Suffering and Survival: The Experience of Dutch Women in

Japanese Internment Camps in Java, 1941–45

Mia Jeronimus

Human Rights Quarterly, Volume 45, Number 4, November 2023, pp.

695-721 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

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HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

Suffering and Survival: The Experience

of Dutch Women in Japanese
Internment Camps in Java, 1941–45

Mia Jeronimus

ABSTRACT
The case of Dutch women imprisoned in Japanese internment camps in
Java, 1941-45, is a little known chapter within the well-known context
of the Second World War. This article deciphers the possibilities of their
experience by examining two temporally distinct sets of sources from the
women’s perspectives. The first comprises a series of ego-documents and
interviews written during the war and just after it, and the second is a collec-
tion of sources from the 1990s onwards, in the form of memoir, oral history,
and children’s testimonies spoken in front of the Japanese Embassy in The
Hague in 2005. In the spaces and inconsistencies between these two sets
of testimony a diverse and complex picture of female experience is found
across three predominant themes: motherhood, female community, and
sexual assault. Each section is an insight into how agency is sought when
agency is denied, how the women held themselves, organized themselves,
and supported and fought against one another within a regime indifferent
to whether they lived or died.

Mia Jeronimus is a graduate, with Exhibition, of History at Balliol College, Oxford, 2022. Her
research focuses on female experiences of displacement, as a result of war, imprisonment, or
climate forced migration, with particular interest in the contrast between parallel female expe-
rience and differential refugee treatment. Her work, scholarly and journalistic, places special
focus on interviews conducted firsthand. She is based in London.

Human Rights Quarterly 45 (2023) 695–721 © 2023 by Johns Hopkins University Press
696 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 45

I. INTRODUCTION

My first impression was of someone who had landed on another planet and
who had to talk to people already dead. I got the feeling these were no normal
human beings and their reactions did not fit in with what one could expect of
normal adults.1

Lieutenant Colonel Nicolai Read-Collins spoke these words at the Tokyo War
Crimes Tribunal on December 23, 1946. The British officer describes his
observation of the women interned in the Tjideng camp, one of the camps
he visited in his role organizing food supplies across Java at the liberation.
Collins can only express these female survivors by negation; they are not
“normal,” their reactions “did not fit.”2 He cannot understand what they
are, or why they are like this after three years under the occupation of the
wartime Japanese, only what they are not.
A structural investigation into what these “vrouwenkampen” were,3
and how they functioned, further contributes to this alienating picture of
Dutch women interned in Java. Knowing that women were forcibly evicted
from their homes, separated from their husbands and older male children,
transported in desperate conditions to the setting where they would spend
their war years under serious duress at the hands of the wartime Japanese,
being subjected to forced manual labor, extreme hunger, dysentery and
disease, as well as acts of acute violence and humiliation, does not give us
insight into their human experience of their suffering. It cannot tell us of
the idiosyncrasies and commonalities in how women together and alone
sought to manage and survive their situation. To go beyond the facts and
figures of this “little-known chapter in the horrors of war” and penetrate the
consciousnesses of these women we must pursue an exercise in historical
rediscovery.4 This article will use a number of new source materials, with
the goal of recovering the experience of women and children in the “vrou-
wenkampen,” not as something other, but as “human beings.”
This line of enquiry is distinctly novel. A general idea of what happened
in the “vrouwenkampen” exists, but the female voice has been overlooked.
In the fifty years following the ordeal, women were silent. Of course, there
was the natural silence of self-burying trauma to cope: “[S]he is completely
broken. So much so, she is unable to speak about the camp life. She doesn’t

1. Foundation of Japanese Honorary Debts, Eyewitness of War: Sixty Accounts of Dutch Victims
Subjected to Japanese Terror 1942-1945 28 [hereinafter Accounts of Dutch Victims] (quoting
Lieutenant Colonel Nicolai Read-Collins) (Nicolette Goldsmann, Yolande Verheyen, Pete
Jordan, Pim Goldsmann, Wim Lamers & Jules Scholten eds., Francis Cox & Nel van der
Ploeg trans., 2005).
2. Id.
3. “Vrouwenkampen” is the Dutch word for “women’s camps.”
4. Accounts of Dutch Victims, supra note 1, at 79 (quoting Jan Ruff-O’Herne).
2023 Suffering and Survival: The Experience of Dutch Women 697

want to hear or read anything about it.”5 But women also felt they could
not come forward. They were isolated and silenced on several fronts. Hol-
land had suffered its own war at the hands of another enemy, the Nazis;
the loss of the Dutch colonies in the East Indies was a source of national
embarrassment; and the women’s husbands had suffered their own trauma
at the hands of the Japanese and need not be reminded that they could not
protect their women: “[S]he did not have much to tell him anyway. It had
been terrible—the lack of privacy, the punishments.”6 An attitude of mov-
ing forward prevailed: “That’s in the past. Get on with your life.”7 This was
pressed upon child survivors also in a letter to them from the Dutch Queen
Wilhelmina, November 1945, acknowledging their “frightening time when
the Japanese locked you up in camps and you were treated so badly,” but
ending, “Now I wish you all happier days.”8
From the 1980s onwards, women began to speak of their experiences
privately to their families and more widely to the world as public debate
was sparked. Their stories piqued the interest of popular cultural conscious-
ness, as reflected in the production of films and programs such as Paradise
Road and Tenko, and in the surge of publications of memoirs.9 But there
remains little historical work on the subject. This is a striking lacuna in the
historical canon of the Second World War, Dutch history, and scholarship
on prisoner of war camps. The case of the Dutch women interned in Java
is an extraordinary instance of women and children alone, imprisoned and
entirely at the will of their wartime enemy. How women organized them-
selves within a regime indifferent to whether they lived or died, devising
structures of self-government to survive, is a unique picture of humanity
within the well-known context of the Second World War. Each camp is a
contained microcosm through which we can explore how agency is sought
when agency is denied: female and child agency specifically.
The limited English historiography on the topic either focuses on the
psychosomatic aftermath of the trauma of these women impacting subsequent
generations,10 or overgeneralizes about internment for all Western women,
not concentrating on the peculiarities that marked the Dutch women’s ex-

