It was Love with a big L

I was born in 1926. My mother was not a Jew, but my father was. As a child, I was sometimes abused when I walked down the street. And I was not always allowed to play with the other children. Parents used to come up to me and say: ‘Don’t you play with my little boy. You’re a Jew!’ I thought: ‘What is a Jew?’ And I had to make inquiries as to what it exactly meant.

My parents divorced when I was a year old. My mother had to work her guts out for me to bring me up in school and that. We just lived in a little attic. Two little rooms, with no electricity. The only thing we had was water. Terrible. How can a little boy grow up in a an attic?

During WW2 the Nazis classified me as a Jew and I had to wear the star, but I didn’t. I denied it. Anyway, my mother and me survived the war. Then liberation came around and it was not long after that, in 1946, that I had to go to the military service. So I became part of the Dutch Wehrmacht, the Dutch army. And I was send to Indonesia.

We were told that we were going to liberate the Indonesian people and kick out the Japanese. But when we arrived, the Japanese were already gone. As a matter of fact, we went there to look after the assets of the Dutch government: Shell, the rubber… Liberation, my foot! But apart from that, I loved the army. Because I had a roof over my head, free meals, and I got out of that little attic where we lived. Somehow you knew you were not welcome there by the Indonesians. People didn’t go in the street and wave to you: ‘our liberators’. Some of them spat in front of you. But it was not in my mind at all to chop anybody’s head off. I wasn’t a fighting soldier, I was in the LTD, the Leger Technische Dienst. A kind of army storekeeper.

Loving Indonesia

I loved Indonesia. I got stationed in Semarang. In the city itself we were more or less ignored as Dutch soldiers. The Indonesians glared at us. But that’s all. I was a bit different to the other boys. I wanted to learn about Indonesia. I started with learning the language. And during the night you could hear the gamelan play in the surrounding kampong. And I was intrigued with that sound of the gamelan playing. So I went there in the evenings when I heard the gamelan. People got to know me, and they noticed that I was sincerely interested in their culture. So they became friendly with me, offered me their chair. And I learned the language a bit. And… well…. there was this girl. About fifteen. Little Surip. All laughing and full of fun. Yeah, well… What happened, just a bit of romance, you know.

She’d take me to her house, and asked me ‘Could I wash your clothes?’ To earn a bit of money. And she washed them and the next day she came to the barracks and nicely ironed and everything. And when she learned I couldn’t eat the army food, she cooked. The dishes she made were terrible, but what can a fellow say? I was head over heels in love with her. Service like that, eating, and looked after properly. A house and a table to sit on. You had a kind of a home life. And what happens in a situation like that? You stay the night. I went there on Saturdays and came back to the barracks on Monday morning. It was lovely to sleep in the kampong. There is this kind of atmosphere, this stillness, this quietness. And you hear the chickens cackling and scratching in the dirt. I thought: what a lovely life that is.

Condoms above the counter

The sexual education we got in the army was mainly taught by the doctor about venereal disease. That’s all. And you had these parades: they look at your genitals, to see if it is all in good order there. That happened once every six months or something. And the doctor said: “Don’t go with the Indonesian girls, they are all sick. They’re riddled with venereal diseases.” Oh wahh… Well, it made an impression on me, too. That’s the kind of picture they tried to implant in your mind. You shouldn’t be with the girls at all. You had to be celibate. How can you tell a boy, a soldier, to be celibate? We were all in our twenties. During the night the boys were helping themselves. What else could they do to get rid of it? But the girl I had then, little Surip, she was safe….

Why didn’t they supply soldiers there with condoms? You could buy condoms with the Chinese, they were hanging there in strips on the counter. When you went into the shop to buy condoms, these Chinese girls started giggling at you. You didn’t like that. You didn’t buy the condoms because of the grinning Chinese girls behind the counter. Well, I did go there now and then, I did buy, but… It didn’t seem right. You could try not to get a girl pregnant, but… And what do you like when you’re twenty and you are with a girl there in the tropics? That’s not a once in a month sort of a thing, that is a nightly thing, just about. How much do seven condoms cost? You can’t afford it! I’m sorry about that, but… yeah…

The talk amongst us boys was that to prevent to make a girl pregnant, what you do is, as we say in Holland, leave the church before the singing starts. And I have practiced that, but…. Yeah…. I have been told that girls can do something to stop sperm entering their body. I don’t know if that is true. That somehow, inside, they can squeeze muscles so the sperm doesn’t enter. I don’t know. That’s what I was told. But me and Surip never talked about it. Otherwise it wouldn’t be love-making. If you have to be frightened for babies…

Real love

I was a very shy boy, I didn’t go with girls, really. Surip was my first one. She was always happy, laughing, full of fun. And me, with my depressed kind of an attitude, I felt uplifted being in her presence. We used to go out, to the movies and things like that. She loved the movie Tarzan. She was always very proud of walking there with her Dutch soldier. She tripped alongside me, almost half the size of me even with her high heels, her sarong, and a slendang over her head, like a prude Indonesian Muslim girl. And I was touched to have this little girl walking next to me. Any boy would be.

In the evening, we are sitting up in bed, and I combed her hair. For a fellow to do that to a girl, you must be in love! And for her the same. Yeah, we cuddled up at night… that is love with a big L, or not?

