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The story of Gerda de Haan about her half-sister Edwina in Indonesia
Out of curiosity and fun, we googled my father’s name, and while surfing, we arrived at the site of the December 7th Division. Just by coincidence. To our surprise there was a call from a certain Edwina who was looking for her father, Eddie de Haan. Our father! We really needed some time to recover from the shock. The call was one year old, but we still tried to contact. The call was in Dutch, so we did not even know if she lived in the Netherlands or Indonesia ...
There was no response to our attempts for contact, and we all thought that the trail again went dead. We have placed calls to several sites, including on this site Warlovechild.com.
On Mother's Day, May 2009, we suddenly got a reply via e-mail from Indonesia by Edwina. And that was another shock. We compared all our data, and everything was correct. Even the baptismal names were similar: my father's name was Eduard Marie Cornelis, and our half-sister was called Eduarda Maria Cornelia.
In his spare time my father played in a music band in Bandung in those years, in the Homann Hotel. His band was called Sweet Seventeen. That’s where Wanda and my father met.
My father, born in 1921, probably never knew he had fathered a child. We recalculated everything completely. He has been in Indonesia from 1946 to 1949. In June 1949 he was back in the Netherlands. If you reckon the boat trip back to the Netherlands, including disembarking, will have lasted about 6-8 weeks have, he must have left Indonesia sometime in April. Edwina was born in December 1949, so conceived around March 1949. Edwina's mother probably did not even know she was pregnant, when my father was already on the boat on his way back to Holland!
Edwina's mother, the Indonesian Wanda, left for the Netherlands in 1950 to search for the father of her child. She left her child up for adoption in Indonesia, less than six months old. Edwina did not have a good time with her adoptive parents. Her adoptive father was nice, but her adoptive mother was brutally. She hit her a lot, locked her up, things like that.
Wanda's mother stayed in the Netherlands and has never got in touch with her daughter Edwina since. However, she really has been looking for father Eddie.
She even seems to have knocked at the door of the Ministry of Defence with the names of her beloved, but they said they could not help because they did not have enough clues with the vague name 'Eddie de Haan’. Strange, because mother Wanda should have known all baptismal names of my father, otherwise she could never have named her daughter with the same baptismal names. And so there are more puzzles, which we can’t solve. My father is deceased and his only sister was already deceased at the age of 15, so we can not contact family members with our questions. Edwina's mother Wanda has a sister who is still living, but she does noet want to talk about it.
Eventually Wanda contacted her daughter in 2004 from the Netherlands once. Edwina was already 54! Maybe her mother had remorse, and she felt the end approaching. Because she had cancer and had not long to live. She traveled to Indonesia for this one occasion and has met Edwina. Only then she told Edwina about her father and her heritage. Edwina has known nothing of this all this time, no names, no pictures, no nothing!
We are very pleased now, despite the initial shock, that we are in touch with each other. We mail regularly (luckily we can correspond in English) and next year we will travel to Indonesia to meet. We are happy that we found each other!
Gerda de Haan, June 2009 |
The documentary
