As he didn’t want contact, I burned his letters

Nana had just been born when her father, the Dutch soldier Jack who was encamped in Indonesia, had to return to the Netherlands in 1949. "Take care of my sweet little daughter," he wrote his fiancée. But after a while the flow of letters dried up and the contact got broken. Only 45 years later Nana met her father for the first time.

The orphanage

'When I was three months old, my father, a Dutch soldier who had been stationed in Semarang, went back to the Netherlands. On my fourth my mother brought me to an orphanage. She had to work, and there was nobody at home to take care of me. It was difficult for her to bring me away, but it was the only solution.
I was totally unprepared. I was taken there, and my mother and my aunt left me behind. I cried terribly, I just wanted to go with them. But I could not.

It was very strict in the orphanage. There was a strong discipline. But I had a lot of girlfriends. And I had the companionship of my cousin Dientje, who was also brought tot the orphanage, a year after I got there.

Every third Sunday of the month I was a day at home. I was always very happy. When the bell at the exit rang, it meant that I could go home! Then my mother came to pick up, we spent a day at home, and in the afternoon she brought me back. My mother lived at home with her two sisters and their children. I loved it, at the end of the day I never wanted to return to the orphanage. I made my mother always buy a chocolate bar for me to persuade me to go back.

A new father

In the meantime my mother got to know another man. Together they got a daughter, my sister Sonja. For me my mother's new husband was just my father, my ‘daddy’. He loved me and made sure I was not short of anything. Nevertheless I stayed in the orphanage, for my education.

My mother told me that papi was not my real father when I was seven or eight. She showed me a photo album filled with pictures of my father and herself together. But I did not understand it at all then. “Oh, so I have a dad in the Netherlands, and that and that is the address.” That was all.
From that time on I wanted to meet him. He was just a name for me. My name comes from him, Marianne Hendrika. He has given me that name at my birth. Marianne of Mary, and Hendrika is the name of his mother. My Indonesian name is 'Nana'.
When I was an adult, my mother gave me a stack of letters from my father, whom he had written to her from the Netherlands, just after he had left. He called me in it ‘his sweet little daughter’ and asked my mother to take good care of me. I think those letters stopped when he married his new wife after a few years.

Child of a white man

I was in the orphanage from my fourth to my sixteenth. Then I went to live with my mom and daddy. They now lived in Sumatra for his work, and I came to live with them. A year later, around her 37th, my mother got blind. My father had to continue working in Sumatra and we went back to Java, to our city Semarang, because she was under treatment and could get her medications there. Eventually my father moved to the Netherlands, in 1965, and took my half sister along. My mother and I stayed in Semarang. From that day on I stayed living with my mother to take care of her. I have not finished my school because there was no money to pay school fees, so I got a job.

I have never felt ashamed that my father was a Dutchman. When I was in high school, children in the village often shouted: "Hey, Londoh-child Londoh-child." That means a child of a white man. But I was a girl, so it was not much of a problem, because I have not been given less attention by the boys. Maybe even more than other girls, because a Dutch appearance had become quite popular after a while.

I was 22 years old when I got married in 1972. My husband and I stayed here to live and care for my mother. Our four children grew up here in this same house. They all have Dutch names. Other people sometimes say to me: 'Hey, you seem Dutch'. Then I say: ‘yes, my daddy was a Dutchman, a soldier’.

Finally in touch

When our first child was about a year old, my mother went to the Netherlands to visit family. She then tried to figure out where my real father was living. That was successful. When she was back in Indonesia, she asked me to write a letter to my father. I did, with the use of a Dutch friend who helped me. But my father’s reaction was very disappointing. He wrote that it was better if we no longer had contact. "Forget it, it's over," he wrote. And that I did have another father, as he had understood.
I was so disappointed! A child searching for her father, why does the father say "what happened in the past, is in the past '? I had longed so much to see him! But I was so angry that I burned all the letters I had saved all those years, the letters he had written to my mother from the Netherlands when I was a little baby.

Much later a relative of ours, who lives in the Netherlands, contacted my father again. She eventually went to visit him, and they talked a lot. His children were there maybe too.

One of his children, his son Jos, wanted to know more about me. He telephoned me and eventually came to Indonesia to meet me. It was very emotional for both of us. We have an old album full of photos of his father with my mother, and I showed him all the pictures. He ws not familiar with any of those pictures. He heard the whole story for the first time, from my mother. And Jos had to cry.

The following year I got a ticket from the family, and I have met my own father for the first time. We arrived at Schiphol, we have embraced each other and I cried and cried. I was 45 years old. I also met his wife, but she was ill and had to live in a nursing home. And I met his children. Since then I call him father, and my other father is still my ‘daddy’. With his son Jos, I have much contact, but with the three other children not so much. And my father and me write and call every now and then. We give each other presents, and despite everything he is sweet to me.'

Read on this website also the story’s of:- Nana's father: So they finally found me (category Daddy Soldiers)

- Nana's mother: He has always stayed her great love (category Soldiers sweethearts in Indonesia)

- Nana's cousin: Two military fathers instead of one and an unknown half-brother (category Warlovechildren in the Netherlands)

- Nana's Dutch half-brothers and half-sister: A sudden confrontation (category Family & kin)