Book Review: War’s Long Shadow – A Family’s Journey

by Wim Versteegh

I was born in 1947, the seventh child in my family and the first to be born in the Netherlands. My six elder siblings were born on the island of Java, before World War II, a war that would change everything for us.

Like the Dutch author Adriaan van Dis, I found myself in the somewhat uncomfortable situation of being the sole member of my family to not experience the war or its prison camps – I was the “lucky” one. Over the years, I explored different episodes of my life in short stories and poetry, searching for a way to explain why they occurred. As an English teacher, writing was an obvious medium for this exploration. 

With the encouragement of family members, I recently set about writing a comprehensive reflection on my life and the journey of my family through that significant portion of the 20th century. I thought I would aim for a document roughly 20,000 words in length – the final product ended up totaling 74,000 words. I gradually came to realize that I was describing the broader context of my family’s story, which is why the account swings between personal memoir and world history. 

The book in question, titled War’s Long Shadow, begins with my entrance through an Australian orphanage in 1954 and that crucial question – how had it come to this? To answer that question, we travel back in time and meet my parents – my father Ferdinand, an Indo (not a term he would have used), born near Yogyakarta in 1905, and my mother Beppie, a Dutch woman born in Den Haag in 1906. Their story is one that many Indos are all too familiar with, and often share:  a journey to the Dutch East Indies, life on a balmy plantation, a growing family, increasing tensions in an unstable world, imprisonment under the Japanese, the end of war but without the hoped-for peace, “repatriation” to the Netherlands – and finally migration to a new country. That’s what this book is about.

I have read many memoirs by those who survived the war and the prison camps, and often they are remarkably similar; indeed, parts of my story can be found in many other memoirs and biographies. Indos and non-Indos alike – and their families – recognize the long shadow that World War II cast over their lives, and the impact it has had, not only on those who personally endured this time, but also on their spouses, their children and perhaps grandchildren. My book attempts to train a sharper focus on the longer term effects of the war and its aftermath, from the perspective of one who was not directly a victim in this story. At times, the dominant voice of this narrative is that of a child; a boy who, like all children, lacked agency over his own life.

While the book attempts to trace the impact that war has on individuals, it also informs people of these events and their wider historical context. By “people,” I mean not only children  and grandchildren generationally impacted by these events, but a wider community. Very few Australians have any knowledge of what happened in the Dutch East Indies during World War II. To most, it was irrelevant, something that didn’t happen to them, so how could it affect them? But the events of World War II in the Dutch East Indies has had such an encompassing, widespread impact, affecting many lives and creating a distinct cultural group – the Indos. I don’t want to see this event – and the lives it changed, the stories it birthed – disappear without a trace, and I would like to see this moment in history understood and recorded. I would like to see Indos recognized as a group, their stories documented and their culture respected.

I believe there are lessons to be learned here; lessons about what happens to people who are disempowered and brutalized, whether these people were our family members, cruelly treated and with their freedom taken away from them in concentration camps, or those brutalized during forced labor on the Burma-Thai railway, or the Indonesian people themselves, deprived of their independence under centuries of Dutch colonial rule. There are memories here that merit being recorded and people who deserve to be remembered.

It took around ten months for me to complete writing the book; I was surprised how quickly the story grew – I suppose much of the narrative had been churning around in my head for a long time, now I was just connecting the ideas. Once the first draft was completed, there was further editing to be done and the inclusion of eighty or so photos. During this time I carried out further research and reading, the latter which included letters written by various family members, especially some written by my father. These hand-written letters, written in Dutch, were quite challenging to translate. It was a delicate process, trying to capture the tone and idiomatic expression of the writer in a modern yet authentic manner. But in this process I learned much.

