Rising from the Shadow of the Sun, A Story of Love, Survival and Joy brings the horror and losses of World War II on Java off the battlefields and military POW camps and into the world of Ronny Herman, who is barely three years old in 1942 when the Japanese conquer the island of Java and force her family…
Special call to emigrants from the former Dutch-Indies who departed to the US under provisions of the Pastore-Walter Act (1958-1962) In May 2013, “Opgevangen in andijvielucht,” the new book by journalist Griselda Molemans, will be published on the reception of approximately 350,000 refugees from the former Dutch East Indies in The Netherlands. Due to lack…
The end of WWII came to the Netherlands on 5 May 1945. This was not the case for their former colony, the Netherlands East Indies. While most of Europe was celebrating the end of German occupation, the war in Asia raged on until the atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and…
Read as an Indo refugee treasures prized possessions from Indonesia as her family repatriates to the Netherlands and then eventually immigrated to the USA. Like many other Dutch-Indonesian refugees, our family took only a few meager possessions with us when we made the journey across the Atlantic from Holland to America. I was almost 4…
When the Dutch government eventually granted independence to their former colony, the Dutch (Netherland) East Indies in 1949, a large community of some 200,000 Indos were forced to find a new homeland. They were the offspring (descendants) of former Dutch and other European settlers, who often intermarried with women of Indonesian or other mixed ancestry. …
A recent article in “De Java Post” about Oom Bert Simon, started me thinking. Oom Bert was one of eight children; I don’t remember if he was the 3rd or 4th child. He was very popular with the Indo/Indonesian community in Holland, as he was Station Manger for Garuda Indonesian Airways. He was also my…