5. Accounts of Dutch Victims, supra note 1, at 49 (quoting Gretha Adriana Van Schaick-Van
Dalen).
6. Accounts of Dutch Victims, supra note 1, at 26 (quoting Anneriet De Pijper).
7. Clara Olink Kelly, The Flamboya Tree: Memories of a Mother’s Wartime Courage 202 (2002).
8. Accounts of Dutch Victims, supra note 1, at 99 (quoting Queen Wilhelmina).
9. See Paradise Road (Village Roadshow Pictures/YTC Pictures 1997); Tenko (BBC & Austra-
lian Broadcasting Corporation 1981-1985) (TV series); Kelly, supra note 7; and Annelex
Hofstra Layson & Herman J Viola, Lost Childhood: My Life in a Japanese Prison Camp During
World War II (2008).
10. Theo A. H. Doreleijers & Denis M. Donovan, Transgenerational Traumatization in Chil-
dren of Parents Interned in Japanese Civil Internment Camps in the Dutch East Indies
During World War II, 17 J. Psychohistory (1990).
698 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 45

perience.11 Dutch historiography is also inadequate. Mariska Heijmans-van

Bruggen has taken the lead in researching this past; writing on the utility of
male and female diaries from the Dutch East Indies as a historical source,12
and compiling diaries from specific camps into book editions with summa-
rizing introductions.13 Her work, while extremely valuable, does not analyze
the possibilities of experience within the testimony she finds.
I will use two temporally distinct sets of sources to retrieve the female
voice. The first set is a series of ego-documents and interviews written during
the war and just after it at the liberation, mostly in the form of diaries. They
have all been personally extracted and chosen from the NIOD Institute for
War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, and are all translated
here from Dutch. Not available online or to the public, special permission
was required to view such papers. The second is a collection of sources from
the 1990s onwards, in Dutch and English, in the form of memoirs, children’s
testimonies spoken in front of the Japanese Embassy in The Hague in 2005,
as well as an oral interview with survivor Tineke.14
The methodological problems posed by all of these sources may go
some way in explaining why this past has not received substantial histori-
cal attention. Simply the reading and translation of the sources found in the
NIOD are onerous tasks. Forbidden to keep diaries or writing materials of
any kind during their imprisonment, the women’s literature from this time
is often illegible, written so small as to fit on the paper they did have. The
language itself is also difficult. It is old Dutch interlaced with Malay jargon
and also includes a language unique to the camps. “Heiho,” for example,
was the word used to refer to the Javanese auxiliaries in the Tjihapit camp;
made up by the children there as they reminded them of the seven dwarves
of Snow White as they walked around with their bamboo sticks.15 This is
where the opportunity to talk to a survivor through the medium of an oral
interview has been particularly helpful to this study. There is also the risk
of losing the authenticity of the individual voice in translation, as the same
meaning would be expressed by a different English sentence structure or
phrase entirely. Therefore, I have translated the Dutch literally.

11. Bernice Archer, The Women’s Response to Internment, in The Internment of Western Civil-
ians Under the Japanese, 1941-1945: A Patchwork of Internment 115 (2004).
12. Mariska Heijmans-van Bruggen, Het Dagboekenproject: Egodocumenten als Historische
Bron [The Diary Project: Egodocuments as a Historical Source], 16 Indische Letteren [Indian
Literature] 17 (2001).
13. De Japanse Bezetting in Dagboeken: Vrouwenkamp Ambarawa 6 [The Japanese Occupation in
Diaries: Women’s Camp Ambarawa 6] [hereinafter The Japanese Occupation in Diaries] (Mariska
Heijmans-van Bruggen ed., 2001).
14. Interview with Tineke, in Surrey, England (Mar. 1, 2022) (audio recording on file with
author) (last name of interviewee has been left out by the author for privacy consider-
ations).
15. Id.
2023 Suffering and Survival: The Experience of Dutch Women 699

Further, history has been skeptical of the ego-document as a historical

source,16 of the memory as an insight into the reality of the past, and of the
child as a reliable historical narrator.17 This is a skepticism my study seeks to
overturn. The diverse human experiences of an event are no less historically
“true” than the proven, factual record of what the event was. They simply
show a different historical “truth.” How one felt at the time and what one
remembers is the experience of the event. What one does remember is
indicative of what was then, and still is, significant within their experience.
Thus, the value of this article is the dual use of contemporary sources
and those produced from memory to explore the experience of Dutch women
and children in the Java camps. Contemporary evidence, at first glance, pro-
vides a far more thorough and reliable account. Its insight into the personal
experience is not tampered by subconsciously borrowed communal memory,
the faults of personal memory, or an audience in front of which it needs to
present a certain picture, as testimonies before the Japanese Embassy do. It
enables us to see women in all their human complexity, not as heroes who
behaved only valiantly.
Contemporary testimony is also far more abundant and intricate in its
record of the fluctuating feelings of the women. But it is not a complete
picture. Owing to the extreme nature of the circumstance of the “vrouwen-
kampen,” certain happenings are deliberately omitted by women in these
sources. These happenings are only able to be voiced decades later in a
changed political and social world. This is true of sexual abuse both in the
system of the “Comfort Women” and within the camps. Retrospective testi-
mony also lends a vital voice to this history: that of the child. This is crucial,
not least because so many of the women there were mothers. Each section
thus compares what is said and what is not said across both sets of literature
in relation to one of the three central themes of the female experience in
the “vrouwenkampen”: motherhood, female community, and sexual abuse.
It is in the spaces and inconsistencies between these two sets of testimony
that a diverse and complex picture of these female experiences is found.

