Those Dutch servicemen were real womanizers

The story of John Sopaheluwakan and his sister Elly Hahijary

When I was  6, 7 years old, I lived with my mother and my two brothers near a military camp. Adrie Vermeulen, one of the soldiers stationed there, came around a lot on our door for a couple of weeks. And suddenly, after five weeks, he did not appear anymore. We asked his friend: "Where is Adrie?" “He’s gone”, he said, “he's back to the Netherlands.” Later we learned that my mother had become pregnant of my sister Elly. Father Adrie has never given a sign of life ever after.

Tough guys

My mother, the Moluccan Suzanne (Susan) Hahijary, became a widow at a young age. My father Sopaheluwakan was telegraphist in the KNIL (Dutch-Indies Army) and was executed by the Japanese in WW2. I myself was a year or 3, 4 at that time. So suddenly my mother was alone with three young boys.

My mother cooked for a living. We lived in kampong Gambir in Jakarta. That was not so far from a military camp, located near the cathedral in Jakarta. I went regularly to the military camp, to beg for bread at the barbed wire. Finally, me, a little boy, befriended a Dutch soldier, Henk Ruhe. He served in the shock troops, the 10th Battalion. I actually still consider him as a sort of older foster brother.
Henk worked in the forage and had access to a jeep. I invited Henk occasionally to come to our home for a visit. Then he drove with a few friends with the jeep into the compound. The ‘Jago boys’, so we called them: the tough guys. They were real womanizers. I gradually became a sort of mascot for them, though I did not realize that at that moment myself. I sometimes had to guard the jeep and then they went to the pubs, having fun with the girls. And one of them was Adrie Vermeulen. A slim, blond, Dutch boy. He was film operator in the barracks, that was his job. And he was a kind of disc jockey, when they had a party.

Pregnant

At a certain moment Adrie often came along to visit my mother. And then suddenly he had left for the Netherlands. I do not know if he knew at his departure that my mother was pregnant, but his mates had told him anyway some time thereafter. My sister was born on May 11, 1950. His friend Henk Ruhe told us that Adrie had said to him: “I will take care of mother and child, and make them come over to the Netherlands.” But the Dutch Army did not allow civilians traveling with military service, so he could not have taken care of that at all.

Henk Ruhe had offered to take me, his favorite, to the Netherlands, but my mother did not want to hear about it. After the departure of the Dutch troops I went to the St. Vincent orphanage in Jakarta. There I have learned Dutch and Dutch customs. When a family who also had a child in the orphanage, offered to take me to the Netherlands in 1950, I finally left for Holland.

Dutch characteristics

My sister Elly stayed behind with my mother in Jakarta. Unlike us, the tree brothers with the surname Sopaheluwakan, as my father was called, my sister has my mother’s surname, Hahijary. She has always been different from the rest of the family. A white Indonesian. My mother always called her “Nona Blanda”, the Dutch lady. She had a strong will and was very compelling, and my mother would say: “She seems to be like her father.” Obviously she considered this a typical Dutch characteristic.

When I visited my sister in Jakarta 30 years later, she told me that she longed to meet her father once in her life. We actually started searching for her from that moment on. My mother never wanted to talk about it. We have no picture of him, nothing. I asked my mother for the army number Adrie Vermeulen and other information, because I knew it was important for my sister Elly to find out something about her father. But my mother closed her mouth firmly. "That’s none of your business," was her only reply. She has taken her secrets to the grave. And she apparently transmitted this silence to my sister: Elly never wanted to talk about it when she was younger. Even  her own children did not know she was conceived by a Dutch soldier. She felt ashamed.
Henk Ruhe has deceased, so we can not ask him for more information. He had no wife and children who might have known something. We tried to start searching with the help of the Red Cross, by the television series ‘Traceless’ and so on. But it all failed.

Peace of mind

My sister is not feeling well the last couple of years. My wife Ivon and me are very concerned about her. Elly has little connection with Indonesia and has gotten estranged from her family and the neighborhood where she lives. She is sometimes really confused. It all started going downhill when our mother was deceased in 1984. She has always suffered from the fact that she has never known her father. A lot of her character was attributed to her father, but nobody knew for sure. This has probably undermined her. Actually there is very little we can do for her. Besides finding her father. Then at least she will find some peace in her mind.

thanks to Ivon Sopaheluwakan