I myself would like to see more explicit attention paid to the losses experienced due to the Japanese occupation in the Pacific during World War II, and for this history to be as much in dialogue with Western culture as the war in Europe and the Holocaust has been, both in film and art, as well as in classrooms and literature. Not only do I think it is important for the Western survivors of the internment camps like my father to be acknowledged and their trauma addressed, but the vast majority of the Japanese forces’ victims in World War II were millions of Asians, and with the singular focus on the Nazi occupation, I think there is a great deal of Eurocentrism in our Western understanding of the Second World War. It’s important that we address this, because an attitude in the West of dismissal toward regions we deem as less important can lead to events such as the Rwandan genocide of 1994, during which the Western world turned a blind eye and the United Nations refused to send aid as an estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered. As long as we continue to divide the world according to our “us and them” mentality, I believe these tragedies will continue. This is not just about politics. Because when we talk about politics we are talking about people.
* * *
In a clearing of his internment camp many years ago stood a boy with his arms raised to the plane above. On a ship to the United States a woman thought about a new life ahead in a place where she was not fout. As I write this, quite coincidentally, it is my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, a date I know they have reached despite challenges and conflicts along the way from which others might have turned away. It has been fifty years since the flickering home movies were filmed in the port of Rotterdam, my mother waving her silk scarf at her family below and my father zooming in on his bride. I’m now in Amsterdam and call her in California. “Mom, how does it feel, being married for fifty years?” “Old!” she says, laughing, and the digital phone line warbles her voice in transmission. “I hear you,” I say. My mother’s voice settles. “Oh, sweetheart. We’ve come through a lot.”
EPILOGUE
As there are neuroses and dysfunctions I have inherited from my parents’ war, there are also gifts. I grew up in the United States, a country that has seen very few wars on home soil, and none since the Civil War. The wars we tend to be most aware of in this country—World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan—live mainly as secondhand knowledge if we are not in the active military, shaped by our history books and media and imaginations. Americans tend to prefer clean, categorical narratives about war. They prefer conflicts with clear victims and perpetrators, examples of good and evil. Having grown up with my parents, I understand that narratives don’t often fall neatly into that formula.
My father was a colonist, part of a system of colonialism that his father and his father’s father were part of. Those in academia and elsewhere tell me that as a colonist, he is the oppressor, and that therefore, his claims to victimhood are null and void, because they defy the conventional dichotomy. Critiques by peers of my past writing that mentioned my father’s war experiences as a Dutch colonist invariably included several notes in this vein, and I am often forced to justify his entitlement to a voice at all, pushing me back into the dichotomy I want to avoid. When I say that my father’s Indonesian babu cared about him and that he cared about her, it is problematic because of the colonial relationship. But still, inconvenient as it is to acknowledge, this is a true thing; we are talking about real people and their relationships, not simply the dynamics of systemic power structures. It was also true that my father’s djongos, Suwardjo, was upset when the family was taken away by the Japanese, and that he followed them to Semarang and lived outside of their internment camp, waiting for their release. “In the history books, when the war ended, the Indonesian people revolted and won independence,” my father says now. “But all Indonesians weren’t the same. There were Indonesians who weren’t happy at all when the Japanese invaded during World War II and took power from the Dutch. It wasn’t a simple question of good and bad. It was a mixture.” When Sukarno took power in Indonesia, ending Dutch colonial rule, Dutch families like my father’s had to leave the country they had called home for centuries. A necessary moment in history, true. A painful moment for many of the people in the system, also true. My grandmother gave Suwardjo all of the money she had left when he appeared in the camp at the end of the war, hoping to get his old job back. Injured by bombs in the Semarang harbor where he had worked in the shipyards after their internment, he was crushed to learn there was no place for him with the family anymore.
I certainly am not trying to justify colonialism. But to place humans into a predictable narrative is simplistic and reductive. All Americans besides those who are indigenous or descended from slaves are also part of an oppressive colonialist system, regardless of our personal politics, though I suspect many of us don’t consider that context of America as a continued colonial occupation or think of ourselves as colonists in our daily lives. Informal surveys on social media suggest that most Americans in my circle do not, which is interesting to me considering that most of them are also academics with knowledge and strong opinions about historic colonialism in other parts of the world. Part of what I want to illuminate is the ease with which we grasp for simple narratives that elide the complexity of history. I’m susceptible to this myself, and am reminded of it when I hear my parents’ stories. I am surprised when my father talks about colonial Indonesia in the 1940s and refers to the neighbor whose father is German and whose mother is a black woman from Suriname, a medical doctor and the breadwinner in the family. I am surprised when he talks about the indigenous Indonesian doctors his father worked with who lived in mansions and had servants too. I’m surprised when I learn of my grandmother’s deep friendships and my great-aunt’s business ventures with local Indonesian women in their communities during the colonial era, including “Aunt Soer,” who was considered part of my father’s family. On the ground, Dutch colonialism looked different than we imagine it.