II. MOTHERHOOD

Voort moeten zij voor haar kindren, They must go on for the children.18

The wartime experience of motherhood for these Dutch women began with
the collapse of the Dutch empire in the East Indies as the Japanese Impe-

16. Heijmans-van Bruggen, supra note 12, at 19-20.

17. Rebecca Clifford, Survivors: Children’s Lives After the Holocaust 7 (2020).
18. Personal documents of L. Corsmit-Lorz 3 (n.d.) (on file with NIOD, Amsterdam, Archive
Indische Collectie, 400: 1848).
700 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 45

rial Army invaded successfully in 1942. Women who had built their lives
there were detained, with their children and separately to Dutch men, in
a series of civilian internment camps across the islands. Java was one of
these islands. Its “vrouwenkampen” were predominantly established in the
provinces of Batavia, Bandung, and Tjimahi. Within their respective camps
women would be entirely segregated from the rest of the world until the
liberation in 1945.19
The fragility of life, safety, and health in the camps forced women to
mother in an environment working directly against their mothering. Nurtur-
ing children in a system deliberately starving mother and child, simultane-
ously inflicting extreme violence on them, meant that at times the ability
to mother was denied entirely. “Motherhood” in these camps, therefore,
must be understood to have functioned outside of the presumed criteria by
which it is often judged. Mothering was not always the mark of mother-
love. Mother-love could necessitate stepping outside the maternal relation,
giving up one’s child to someone better positioned to care for them. Every
woman’s maternal instinct reacted to the unique vagaries of her camp or-
deal. This idiosyncrasy explains the diverging and often-conflicting portraits
of motherhood that varying forms of testimony present. But the mother was
not the only actor in this relation. In literature on the Second World War,
the child’s agency has been overlooked, seeing them only “on the receiving
end of power.”20 Neglecting children’s agency is a great disservice. Testimo-
nies from the child’s perspective of life in the camps indicate that a regime
of care was led by them also, towards their mothers. It was this unceasing
synergy of care from child to mother and mother to child that not only
provided the structure through which they would endure the war, but also
how they would understand it. The bond became the framework through
which both mother and child conceived and made sense of the strikingly
unfamiliar lives they were suddenly forced to live. The maternal bond was
a framework for living.
Being a Dutch mother in this antagonistic environment meant, most
fundamentally, caring physically and emotionally for one’s children. The
volatility of the situation and their safety meant this care had to be something
total, best understood as a “regime of care.” The simple syntax of Neeltje
Martine Zorgdrager’s testimony of her life in the Banjoebiroe camp, read in
front of the Japanese embassy in 2005, speaks in the spirit of her younger
self to encapsulate this reliance:
My mother is in the infirmary and I may not visit her. She always succeeded
in getting me to eat porridge made of starch but now I don’t have much of an

19. See The Forgotten Women of the “War in the East”, BBC News (Oct. 19, 2014), https://
www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29665232 [https://perma.cc/W6B4-A7P2].
20. Clifford, supra note 17, at 8.
2023 Suffering and Survival: The Experience of Dutch Women 701

appetite. Also, during the dysentery, she always assisted me in using the potty.
Now I have to do this by myself. I . . . forget to lift the cover off the potty, hurt
myself and then everything gets very dirty. I try to clean it up but crying doesn’t
help when there’s no one to comfort you.21

Neeltje’s rudimentary description that “everything gets very dirty” trivial-

izes the grave consequence of such an incident. The camp’s marked lack of
hygiene, rendering infection and other related disease rife, meant this was a
matter of no flippant dismissal. Reliance on the mother for a child’s physical
well-being was paramount. But also, we see profound emotional dependence:
“comfort” of the child by the mother. At the child’s most vulnerable, pain is
dealt with by calling for the mother. Cornelia Maria Arendsen-Van Bossum,
after being abused by a Japanese guard, writes: “I never said ‘Ampun’ [this is
a beg for mercy]. I do remember saying, ‘Mummy’ . . . [Later] I was brought
home on the stretcher. I couldn’t stop crying terribly and again called for
my mother.”22 Cornelia’s memory is written as true to form as possible. It
is positive, fragmented memory as opposed to memory in its entirety: “I do
remember.” Emerging from the void of forgotten detail is what cannot go
amiss: the longing for her mother.
Tineke’s oral testimony recalls the physical positioning of her family at
“tenko” (roll call) and its dependence on the threat that the guard inspecting
the practice that day posed. She outlines that if he was “just” a “Heiho,”
then her and her younger siblings would stand at the front. But if it was a
Japanese guard, then her mother would occupy this position: “as soon as
we noticed that the commandant was coming we swapped.”23 In the case
of the Japanese, she repeats, at the front was “always my mother, always
my mother.”24 Her mother physically positions herself as the intermediary
between her children and the aggressive environment they exist in.
Mothers also sought to be this intermediary conceptually. Innate to all
childhood experience is learning about the world and its unknowns through
explanation. This phenomenon provided scope for Dutch mothers to curate
the reality that their children were experiencing. Tineke’s understanding of
the camp still centers on the knowledge conveyed to her by her mother
at the time: “I remember my mother saying that to start with the Japanese
people we had were not military ones, but administrative.”25 But a mother’s
ability to control what her child saw was limited. Punishment and humili-
ation were not reserved for those over a certain age. A mother could try
to manipulate a child’s emotional reaction to an event more than alter the
actuality of them. This is apparent in the then six or seven-year-old Marijcke

