We’ve all been there. Just go back in time and think of your elementary school antics. In the schoolyard someone lashes out and says But you’re a moron. The answer that may come back when there is no good answer: No, you’re a moron. And then there is always that line of last resort and…
A Search for the Truth Interview with Thomas Watson by Patricia Teunisse, Secretary of The Indo Project. Also published in Moesson International. On October 31, 2021, The Indo Project and Moesson attended the Netherlands premiere of The Past Ended on Mango Street. The documentary is the vision of Thomas Watson, who narrates the film and…
The Back Story In light of the upcoming REVOLUSI exhibit at the Rijksmuseum which deals with the independence struggle of Indonesia, one of the Indonesian curators, Bonnie Triyana, publicly announced that the word “bersiap” should be (and was going to be) omitted from the exhibit. He argued that the term, when used by Dutch people,…
The Indo Project is asking you to save the date: Sunday, April 30th, 2023. There will be an ultimate event this year: the combination of the annual Holland Festival and the annual Dutch King’s Day celebration! This will allow everyone a unified event to celebrate our Dutch and Dutch East Indies heritage background. This event…
by Sheldon A. Krancher On September 1, 1939, the world changed. My world changed. I wasn’t born yet, but on that day my father was born. He was born Jan Adolf Krancher to his parents Ludwig Krancher and Henriette Krancher. He was the second of three children born in Malang on the island of Java…
By Edward E. E. Frietman This is the second installment in a three-part series (see part 1 and part 3) featuring Indo luminary Edward E. E. Frietman. In this chapter, he recounts his experiences as a young child in the immediate aftermath of World War II, during the violent and chaotic Bersiap period in what is…
UPDATE: FILM NO LONGER AVAILABLE ONLINE (2024) Louis Couperus was one of the few Dutch writers to become fairly widely known outside Holland. His great novel ‘The Hidden Force’, (‘De Stille Kracht’), which is set in the Dutch East Indies, has been translated into English and is available from Pushkin Press. The description on the…
On August 15, 2023, the victims of the Second World War in the former Dutch East Indies were commemorated in over fifty places in the Netherlands. The war experiences and the large-scale displacement that followed are still affecting two million people in the Netherlands with an Indies family war story and in the Dutch society…
A Young Indo Woman Displays Courage, Cunning, and Hope By Sally Brandle The author notes that Iris passed away early December 2021, just short of her 98th birthday before this article was published. Iris, the little girl on the left, and her brothers are the descendants of an Indo maternal grandmother, a French countess paternal…
[Featured Photo: From Left to right: sister, mother, Oscar and father. Oscar in tub in Malang] By Oscar Micola Von Furstenrecht Born 1929-December-03 in Malang, Indonesia (Java) At a very young age, growing up in Malang, I was admitted into a military hospital with Bacilary Tifus. After a difficult time, I slipped into a…