- The Author, age 7 (barefoot) and friend
This is an image of yours truly at age 7 standing with bare feet by the solitary water supply for our house. Our house stood very close to the gate, and we two kids were probably the first interned children the photographer encountered.
For the occasion my young friend placed my birthday present on his head.
The rest of the Indian outfit was too grotesquely hot to be worn when straddling the equator. I am positive that this exact same outfit was passed on from one birthday boy to the next in rapid succession. We arrived in the Tjideng camp with next to nothing. The mother of the previous owner of the Indian outfit had been in Tjideng from the very start and so still had quite a lot of possessions.
Photo from NIOD ( Netherlands Institute of War Documentation)
- Gedek Destruction
When food became more plentiful after the war we needed firewood and the bamboo wall was an attractive source of this commodity. The plundering operation was soon stopped by the Japanese camp Commandant because the bamboo wall had now become our defense against rioting Indonesians.
Photo from NIOD ( Netherlands Institute of War Documentation)
Room of Women in Tjideng Camp
In the Tjideng camp, houses that had been designed to accommodate a normal family now held well in excess of 100 women and children. There are claims that some houses accommodated (a euphemism under the circumstances) as many as 150. Aside from the complete collapse of hygiene with the resulting onslaught of dysentery and a host of other diseases, there was a complete lack of privacy.
Mothers and Children in Tjideng Camp
These people were thus assaulted both physically and mentally, and many never recovered after the war when once more they were fed. We were lucky that we missed the monsoon season, when flooding of the low lying and poorly drained coastal land where Tjideng was situated, added another dimension of misery and suffering.
Photos from NIOD ( Netherlands Institute of War Documentation)
Shortly after we arrived in Tjideng the supply of coffins dried up for reasons unknown. Henceforth a coffin making factory was established in Tjideng camp right accross the road from our house. Its productivity, alas, was inadequate in terms of volume as the death rate increased and also in terms of quality fell short of requirements as the bloated conditions of the corpses taxed the rudimentary materials used by the coffin makers.
Photo from NIOD ( Netherlands Institute of War Documentation)
- Tjideng Camp Gate, 1945
This picture appears on the front cover of the book, Tjideng Reunion. It shows the Tjideng camp gate shortly after the war was declared over ( August 23, 1945) when the first curious visitors from Batavia came to see what lay behind the mysterious Bamboo wall from where so many dead emerged. The author and his mother may well be among the crowd of curious internees looking out onto the much changed outside world.
Photo from NIOD ( Netherlands Institute of War Documentation)