21. Accounts of Dutch Victims, supra note 1, at 39 (quoting Neeltje Martine Zorgdrager).
22. Id. at 30 (quoting Cornelia Maria Arendsen-Van Bossum).
23. Interview with Tineke, supra note 14.
24. Id.
25. Id.
702 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 45

Van Der Wal-le Compte’s testimony: “He [the Japanese guard, Murui] comes
up to me, grabs my little nose and twists it as far as possible . . . My mother
receives another few blows. Bloody, we walk out the gate. Then a sob fol-
lows; my mother is proud of me.”26 Marijcke’s mistake that was spitting a
“cherry pit” in the direction of a Japanese guard and then failing to “[bow]
deeply” to him as he turned around, is not just a fault of her own, but also
her mother.27 Bloody, bruised, beaten, and sobbing, her mother finds it in
herself to be “proud” of her daughter.28 She cannot hide the overt violence
they have both just experienced together, but she can absorb the event into
the mother-daughter relation through her pride.
The most potent illustration of the child’s fundamental reliance on the
relation with their mother as their framework for living is an episode in the
life of Clara.29 She and her brother are smuggled out of the camp in the earlier
years, before the camp perimeter was closed off entirely, by the Mungers, a
Swiss couple the family knew before the war. The Mungers cared for them
with sufficient food, hygiene, safety, and love, while their mother remained
in the camp. Clara and her brother’s request to be brought back to their
mother, despite the implications this entailed, is a remarkable statement of
her centrality to their lives:
[H]ard as it may be to believe, I had lost my appetite. I was so homesick, and the
pain of separation from my mother was so great, I could no longer eat . . . All
of a sudden we were [back] there. Back at our squalid, bug-infested, dank little
corner . . . The place I had longed for and dreamed about for so many days.30

The testimonies of Neeltje, Cornelia, Tineke, Clara, Marijcke, and Jan

express a portrait of their own mother and the relationship they shared
in unique ways, resurrected from their memories. What is common to all
of their recounts, though, is a tendency to valorize or mythologize their
mother; omitting the usual fluctuations of the mother-child relationship. The
immediate suspicion would be that in front of the Japanese Embassy—the
vanguard of their wartime aggressor—the stage for nuance or criticism can-
not feature. In the presence of the wartime “other,” old sides are resurrected.
Undoubtedly this marks the accounts of Neeltje, Cornelia, Marijcke, and
Jan, but Tineke and Clara’s voices exhibit the same tone despite speaking
and writing respectively with familial audiences in mind. Instead, what
we should distill from all of these literatures is the nature of looking back.
Minor moments of petty squabbles with one’s mother are overshadowed
by the crux of the matter that with age has become clear: these children,

26. Accounts of Dutch Victims, supra note 1, at 57 (quoting Marijcke Van Der Wal-le Compte).
27. Id.
28. Id.
29. Kelly, supra note 7, at 129-149.
30. Id. at 147-48.
2023 Suffering and Survival: The Experience of Dutch Women 703

now adults, understand the extremity of the situation that their mothers
navigated them through. The language of Hank Heijn-Engel, in front of the
Japanese Embassy, reverberates in the words of Tineke’s oral recollection.
“My youth—and the lioness behaviour of my mother—spared me from the
Japs’ frequent round-ups when they needed girls again for their brothels.”31
This same heroism underpins Tineke’s memory of the mother: “my mother
was actually very brave because one time . . .”32 We must also question
why these men and women should speak out against the silence that has
marked the subject for the last sixty years, remembering that they are the
anomaly not the majority. Naturally those who were proud of their mothers
would be willing to speak about them. It is far more natural to praise than
to deprecate the dead one has loved.
The tone used to remember one’s mother in these retrospective accounts
diverges considerably from that of diaries authored during the war, or those
which do recount but observe other mothers. In these literatures the role as a
mother can falter. Petronella, writing about her time as a child in the Tjideng
camp in 1995, describes the desperate plea of the mother of Heinkie to her
own.33 Governed by her body on the brink of starvation, Heinkie’s mother
eats her son’s food. She implores Petronella’s mother to take on her son,
for she has seen how she cares for Petronella and the other children of the
camp who she reads to daily: “you are a lovely mother.”34 The content of
Mrs. C.H.S.’s daily diary also counters the notion of infallible motherhood.
Despite being the mother of the young boy, Huup, her diary talks of arsenic
and contemplates suicide. She does not see value in her life as a human or
as a mother: “no one’s life has value [here].”35
But Heinkie’s mother’s and Mrs. C.H.S’s rejection of their maternal
identity should not be conflated with the idea that their mother-love was
lesser in any way. This is not a case of which mothers had stronger maternal
convictions, but a case of understanding the intersection of each mother’s
intrinsic mother-love with the unique fate they faced in the camps. Some
women fared worse from hunger, disease, and mental strain than other
women. Indeed Heinkie’s mother does not give up her child out of lack of

