Daddy soldiers

The story of veteran Bas about his daughter Rose

'A year ago I received a letter from the FIOM (organisation that helps reunite family members). My daughter was looking for me. That was a bolt from the blue. I was shaking in my seat, with the letter in my hands. Pictures and everything was in it. I was devastated. I knew everything was true, I recognized it all. It was so obvious, it was not necessary at all to ask for a DNA-test.

One day the phone rang. After answering the call, I thought, ‘so they finally found me.’ It must have been somewhere around 1979, I suppose my daughter was about 30 years old.

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.

Ten years ago I watched television with my wife, the program ‘Spoorloos’ (‘Without a trace’). We always liked watching that program. My wife made a cup of coffee in the kitchen. When she came back in the living room, there were two guys on TV, a twin of almost 50 years old, who sought their father. The boys were born in Surabaya. My wife looked at me and said: 'that boys could be yours...'. In some way or another she saw a resemblance. And then suddenly, my name appeared on screen ...

A week after he and his fiancee had broken their engagement by mail, Henk took a stroll through the streets around the barracks in Semarang. Suddenly he stood face to face with a nice girl. Less than an hour later they were together in bed in her shack.

It began with compassion for a pregnant girl who was abandoned by a soldier. But one thing led to another, and history repeated itself. Now, 60 years later, he has a hard time. He would love to get to know his abandoned daughter. But where is she?

The confession of a secret