My father left the Netherlands to return to the Indies about a week after I was born, in July 1947; his intention was to return there and to resume his work as a plantation manager. He must have been convinced that the Dutch would retain their control over their eastern empire. In any case, he sensed there was work for him there, while Holland held no hope, no prospects for him. On the other hand, my mother had no intention of returning to the Dutch East Indies; she was still recovering from the trauma of war, and she had six older children plus a newborn to take into account. I hardly knew my father. This writing project has helped me to come to know him better and to understand his motivations far more clearly. Even as I was finishing the final copy, I discovered more information, this time regarding my father’s involvement in the Burma-Thai railway. This led me to write a postscript and caused me to reconsider the person he was.

I hope that people who read this story will approach it from a place of understanding and not judgment; that they will try to understand why people act as they do, especially when subjected to forces beyond their control, and when they have suffered trauma. Towards the end of my writing, I recognized a theme of disempowerment across the narrative, and it underscored for me that the way forward – for nations and individuals – is to empower them. As a teacher of English and History, I see that it has always been my unconscious aim to empower my students through language. Empowerment gives us dignity, builds our self-worth and our ability to withstand, analyze and resist the negativity that surrounds us.

One aspect I’ve not yet discussed, but which was central to my family’s experience, is migration. My siblings and I all reacted differently to leaving one country and beginning in another; we rejected our past and adapted to new life in different ways. Indonesia, the Netherlands, Australia – who were we in these places, and what did we want to be? These questions are ones that Indos have grappled with since World War II, continuing into today. This is why I was fascinated when I came across The Indo Project online; I saw the potential to explore a new facet of my identity, one I’d only been marginally aware of, previously. Identity is certainly a strong, consistent thread woven through the narratives of the Dutch East Indies. Personally, I have always felt torn, but the fact that I am somewhat divided makes me a sterner critic of what I find around me, for better or worse.

My book intends to capture several of the seminal moments of the 20th century: colonization, depression, war, decolonization, displacement and migration. These tectonic movements, which can easily make an individual feel helpless, persist in our contemporary world. To look into our past and understand them makes us wiser for today. Writing about these matters has certainly helped me understand my family much better, and has given moe more empathy for those in our present time, caught up in similar circumstances.

There was not a moment while I was writing this narrative, when I was not enjoying the process. While parts of it were emotionally tough, I enjoyed the challenge of writing about these, even if I was writing for an unknown audience. Some things were especially helpful. I have always been the family’s collector and recorder of family photographs, and photos often provide me with inspiration and ideas; stepping stones towards the next episode. Similarly, I have often been inspired by letters, documents and even objects. Two of my most precious objects are a pair of decorated napkin rings, made of scrap metal in a POW camp at Tjimahi, dated 23 June 1942. There were originally eight of these which my father had made for each member of the family, inscribed with a personal message. For me they are a powerful connection with that time more than eighty years ago. Things like this invigorate my writing.

Another major support for my story was the fact that I had interviewed my siblings on one or two occasions over the years. These interviews were collected together in a private publication entitled A Chain of Voices, and the material in it has been invaluable. Sometimes, people’s recollections of events are contradictory, but even this matters little – all historical writing is riddled with contradictions, and it is up to readers to draw their own conclusions. In order to flesh out my family’s connection with the former Dutch East Indies, I also drew on some better-known Versteegh relatives, whose stories are already in the public realm. These include my grandfather’s cousin, Johanna Kloppenburg-Versteegh, who wrote a well-known book on the medicinal use of Indonesian plants, and also my father’s cousin, Pierre Versteegh, who was a leader in the Dutch underground during World War II and was executed at Sachsenhausen.

While the story centers around the crucial events of World War II, the first part focuses on the Indies and the second half is largely preoccupied with my own childhood and how what happened in the past affected me. This may seem self-indulgent, and the thought definitely occurred to me as I was writing, but the only truth I can be certain of is what came from my own experiences. I was not directly involved in the drama of the war, yet I feel its impact. I would like to know whether others in similar situations as me share this belief. My intentions behind this book is to shed more light on recent historical events, and spread an understanding of what happened in the Dutch East Indies during World War II and keep the conversation going.

The author and publisher disclaim any liability in connection with the use of the information and content of this article.