31. Accounts of Dutch Victims, supra note 1, at 44 (quoting Hank Heijn-Engel) (Hank here
is a girl’s name).
32. Interview with Tineke, supra note 14.
33. Report of Mrs. P.W. Donk-Zeeman about her experiences in the Tjideng camp [herein-
after Report of Mrs. Donk-Zeeman] 6 (1995) (on file with NIOD, Amsterdam, Archive
Indische Collectie, 400: 5255) (I refer to her as “Petronella” here because this is the
name she goes by within her testimony).
34. Id.
35. Diary of Mrs. C.H.S about her daily life outside the camps and her stays in different
women’s camps 3 [hereinafter Diary of Mrs. C.H.S] (June 8, 1942-June 11, 1945) (on file
with NIOD, Amsterdam, Archive Nederlands-Indische Dagboeken en Egodocumenten,
401: 159) (the initials of this individual are used by the author in place of her full name
for privacy considerations).
704 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 45

love but as an act of love, trying to secure the best for her son, a best that
can no longer involve her. She is starving and dies before the end of the
war.36 Petronella’s mother is acutely aware of the importance of someone
fulfilling this maternal role, and despite already struggling to care for her
own children, she takes Heinkie on.37 Her maternal-love reacts to the con-
text of the situation also, only in a different direction. Equally, Mrs. C.H.S’s
diary entry contemplating her suicide comes immediately after describing
the events of that day, including an incident in which she had to defend her
son from the accusations of other women in the camp that he was stealing.38
Her dark contemplation stems from the pain of seeing her son lonely, vili-
fied, and isolated from the camp community. It was mother-love as pushed
through the grate of mothers’ own experience in the camps that determined
the motherhood they themselves performed.
In this analysis the child appears as the passive receiver of mother-love
and care. The maternal bond was not a one-way phenomenon, however. We
must recognize the reciprocation of a “regime” of care from child to mother.
Will van de Corput, after watching his mother receive a beating, remembers
that “in the truck, I held my mother tightly because I felt responsible for
her.”39 Tineke’s oral history also illustrates a picture of concern for the mother
on the part of the child: “my sister was usually sitting under the vegetables
where the cooking people were . . . facing the big door [to the camp] . . .
to wait for my mother to come back from working . . . she was obviously
worried.”40 While Clara’s mother was always trying to find “an extra morsel”
of food for her children,41 in Tineke’s family her younger brother assumed
this role: “we licked our plates, we ate with a little teaspoon, and my brother
was offering always his plate to us because he had just enough.”42
Also reciprocated was the child as the mother’s “framework for living.”
There is one particularly memorable testimony recounting, second-hand, a
mother’s response to their child dying. Marjan Van Wagtendonk-Kuselbos
recalls the horror of an incident in which a young boy falls into the boiling
porridge pot of the camp kitchen, later dying in the hospital as he rolled
off the top bunk where he lay to recover.43 His mother had an older son,
who was from that moment “never allowed to return to the school or to
play with the others out of his mother’s sight. From that moment on he

36. Report of Mrs. Donk-Zeeman, supra note 33, at 6.

37. Id.
38. Diary of Mrs. C.H.S, supra note 35, at 3.
39. Accounts of Dutch Victims, supra note 1, at 54 (quoting Will van de Corput).
40. Interview with Tineke, supra note 14.
41. Kelly, supra note 7, at 199.
42. Interview with Tineke, supra note 14.
43. Accounts of Dutch Victims, supra note 1, at 36 (paraphrasing Marjan Van Wagtendonk-
Kuselbos).
2023 Suffering and Survival: The Experience of Dutch Women 705

became the great guardian over his mother for the rest of her life.”44 The
seeming incoherence between these two sentences is striking. The child is
never allowed out of his mother’s sight, insinuating that she cares for him
unceasingly, but it is he who becomes the “guardian.”
Testimonies reveal that mothers without this other child, who watched
the loss of their only offspring, were driven to a kind of insanity. This is
epitomized by accounts of the deeply distressing separation of sons from
their mothers when guards removed them from the “vrouwenkamp” and
sent them to the men’s camps once they reached a certain age. By the time
of the liberation this age was as young as ten.45 The ordeal of this process
is one of the most spoken about moments in mother and child testimony.
Leonora Dijkgraaf-Lokkers describes the scene:
The children had to stand in the central area whilst the guards intimidated them
with bayonets. Murui struck them with his whip! If a child peed his pants in
fear, he hit them wildly. It was terrible to see. The mothers had to watch, but
were not allowed to wave when the shabby parade walked out of the gate.
Several mothers fainted. Some even committed suicide after watching their
only child disappear.46

Willem Nijholt recounted his personal experience of this observation as the

opening speech to the “Children in Wartime” exhibition in March 2005:
I can still see the mothers—mine in front—screaming with despair and distress,
running behind the lorry full of crying boys. Some of them, my mum included,
clamped themselves to the truck and were hit off with cudgels by the guards.
I can still feel being ashamed of the hysterical screeming [sic] of my mother
. . . I can hear myself scream, “Stop it mummy, don’t do it!” Never have I been
able to rid myself of that terrible feeling.47

