are those by Ernest Hillen (The Way of a Boy: A Memoir of Java, 1993) and Jan Lechner (Uit de Verte: Een jeugd in Indië 1927–1946 [From a distance: A youth in the Indies, 1927–1946], 2004). Both are longer and in some ways more detailed accounts, but the young lives and perspectives they depict are powerful confirmation of much of what Lanzing tells us. Hillen, for example, recalls that “for me the worst thing about living in [the internment] camp was not the heat, fear, smells, noise, flies, too many bodies, too little food, scratches that festered, and diarrhea—it was the sameness.” He disagrees with adults and the values they sometimes try to enforce, and wants them to recognize that he, at nine or ten, is no longer a child: “I wasn’t a kid. I didn’t pee, I pissed. You didn’t give things away—[certainly] not food; you traded.” Hillen doesn’t say directly that internment was a privilege to have experienced, but he is very far from suggesting that it was a trauma. Lechner, who was a few years older than Lanzing and Hillen, nevertheless shows us a camp life that is very similar, and certainly not a misery. He hears and witnesses Japanese violence against Europeans, but insists that was not usual in the camps. And he notes that he has wondered in retrospect why he never developed “a total, enduring, and blinding hatred of the Japanese,” but he did not. Like Lanzing, Lechner also sees his wartime experience as on the whole a positive experience, preparing him well for embarking on his adult life.
As to the second part of the question, it is not clear why there are not more accounts from former camp children that corroborate the picture we get from Lanzing and the others. It doesn’t seem possible that only a minuscule number of the more than 27,000 child survivors saw things in more or less the same way, or that they represent only very rare exceptions due to blind luck, special treatment, or extraordinary psychological circumstances (healthy or otherwise). More likely, their perspective is more widely shared, but others have declined to write about it, either because they believed it was unnecessary or unimportant to do so, or because they did not wish to bring attention to themselves, especially by contradicting what had become the received popular view. A Dutch researcher recently discovered how real such pressures may have been when she was informed by several former camp children, now well in their eighties, that their parents had forbidden them to say such outlandish things as that they had felt free and had rather pleasant memories of life in the internment camps; they never realized that others might have had the same feelings, and they certainly never dared express them in public, until they heard of Lanzing’s memoir many decades later. A few individuals have indicated their approval directly to Lanzing, but not spoken or written publicly about it. Some accounts from former camp children in places like Hong Kong and Manila reflect similar experiences and thoughts.
There is a decided irony here, perhaps easily missed by readers unfamiliar with the terms of the continuing debate in the Netherlands over the occupation. The understanding long established in popular myth about the Japanese occupation of the Indies holds that the full force of the “truth” of that experience—the awful truth of unvarying savagery, misery, and so forth—was and still is silenced, and its victims must struggle to be heard. Not only is that at best an exaggeration, but it seems fair to say that something like the opposite has in fact been the case: in the popular arena it is the “benign” views that have been hushed, given short shrift, or dismissed altogether as merely contrarian. The sensationalist popular view, in contrast, now extends to second and third generations whose often spectacularly inaccurate grasp of history proliferates even in more or less official publications, and whose politics appear to make closure regarding the colonial past—and, it must be said, full accommodation of a multicultural present—very difficult indeed.
Fred Lanzing’s memoir is a remarkable and thought-provoking work, notable for its determination to present a factually and emotionally accurate account of the author’s childhood internment, and with it to provide a credible modification of or counterweight to popular mythology and what he sees as a “failed, one-sided, and sterile processing of the war experiences in the Dutch East Indies.” That effort has unquestionably required among other things courage and a thick skin, as well as a certain stubbornness in the face of the realization that it is not likely to succeed in its main purpose. For the historian or historically inclined reader, however, the memoir remains not only a literary pleasure but a key source for understanding the Japanese occupation in Indonesia. It is also of special interest as one of the rare personal sources daring to speak so bluntly about both the realities of war in the Indies and the implications of the subsequent seventy-year-old memory wars that followed. This is a work that deserves an attentive audience outside its native Netherlands.
William H. Frederick
Selected Sources and Further Reading
Blackburn, Kevin, and Karl Hack, eds. Forgotten Captives in Japanese-Occupied Asia. London: Routledge, 2008.
Brouwers, Jeroen. Bezonken rood. Amsterdam: Arbeiders Pers, 1981. Translated as Sunken Red. New York: New Amsterdam, 1988.
Captain, Esther. Achter het kawat was Nederland: Indisch oorlogservaringen en -herinneringen 1942–1995 [The Netherlands behind barbed wire: Indisch war experiences and recollections, 1942–1995]. Kampen: Kok, 2002.
. “‘Geen spoortje Indisch, geen bamboe, geen prikkeldraad’” [‘No sign of Indisch, no bamboo, no barbed wire’]. In Kristel, Binnenskamers, 325–55.
Dütting, Hans, ed. Over Jeroen Brouwers: Kritische motieven: Beschouwingen over het werk van Jeroen Brouwers [On Jeroen Brouwers: Critical motifs: Considerations of the work of Jeroen Brouwers]. Baarn: De Prom, 1987.
Ernest Hillen. The Way of a Boy: A Memoir of Java. 1993. New York: Penguin 1995.
Hoek, Jasper van der. “‘Geen haat, maar afkeer’: Japanse kampbewakers in de ogen van geïinterneerden in Nederlands-Indië; een vergelijking van dagboeken, memoires en interviews” [‘Not hate, but aversion’: Japanese camp guards in the eyes of internees in the Dutch East Indies; a comparison of diaries, memoirs and interviews]. Master’s thesis in social history. Rotterdam: Erasmus University, 2006.
Kemperman, Jeroen. De Japanse bezetting in dagboeken: Tjideng [The Japanese occupation in diaries: Cideng]. Amsterdam, NIOD, 2002.
Kousbroek, Rudy. Het Oostindisch kampsyndroom [The East Indies camp syndrome]. Amsterdam: Meulenhof, 1992.
Kristel, Connie, ed. Binnenskamers: Terugkeer en opvang na de Tweede Wereldoorlog [In private: Return and relief after the Second World War]. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2002.
Lechner, Jan. Uit de Verte: Een jeugd in Indië, 1927–1946 [From a distance: A youth in the Indies, 1927–1946]. Leiden: KITLV, 2004.
Leffelaar, Hendrik L. Through a Harsh Dawn: A Boy Grows Up in a Japanese Prison Camp. Barre, MA: Barre Publishing, 1963.
Locher-Scholten,