Happy dad

One day when I came to her, she said: I’m pregnant. She might have expected me to run away and never see me again, but I said: ‘Oh, really? Lovely’. Of course it should have been uppermost in my mind, pregnancy. I should have known, and I should have been very careful having sex and use condoms and that. But I was lacking the responsibility.

Well, that’s it. Happy dad. I looked after both of them. I used to take the child to the barracks. I was proud of it ! I was lucky that they let me stay, because other boys who went about with Indonesian girls and women, specially a married woman, were sometimes transferred to another part of Indonesia.

And then the Dutch army was about to leave, because of the ending of the fightings. I wanted to stay with Surip and my son. But a fellow has to make a living. And what kind of living could I make? There were no jobs for me in Indonesia. Still I started to look for a job. But I did not succeed. That went on till the fatal day came along. That last day… I was picked up from her house… Awww… That image of her, standing in the middle of the road with the little baby like a Madonna, and the jeep moved away from her and I sat there looking at her and she got smaller and smaller until the jeep went around the corner… That sticked in my mind for the rest of my life. Terrible. A cruel thing to do.

A new life

Now, the first thing I did when I was back in Holland, was write a letter and put money in it. And I kept on writing and sending money and parcels. I was a dad. I was the head of a family there. I had a son there and my wife. I applied with companies like Shell, the Railways… a chemical factory who had a factory in Indonesia. And the answers were all the same: “no  vacancy”. I became fairly depressed after a while.

Having Surip in Indonesia didn’t mean I didn’t go out with girls at all. Now and again I did go with a girl. No touch, just a kiss in the evening and go home. Or a bit of a more permanent relationship, and that girl wondered why I didn’t ask her to marry. And one time I did tell her about Surip, I must have been drunk or something. I told her about having a baby in Indonesia. And I never saw that girl again.

I tried to put it out of my mind. A little voice saying: “give it all away. Let them vegetate there, they’ll be alright. Go have a good life with girls and live a normal life.” I didn’t send money for months on end sometimes… You can’t help that, you know. You’re all a human being.

A small jump from Australia to Indonesia

I still have the letters I wrote and the letters she wrote. And so it went on and on. Till… When did I apply for immigration? That must have been 1957. Six years after I left Indonesia, I finally got a visa to Australia, which is not far from Indonesia. I hoped that from Australia, I might find a way to work myself back to Indonesia.

And I wrote a letter to Surip: ‘Australia is a country not very far from Indonesia. So I might be able to come to Indonesia.’ Somebody wrote a letter back to me that she was married. That was a shock to me. But after a while I could understand it. A woman like that, waiting six, seven years for a fellow to come back to her…

Married

So I was free… but I never felt freedom. I became a workaholic. To get that picture out of my mind, the Indonesian period. I never thought about the possibility of my son being abused in Indonesia because of his roots. He was not blond or anything, he looked a bit like an Arab, or a Jewish appearance, a big nose and that. I knew his life would not be easy, because I compared his life with mine. But I got through it, so he probably will get through it, I thought. And then Surip, I hoped that she got a job or something. That she wouldn’t be starving. You hoped. Because I couldn’t do anything. I was powerless.

Don’t think that I forgot all about Luwi! He was still on my mind. And a couple of times I saved money and I thought I’ll go to Indonesia. That was in the 1970s. And I had some money and I made inquiries to go to Indonesia, and then my mother died. She had had a hard life, and I thought: I must go there, to bury her, the poor thing. So I went to Holland for the funeral and all my travel money went in that. All my savings were gone.

I didn’t get married till 1981. I got to know a girl in the Philippines, and we were going to marry. I had just saved enough money for the second time to go to Indonesia and go find my son. And now I had to make this choice: either go get my wife from the Philippines or go search for my son in Indonesia. Now what kind of a choice is that? Terrible, isn’t it?

And it went through my mind: when I go to Indonesia, I say ‘hello, how are you. I am your dad.’ And then I stay there for a fortnight and then I have to go back to Australia again. Now, that would be a terrible thing for the boy, and for me too. It did not feel good anymore. And I made the decision to get my wife from the Philippines instead. When I look back at it, it is the right decision. Because what would have happened if I had gone to Indonesia, just for the fortnight? It would have caused a lot of emotional upsets and nerves…  And then we would have touched each other, you see. You will begin to get a bond or something, but that wouldn’t be any good, really. Yeah, so I got my wife over and married.

A strong bond

In 1990, my young son found a letter and a photograph of Surip and Luwi in my suitcase. And he asked who these people were. I told him this was his elder brother. That made me decide to try and get in touch with Luwi. I wrote a letter to the same address I had from a long time ago. And I did get an answer! Fancy that. Luwi’s mother Surip received a letter and she couldn’t read, so she passed it on to her son, who was then… how old will he have been? 41. And Luwi wrote back. He didn’t know who I was. It was only after a couple of letters that he realised that I was his dad. And so the correspondence started. He told me all about his life, and I told him all about my wife and two children, and he had two children. The last letter I received from Surip 30 years before to tell me she was married, I passed it on to Luwi, so he would understand that I was not the one who abandoned him, at the end. And up to this day we have been writing, exchanging letters and pictures. And somehow by letter we started forming a bond. And I’m not sorry that we never even saw each other. I think that the bond we have now is a better bond than… going there.