It is difficult to write about personal human struggle when saddled with a rigid view of history. I find it frustrating that I must always grapple with the evils of colonialism first when writing about my father’s war experience at the hands of the Japanese. How we would be burdened when telling the stories of personal suffering of Americans if we had to preface them all with the fact that the United States is itself a product of violent oppression of the native people. We should be able to hold two truths at once.
* * *
Even if we could cleanly divide the world into “good guys” and “bad guys,” we’d still have difficulty keeping the players straight. Because what do we do with life’s tangled and shifting narrative? The Dutch as colonialists oppress the Indonesians. The Japanese arrive with Koreans they have oppressed and imprison and brutalize the Dutch. The Japanese are initially seen as liberators of the Indonesians, but soon the Indonesians realize that they are being oppressed by the Japanese as well and turn against them. The Allied forces of Dutch, Americans, and British liberate the Dutch and defeat the Japanese. The Indonesians revolt against the Dutch and begin attacking innocent civilians. And the former Japanese and Korean occupiers, who haven’t even had a chance to leave the country after their defeat, are now enlisted by the Allied troops to defend their former Dutch prisoners against the attacks of the Indonesians. The roles of villain and victim change places so often, it’s dizzying.
War lives in the human experience, in the personal. Where in the collective narrative do I place German soldiers hiding their enemies beneath their train seats and feeding them their own lunch? Where do I place a Korean officer dragging a piano out of hiding on Christmas and allowing his prisoners to play it? A Japanese officer crouching next to a homesick child in a prison camp and telling him that he’s homesick too, and that they both need to stay strong to get through the war? Nazi sympathizers being beaten, tortured, shaved bald, and their children left on the street by the people supposedly on the “right side” of the conflict? Dutch citize
ns condemning the Holocaust but snatching up their Jewish neighbors’ possessions and homes for a bargain price when they are taken away to the concentration camps?
My grandfather was a Nazi sympathizer, the great shame of the family. My cousin cannot share this fact with his wife’s family because they’d hold it against him. For decades after the war, her parents refused to serve Germans in their bakery.
For a long time, I internalized the monolithic narrative fed to us, and believed that there was some kind of rottenness I had inherited from my grandfather, as if Nazism were something that could be detected in the blood. After all, people are proud of their successful ancestors. Wouldn’t it follow that we would feel shame about the ancestors who did bad things? I spend a lot of time thinking about the children of SS officers in Germany, about the children of terrorists or serial killers. I want to know how they reconcile their parents’ acts with the love they feel for them.
I search online for information about Hitler’s family. I want to know if he had children, and what happened to them. There are no offspring, it turns out. In fact, the Hitler bloodline ended in 1987. There are claims that this was a deliberate choice on the part of the descendants. If it was, I can understand this impulse. When you grow up with the unspoken fear that your legacy is shame, that your identity is tainted, then, like my mother, you want to call as little attention to yourself as possible, to be as small as possible. And if your last name is Hitler, what could make you smaller than disappearing? Several of the descendants of the most famous Nazis, including those in the Göring, Himmler, and Höss families, have intentionally ended the bloodlines with themselves, as told in the documentary Hitler’s Children. Their grief, shame, and sense of culpability run that deep.
The fact that a person can feel conflicted about their feelings toward the people they love is what keeps the thousands of children and grandchildren of Nazi sympathizers silent. Even racist, alcoholic abusers sometimes tuck their children into bed at night with sweet kisses or take in a hungry stray cat. I don’t like to think about those things. It upsets a social code of safe, identifiable characters to contend with. But the children of our villains don’t have that luxury. They actually have to contend with the Nazi who takes them fishing and sings lullabies, the one who is flesh and blood and not just a one-sided concept.
My family went to the screening of a documentary in which the filmmaker discovered that his grandparents had been Nazis. The filmmaker was there, and there was a lengthy, heated discussion afterward with the audience about complicity during and guilt about World War II. Our family sat in absolute silence as people all around us, Americans with no direct ties to the Holocaust, offered their opinions. Because how could my mother tell a roomful of Americans that she was fout, that her father was fout, but that she loved him anyway? How can she tell people she suffered during the war because her parents were allied with the Nazis and ask for their empathy? Like those who say my father’s suffering in a concentration camp is problematic because of his membership in a colonialist system, my mother’s family’s suffering is canceled out because of their affiliation with the Nazis. So she submits to the accepted narrative. She holds her tongue.
* * *
My father never admits he’s fallible. When we play board games in my family, we always refer to my father as the straight man. He invariably bumbles the rules, and as we tease him, he looks perplexed, protesting in mock outrage. “What? That’s how you’re supposed to do it!” We correct him, and during his next turn, he makes the same mistake, and we all laugh at the idiocy of it. He’s good-natured about the ribbing, but then I am pretty sure he knows he’s playing the straight man and does it on purpose. This refusal to admit to weakness is fun in that circumstance, but often it’s infuriating. When he loses something, he accuses others of stealing it. When he drives into a pole, it’s the fault of the people who put the pole there and the car manufacturer for making the brake pedal too far from the gas pedal and the glare of the sun for blinding him.