In this moment it is Willem who is strong and his mother is frenzied by her
inability to protect her son. His embarrassment stems from his burgeoning
masculinity, while her “hysterical screaming” denotes a mania. Testimony
can only express the state of the mothers in this scenario by using this lan-
guage of madness: “When the little boys of the age of 10 were taken away
to the men’s camp, I saw two poor mothers lose their minds.”48 Children
could not find meaning or happiness in a world of missing and solitude,
while mothers could often not even find a reason to live. Here lies the horrid

44. Id. (quoting Marjan Van Wagtendonk-Kuselbos).

45. Accounts of Dutch Victims, supra note 1, at 56 (paraphrasing Leonora Dijkgraaf-Lokkers)
(age corroborated by accounts of other testimonies throughout the book).
46. Id. (quoting Leonora Dijkgraaf-Lokkers). There is sufficient evidence to support this claim
that suicide did indeed happen. Mrs. C.H.S, in this chapter, considers the prospect seri-
ously. See also the case of Liesbeth List’s mother, who took her own life following her
camp experience. Id. at 35.
47. Id. at 53 (quoting Willem Nijholt).
48. Id. at 48 (quoting Elizabeth Van Kampen).
706 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 45

irony that marked life for Dutch mothers and children in the camps of Java:
the maternal bond was both the means for surviving and for not surviving.

III. FEMALE COMMUNITY

Interviewer (me): Did she [her mother who was a group leader] have to keep
the other ladies in check?

Tineke: She was not keeping. She was working with them and telling them what
to do and . . . “keep going” . . . they were all very friendly together . . . don’t
forget we were all in the same problem.49

Dutch women interned in camps across Java found themselves existing in

a physical and logistical “chaos” that demanded their own organization
of their situation.50 They devised distinct ways of ordering this chaos, like
supplementing the set of rules the Japanese enforced upon them with their
own camp protocols. An interview with Mrs. Holm-Boer, conducted by
Allied liberating authorities immediately after the war, exposes these inner
workings of the camp “Gedangan.”51 She speaks of the rules for when to eat,
wash, and clean and notes that the specifics of this camp timetable pivoted
around the schedule of the children: between 10 p.m. and 7:30 a.m. one
was not to leave the doors of their barrack unless to use the loo or do their
night watch duty.52 The central fulcrum of the new system common to all
“vrouwenkampen” was the division of the women into “hans” (groups) and
“kumis” (sub-groups of around thirty internees).53 The leader of the “han”
was the “hancho,” and the leader of the “kumi” was the “kumicho.”54 This
exact terminology was not used universally across all camps. Mrs. Holm-Boer
appears to have assumed the role of the “hancho” but does not claim this
title explicitly in her interview.55 Equally, Petronella’s memoir of the Tjideng
camp speaks of the “sjouwploeg,” the group of “capable women” who led
the women of the camp.56 Diaries of the “Ambarawa 6” camp refer to such
women as “streaks” (a reference to the insignia they had to wear on their
clothes which consisted of two or three strips in different colors to mark

49. Interview with Tineke, supra note 14.

50. Interview by allied forces with A.M. Holm-Boer & Mrs. de Waal [hereinafter Interview
with Holm-Boer & de Waal], Camp Leader of Camp Gedangan, Semarang, Java, Indo-
nesia, at 2 (August 1944) (on file with NIOD, Amsterdam, Archive Nederlands-Indische
Dagboeken en Egodocumenten, 401: 467) (quoting Holm-Boer).
51. Id. at 3.
52. Id. at 9.
53. The Japanese Occupation in Diaries, supra note 13, at 12.
54. Id.
55. Interview with Holm-Boer & de Waal, supra note 50 (referring to Holm-Boer’s interview).
56. Report of Mrs. Donk-Zeeman, supra note 33, at 1.
2023 Suffering and Survival: The Experience of Dutch Women 707

their status).57 Each camp used its own nuance of Dutch and Malay language
to articulate the same principle of division that was the structure of their
self-governing community.
Thus, women undertook roles outside of their identity as a “mother.”
Without undermining the centrality of motherhood to the camp experience,
we must understand female identity as something beyond this category of
analysis, not least because not all women were mothers. A surprising recur-
ring phrase in the literature that Mrs. Holm-Boer refers to is “mothers and
women.”58 The separation of the two titles should remind us of the female
experience outside of motherhood. Tineke’s mother was first and foremost a
mother to her, but she was a “Hancho” to the other women of the camp.59
Her portrait of her mother as a leader in this framing quote is one stressing
harmony, friendliness, and equality, despite the inherent power imbalance
of her role in overseeing the work of the women of her group; a work she
herself undertook. While certain diaries corroborate this sense of unanimity,
others depict a markedly different attitude. It is here that documents written
at the time of the war provide compelling insights into the diurnal rhythms
of consciousness and feeling experienced by interned Dutch women. They
enable us to focus on the central question: how did the situation the women
faced, and the structures they devised to manage it, foster a sense of com-
munity and animosity among them?
Identifying the criteria by which women were appointed to these lead-
ership positions is crucial to understanding the sentiment of their groups
towards them. Mariska Heijmans-van Bruggen’s research into the “Ambarawa
6” camp insinuates that leadership selection was decided by the class and
the social status one had possessed prior to internment: “the first two large
groups of internees that arrived in Ambarawa 6 from Magelang and Djok-
jakarta each had their own leader. Probably because of the high positions
of their husbands.”60 Indeed Mrs. J.A. Adam-de-Vries, leader of those from
Djokjakarta, was the governor’s wife.61 Rather, what emerges from the sources
preserved in the NIOD as the most common, but not absolute, criterion for
a leadership role is one’s previous occupation as a teacher. Mrs. de Waal,
also interviewed immediately after the war about her leadership perspec-
tive on camp life, was a teacher before the war.62 As was Tineke’s mother,63
and Adriana Modoo, who was in the “Ambarawa 6” camp.64 Undoubtedly

