I have available the camp name register of August 1945. This provides name, number of family members and name of previous camp. From this I have for instance extracted a list of names of all our fellow travellers coming from Tjihapit to Tjideng in May 1945. Contact Boudewyn for further details.
An earlier dated name register ( 1944) is available on Peter Kuil’s website.
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1. MAY 10, 1940
When my father, Boudewyn A. J. van Oort, stepped out of the Chevrolet on Friday night, my mother, Wilhelmina, immediately knew something serious was amiss: he was earlier than usual. He strode up the gravel path to the veranda steps waving a newspaper in an agitated fashion; he was almost unable to express himself coherently.
“Wil, Wil, call Juf—did you not hear the news? Holland has been attacked by the moffen,” he shouted.
As he stumbled up the steps of our veranda, he unfolded the special late edition of the Rand Daily Mail, the paper he usually bought on his way from work in Roodepoort. Its headline screamed, “HOLLAND AND BELGIUM, NAZIS’ NEW VICTIMS—SUDDEN INVASION.” An entire page was devoted to the shocking news and the reactions from various world capitals.
My mother had only shortly before driven home to Lombardy East from an afternoon’s game of tennis and had not bothered to turn the radio on. She hurried to the back of the house to call Juf, and returned to my father saying in an overwrought voice, “We must contact my family—must send a telegram.”
Just then Juf appeared. She was an old-fashioned soul who preferred not to listen to the radio at all and in any case understood no English and only the little Afrikaans that she could relate to Dutch. Besides, we had to be careful with our electricity consumption: the batteries did not have unlimited capacity. When Juf heard the awful news she shook her head in disbelief. “Oh, oh, oh,” she wailed. “It can’t be true. How could the Germans have done that to us?”
“We’d better go right away into town before the post office closes!” my father urged. “Let’s see, Wil, we need to send one to Zwolle, and I must get one to Jurrema, and perhaps we should also send one to Bets.” After a search for the address book, my parents had a short discussion on what should be said in the telegram to Jurrema, the accountant who managed Juf’s pension; my father wondered whether there was time to safeguard those investments.
“What can we say to your parents,” he thought out loud.
“Let’s think about that on the way to town.”
They hurried out to the car and left in a cloud of dust, as my father raced to cover the five-mile trip to Germiston before closing time. When they returned an hour and a half later they could reassure Juf that they had succeeded, but only just, because of the huge lineup at the telegram counter. My father was spluttering about “uncooperative post office workers, who refused to stay on after six.”
“There was a scene when some who had come after us were unable to get their telegram off,” he recounted to Juf. “I authorized Jurrema to do whatever he thought best for the family.”
As if struck by a bolt of lightning, our peaceful life on the Transvaal veld had been shattered by events over five thousand miles to the north. That’s how our adventure began, a story I heard over and over again, years later, when my father and mother reflected on our troubled past.
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So glad to see the review (your book Tjideng Reunion) nin the january 2009 edition of de Krant
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This prewar map shows the surroundings of Bandoeng (Bandung). It is dated around 1937.
The Tjihapit district lay along the north eastern edge of town.
Included in the book, Tjideng Reunion, is this detailed map of the camp itself.
To clarify the position of the camp, comparison of the two images makes the location obvious because of the curious road layout.
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What follows is a short description of some of the statistical data I collected and refer to in my book, Tjideng Reunion.
Japan justified its major offensive of Dec 1941 in part on a desire to rid Asia of European influence. But an equally strong policy objective was achievement of economic hegemony, most importantly by securing control over the petroleum resources of Indonesia. In Java these two policy objectives clashed, because the economy of Indonesia had been managed by the European and Europeanized sector of the population.
The book Tjideng Reunion discusses how these policy clashes manifested itself with resultant misery for all inhabitants of Java The process of selective incarceration over time of Europeans is presented in the following graph.
This graph provides an overview of the Japanese internment history on Java. The source of the data presented is the Geillustreerde Atlas van de Japanse Kampen in Nederlands Indie 1942-1945,(J van Dulm, W.J. Krijgsveld, H.J. Legemaate, H.A.M. Liesker G Weijers, Asia Maior, 2000).
The decreasing numbers of interned military personnel over time evident from the above graph, reflected the Japanese High Command policy of using these manpower resources as slave labour elsewhere in the occupied territories and within Japan itself. The field labeled “net transport” is an aggregation of the data that has been assembled of military personnel (mainly) being shipped out of Java. The other fields attempt to aggregate the remaining interned population.
Internment was almost exclusively based on ethnic considerations, although in Bandoeng a number of civilians of mixed race were also imprisoned. The author is unaware of accurate records covering the entire war time period. What is presented in the Atlas is clearly an attempt at reconstruction from fragmentary information. For the Indonesian part of the population almost no data related to internment or slave labour is available at all.
The casualty rate associated with the internment process and the slave labour aspect is poorly defined. The Junyo Maru incident described in the book Tjideng Reunion is merely one such disaster.
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Sone, our Camp Commandant on trial for war crimes in Singapore. He was convicted and executed.
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Our friends who had accompanied us from South Africa to the Indies in 1940, now recuperating at Ismailia (Egypt) and waiting for availability of shipping south.
First post war picture of Emmy Kerkhoven, recuperating in Ismailia. Egypt , on transit to South Africa. She and her fellow travelers returned there in February on board the S.S. Felix Roussel, a French merchant ship that had sailed for the allies during the war.
Edu, waiting in Egypt at Ismailia for repatriation- still in his army uniform
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After the war we returned to South Africa as Refugees. Here is a picture of my family on the beach at Durban. In this first postwar family photograph- note my father’s hollow face.
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Cumberland
Towards the end of September 1945, one and a half months after the war had ended, the first Allied military personnel set foot on Java. The arrival of HMS Cumberland and HMNS Tromp in Tandjong Priok, the port of Batavia, was hardly the way we had anticipated being liberated by our victorious Allies. The tiny force was barely sufficient to take over Tjideng Camp guard duty from the Japanese army who for one and a half months had continued to guard the gate, but now from the threat of Indonesian rebels.
Guards
Elsewhere on Java, Japanese soldiers continued their new task of “protecting us” from former fellow citizens, an utterly bewildering turn of events. Seldom in history has a political weathervane swung so swiftly from one extreme to another. The Korean and Japanese chaps who had spent three and a half years trying to keep us locked up in the camp as enemy aliens, immediately after the armistice was signed, changed their role, and kept us locked up under Allied orders “for our safety”.
The tsunami of Japanese invasion was now replaced by the typhoon winds of political change. Within three and a half years life on Java had morphed from colonial oppression through military tyranny to descend into anarchy.
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This is a typical house on the main street of Tjideng camp.
These images give an impression of our living conditions. Trivelli was the name of the street. Today it is called Jalan Tanah Abang 2.
This is the sort of house we occupied in Tjideng along with another 110 occupants. This was a better type of home, located along the mainstreet through the camp. The picture was taken by Mr Ripassa, a Eurasian photographer who had remained at liberty throughout the war, and after September 2, when the cease fire was signed, visited Tjideng
This house is probably number 93. Note the potties and makeshift sun shade, probably plundered after the war from the camp wall.
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