This is extremely annoying to those of us who have been living with it for decades. On the other hand, this is the same quality that makes my father “unbreakable,” as my mother calls it. Not being willing to show weakness or defeat under any circumstance is what keeps my father persevering long after others would give up. He keeps moving forward no matter what. All ships follow me. Once, hopelessly lost on a family vacation in France, all of us frustrated and near tears, I said, “Forget staying in Paris. Let’s just get off here and find a hotel. We are miles off course.” And my father replied, “We are not off course. There are many ways into a city.” He kept going, and we did eventually get to see Paris. So while my friends and I have made a joke out of the phrase “There are many ways into a city,” I find myself saying it to myself when I meet an obstacle. “There are many ways into a city,” I say when a friend and I arrive at a restaurant to find it closed, when I get turned down for a research grant, when somebody tells me no.
I try to be the ship that will follow my father in going forward against the odds, because it’s not my own nature to shake these things off and keep moving. That’s just my survivor father speaking in me, a positive inheritance of his war. I’m ashamed to admit that there has been more than one occasion on which my father has helped me move that features me standing in tears in a half-packed apartment the day before a moving truck has been reserved, saying, “Forget it. I can’t do this. Let’s cancel the truck.” And my father has gotten me through, because surrendering is simply not an option for him. I can’t say whether my father brought that quality into the war or whether he learned it during the war or a little bit of both, but I know that it’s what got him through the war, and that his maddening refusal to admit his shortcomings comes from a relentless will to survive.
I have thought a great deal about the irony of victimhood. We think that acknowledged victims are the most damaged and suffer the most, but when I look at my parents, I see the reverse effect. I see the power my father derived from surviving abuse, and the weakness my mother learned from her family’s perpetrator status. Victims are by default survivors. Victimhood goes hand in hand with the concepts of triumph and overcoming. We have survivors’ groups and resources and fund-raisers, and we openly champion the strength of victims. Victims are permitted and encouraged to be resilient and to speak their pain. But perpetrators and their children? Perpetrators are given no survivor status. We have programs for reconciliation, and increasingly, with time, we have more open dialogue to heal the scars of conflict. But society doesn’t really allow you to overcome being fout emotionally. It’s a perpetrator’s burden to carry being fout with them until the day they die. For many children of perpetrators, the emotional burden is extremely painful for them, too. The grandchild of Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss, in an interview with The Telegraph, commented, “I can’t forgive the burden he brought into our lives. We had to carry a very heavy cross.”
When I think about the trauma I have inherited from my parents’ war experiences, I acknowledge the neurosis, anxiety, and compulsions I learned from my father. But I believe that the trauma my grandfather passed down to me through my mother is far more damaging on an existential level. It is the trauma of an eternal and unchangeable identity of being somehow inherently fout by blood, of not having the right to survive and succeed. I know, of course, that I didn’t make the choices, and that my grandfather’s actions are not my mother’s or mine. But much as a person feels connected and special for having a notable ancestor, I feel connected to a legacy of shame and the most notable mass murder of the modern era. And my mother feels it more so, because she experienced the wrath firsthand. And so she passed on to me be selfless, don’t rock the boat, let the rest go first, don’t be greedy, don’t disagree with others, tell people what they want to hear, live frugally, sacrifice.
My father hoards corks, my mother has an inferiority complex, and we all have trouble expressing ourselves without showing our damage. But we are doing our best wi
th this ghost in our midst. There’s no way to undo the psychological effects of war completely, but at some point in the chain of that multigenerational pileup, the last car will absorb the remaining energy and come slowly to rest. Then we will all climb out of our dented vehicles and peer back into the fog, our hands on our hips, and get to the business of calling a tow truck or helping the injured. I’m trying to overcome my tendency to sacrifice myself. I’m trying to use up the last inch of shampoo instead of saving it out of a feeling of lack, and to let the potato chips remain uneaten in the cupboard because they will still be there tomorrow. I’m trying to see the universe as abundant and benevolent. I’m working to create a sense of home.
* * *
One of the great frustrations of writing this book has been the discovery that the narrative, as I come to understand it, keeps shifting. My parents correct me about things I misinterpreted, new information comes to light that challenges my previous assumptions, and I learn that my understanding of the past is wholly subjective, no matter how much I research. However, the more the ghost takes shape for me, the more I can see its movements, and being able to see it has always been the main problem for me. So that’s where that comes from, I think when I hear the stories, and some dark part of me that I don’t understand begins to fill in with pictures and color. I may not have the memories of my parents’ wars, and I will never know exactly how it all really happened, but when I see the source of my learned habits and fears, I can at least reclaim them from a battle that was never mine. I am doing my best with the neuroses, just like my parents, like we all do with our myriad traumas. I am finding my way forward, as are they.
All Ships Follow Me Page 27