57. The Japanese Occupation in Diaries, supra note 13, at 12.

58. Interview with Holm-Boer & de Waal, supra note 50, at 3 (quoting Holm-Boer).
59. Interview with Tineke, supra note 14.
60. The Japanese Occupation in Diaries, supra note 13, at 11.
61. Id.
62. Interview with Holm-Boer & de Waal, supra note 50, at 1 (referring to de Waal’s inter-
view).
63. Interview with Tineke, supra note 14.
64. The Japanese Occupation in Diaries, supra note 13, at 29.
708 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 45

women were appointed to positions of “hancho” or “kumicho” for a variety

of reasons, but the frequency with which a previous teaching role appears
in this criterion cannot be overlooked. Implicit in being a teacher is the
entrustment of responsibility to lead others, to keep discipline, and to care
for the vulnerable. These skills were deemed pivotal to navigating the chal-
lenges of the camp.
The intrinsic power imbalances of a hierarchal leadership structure im-
bued the female community with serious tension. In fulfilling tasks demanded
of them by the Japanese as leaders, women in positions of responsibility were
vulnerable to accusations of wrongdoing especially. Nel Van Zijl recounts:
“My mother was appointed block leader, which meant that she had to be on
duty at night in our barrack. This was a terrible experience for us because
there were always women running amok and threatening her.”65 Nel Van Zijl’s
mother’s position necessitates her to enforce both the duty demanded of her
by the Japanese: a night watch against smuggling with Javanese traders at
the fence of the camp, and to enforce the timetable devised by the women
regarding sleep hours. In occupying this intermediary position between the
Japanese and the women, she is at times isolated from her fellow Dutch
women. Mrs. Holm-Boer speaks to the interviewer of her own experience of
this intermediary position as she and the management tried to mediate the
consequences of the “regentijd,” the “rain season,” for the camp: “leaked
and clogged gutters were the order of the day. People started to blame the
board for being too weak, but even if the board had been more vigorous,
it would not have got anything more done.”66 In her own words, the scale
of the task that the leadership faced was “inhuman.”67
What Mrs. Holm-Boer’s interview makes most apparent is the sense
of change over time in attitude towards the leadership personnel. As more
women entered the camps without a paralleled increase in food and hopes
for the end of the war were strained, faith in and respect for the women in
these positions declined. Mrs. Holm-Boer describes the hordes of people that
kept arriving and the consequent arguments that got “larger and larger” and
“unending.”68 Food was a focal point of these increasing arguments. Mrs.
de Waal, a lead on the cooking team, describes the “unimaginable chaos
before us” of sharing the small amount of food granted to them among the
600 women who she was responsible for.69 Accusations of unfair division
of loaves of bread, for example, caused extreme upset as women claimed
that they received pieces with holes more regularly than those who divided
the bread themselves.70

65. Accounts of Dutch Victims, supra note 1, at 41 (quoting Nel Van Zijl).
66. Interview with Holm-Boer & de Waal, supra note 50, at 4 (quoting Holm-Boer).
67. Id. at 2.
68. Id. at 6.
69. Interview with Holm-Boer & de Waal, supra note 50, at 1 (referring to de Waal’s inter-
view).
70. Interview with Tineke, supra note 14.
2023 Suffering and Survival: The Experience of Dutch Women 709

In a rare piece of historiographical work on this subject, Bernice Archer’s

research into the internment of Western women in general under the Japanese
suggests that the hierarchy lost traction over the war because other women
possessed “increasing awareness of their own maturity, personal strengths,
experience and skills.”71 She thus insinuates that women no longer wanted
to be led but found such advice redundant and patronizing. Mrs. Holm-Bo-
er’s account suggests otherwise as she describes a riot of the women in the
“Gedangan” camp against a specific leader, not the leadership in general.
General dissatisfaction with the camp led to an internal movement to depose
Mrs. Lagro and replace her with Mrs. Van de Granden as the “kepal”: the
female lead.72 Archer’s assumption is further undermined by the fact that
the utility of the self-made female leadership was two-fold. It was not just
to lead the women, but also to negotiate with the Japanese in any small
way possible. Indeed, after one such negotiation a “tap” was successfully
installed in the “Gedangan” camp, although leadership efforts were gen-
erally far less successful in achieving the wants of the women and risked
severe repercussions as a result of doing so.73 In this sense, the leadership
structure could never really be outgrown as Archer suggests. But the case of
Mrs. Lagro makes it apparent that its personnel could be rejected and even
ousted. In this vein we can understand the negative reaction of the leader-
ship when new groups of women arrived, knowing this most likely entailed
the personal association of themselves with the sufferings in the camp. They
muttered “welcome” to the newcomers “without a smile.”74
Mrs. Holm-Boer, Mrs. de Waal, and Mrs. Lagro’s emotional experience
in receiving this unwarranted blame is particularly poignant. While they
were upset by the way that they were treated, they continued to feel a great
care for the women they oversaw behind a stoical resolve. “Calm, women,
calm” was the unfaltering call of another leader Mrs. Holm-Boer perceived,
however unreasonable the women became.75 Mrs. Lagro stepped down
from her position as the lead of all the women “disappointed and sad,” not
angry at the way in which she was dismissed by the other women after all
her efforts to help them.76
Beyond this tension between women and their leadership, however, lay
a wider tension between all members of the female community. Intrinsic
issues of sustenance made this an inevitability as women competed for their
own survival. Mrs. Holm-Boer reports an incident resulting from the drawing
up of “baby lists for the milk.”77 “It happened that on the milk list there was
a name of a lady with a three year old child, who regularly received milk

