A closet full of souvenirs from the Netherlands

The story of warlovechild Lenny

While Lenny tells her story, every now and then her eyes fill with tears. Her house in Jakarta is full of memorabilia from the Netherlands: the famous Delft Blue kissing Volendam couple, the colored wooden tulips in a Delft Blue vase, a coffee cup with Amsterdam canal houses painted on it, Delft Blue plates on the wall with windmills or an Islamic text in Arabic script. Even the studio photo, shot in an old-fashioned Volendam kitchen in Volendam traditional clothes, is not lacking. But the looks of her own father are unknown to Lenny.

A love story in Jakarta

Lenny was born in 1947 in Jakarta. What day or month, she does not know exactly. And the only thing she can tell about her name ‘Lenny’ is that the sister of her Dutch father was probably called Lena.
She knows almost nothing about her father. Her mother kept her mouth shut and Lenny has never dared to ask much. In those past days it was a very rude thing when children asked their parents about such subjects. The little that Lenny knows about her father, she has heard years later from the sisters of her mother and her stepfather.

Her Javanese mother Suyati came from a Muslim family and must have been around 23 years old when she met this Dutch military with whom she fell in love. The young soldier was alternately stationed in the barracks in Jakarta and in Cimahi, near Bandung. According to an aunt, he used to drive a military vehicle for the army. According to this aunt Lenny's mother, Suyati, sometimes joined him on his way to the barracks in Jakarta and Cimahi.

It is said that after Lenny's birth in 1947 a second child had been born, a son, who died soon after the delivery. Lenny has overheard this story, but she is not sure if it is true. She herself can not remember her father. She was a three year old toddler when her father went back to the Netherlands in 1950, like all other Dutch soldiers. He had proposed to his girlfriend and their daughter to come along to the Netherlands, but Suyati did not dare. How could she survive in a completely foreign country without family or friends? So Lenny's father left without his beloved ones.

Child of a Dutchman

It was hard for mother Suyati to take care for a child on her own, while she had to work for a living. Her sister, who lived in Balikpapan, welcomed Lenny in her family, so Suyati could earn a living as a maid. Lenny lived with her aunt from 1952 to 1956. Then she went back to live with her mother in Jakarta, who was now married.

Her mother and stepfather got five children together: the four step-brothers and a stepsister of Lenny. Lenny, the oldest of the family, knew that she was the child of another father. There was no hiding about it, while she differed so clearly from the rest of the family, with her pale skin and european looks. She always had the feeling that her mother treated her stricter than the other children. Perhaps Suyati felt embarrassed because she had had intercourse with a Dutch soldier and had a child. Maybe she was angry that she had been abandoned with a small child. Lenny will never know for sure.
Even at school and in the neighborhood it was known that Lenny was the child of a Dutch soldier. She was sometimes teased: “Oh, you're the child of a Dutchman” or children called her names like “buleh”, meaning “white”. That sort of thing. It was not pleasant, but what could she do? A schoolmate of hers was also a secret child of a Dutch soldier. So they told to each other once. But otherwise Lenny did not talk about it with anyone. Whom could she have turned to to relieve her sorrows?

A name, a letter and a photo

Many years later, when Lenny was trying to find out more about her origins, her stepfather told her, that at his departure the Dutch soldier had given a letter and a photograph to Suyati with the words: “Give this later to my daughter, when she is grown up.” Suyati could not read and write and thus never knew what the letter said. She stored the letter and the photo in a closet. But when a neighbor’s house was on fire and the homes around it also got ignited, the letter and the picture burned to ashes with the house. Lenny's only sign of her father thus disappeared.

Fortunately, the stepfather of Lenny had once read the letter. He remembered that the name Lenny’s father had written was ‘Willy van de Arts’. But it could also have been ‘Willy van der Arts’ , ‘Willy Arts’ , ‘Willy Aerts’ or something similar. An aunt told her, that her father had once returned to Jakarta and had gone looking for his daughter. But Lenny lived with her aunt in Balikpapan at that ime, and the two have never met.

A small chance

Lenny has six children. All kids, like Lenny, have faint signs of the Dutch complexion coming from their grandfather. One of them, daughter Inneke Koesherawaty, has become a famous actress in Indonesia.
Lenny has always longed to find her Dutch father and his family. But where should she start? The attempts that she has done, all came to nothing because she does not know the right name of her father. When she visited Holland, every time she saw an old man, she thought: ‘Could that be my father?’ That’s the reason why she so open in our conversation, even if that's difficult. It is the last small chance to find out something about her family ties in the Netherlands.

Interview: Annegriet Wietsma, Jakarta
Interpreter: Joop Pelupessy