71. Archer, supra note 11, at 145.

72. Interview with Holm-Boer & de Waal, supra note 50, at 7 (quoting Holm-Boer).
73. Id. at 3.
74. Id. at 6.
75. Id. at 10.
76. Id. at 8.
77. Id.
710 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 45

for this child. Upon further investigation she turned out to be a 63 year old
spinster.”78 This “lady” had fabricated her motherhood to work the self-made
system to her own advantage.
But the tension marking the community was something more deep-seated
than arising over fundamental provisional issues. The intense confinement and
emotional rawness of imprisonment created a febrile environment in which
existing socio-religious tensions easily came to the fore over trivial issues.
Atie Te Velde’s daily diary from her wartime experience records in 1944 that
“Miss M [as a Protestant not a Catholic] is so afraid that ‘people’ will say
that she favors the Reformed, that she puts them at the very back.”79 Camp
harmony has the potential to falter over the issue of a seating arrangement
at a camp gathering as women are predisposed towards finding issue with
one another. “Miss M” seeks to extinguish the potential for fallout that she
predicts upon religious lines. Class lines are evident in Mrs. C.H.S’s diary.80
She believes she should not be subject to the same dilapidated living con-
ditions as the “common Amsterdam” lady, because of her previous social
superiority, and that her peers are unfair in denying her an exception to the
no light after dark hours rule for her “sewing.”81 The language with which
she expresses her unhappiness is staunch and misanthropic: “[W]hat does
it matter if I never see any of you again?”82
How should we explain this extreme propensity for altercation among
the women? Surely the desolate reality of life in detention was as much a
matter of solidarity as animosity? The common experience of its suffering
could be, and was, a unifying factor as Tineke’s framing quote makes appar-
ent: “don’t forget we were all in the same problem.”83 To fully understand
the essence of the hostility existing in the female community, we need to
understand the extreme proximity in which they were forced to live.
That their physical confinement was a pre-eminent feature of their
camp experience is evident in the specificity with which women both at
the time note, and in hindsight recall, the exact amount of space they had
to sleep in. Diary entries and interviews at the time corroborate testimony
from memory exactly; both outlining that they had between forty-five and
sixty centimeters of space each. The variation arises not from the impact of
memory, but by camp. While Tineke remembers only forty-five centimeters

78. Id.
79. Diary of A.G.J. Velde about trials of the internment period in Central Java (June 15, 1943-
Apr. 19, 1945) (on file with NIOD, Amsterdam, Archive Nederlands-Indische Dagboeken
en Egodocumenten, 401: 241), in The Japanese Occupation in Diaries, supra note 13, at 40.
80. Diary of Mrs. C.H.S, supra note 35.
81. Id. at 3.
82. Id. at 4.
83. Interview with Tineke, supra note 14.
2023 Suffering and Survival: The Experience of Dutch Women 711

of space,84 Ida van Marle remembers fifty to sixty centimeters.85 Tineke’s own
drawing, Figure 1, illustrates the physical layout of the barrack in which she
slept, and the human experience of this arrangement as we can see humans
lying so closely next to one another. Her drawing makes apparent the lack
of space and the resultant lack of privacy. It is this lack of privacy and ability
to retreat to somewhere on one’s own, for the duration of the war, that is
largely responsible for women’s antagonism towards one another.

Figure 1. Tineke’s drawing of her camp living situation.

84. Id.
85. Letter from Ida van Marle to Beppie Hupka-Barth about her internment in Camp Tjihapit
[hereinafter Letter from Ida van Marle] 8 (Nov. 18, 1945) (on file with NIOD, Amster-
dam, Indische Collectie, 400: 5446). The standard metric changed between the time of
contemporary testimony and recollection from inches to centimeters. Figures here have
been translated accordingly.
712 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 45

This concern appears as the most pressing issue within Dutch women’s quo-
tidian psyche, sometimes beyond fear of the threat of the Japanese guards.
Mia Tjakkes-Grein’s diary writes of the imagining that makes her the calmest:
“a room that can be locked.”86 She speaks of this as “the best thing anyone
could wish for.”87 The mind seems more preoccupied with the desire for
space from the other woman than escaping their situation in the war. This
is also the case for Jettie Burger-Duyfjes:
[E]verything is bad, but the worst are the people. People you hate . . . in ordinary
life you wouldn’t know them or only by name and here they force themselves
upon you and meddle with everything you do. . . [they] chat, chat, chat until
their tongues are lame and their minds are filled with talk and viciousness.88

The physical lack of space translates here into sound; silence is a luxury they
are not afforded, and speech itself becomes claustrophobic. The physical
confinement of the camp came to dominate the women’s mental state. It
is this psychological experience that was a universal one of women across
camps, even though the physical composition of each camp was different.
While some camps were repurposed old prisons, others old hospitals, and
some newly erected bamboo structures, they all induced the same feeling.
While there was the personal feeling of animosity, there was also a
communal feeling of togetherness. There were situations in the face of the
Japanese that provoked a collective female reaction, thereby stimulating a
communal conscience. This is the case in the moment that women aged
eighteen to thirty were rounded up to work in a “restaurant,” the most at-
tractive girls being picked and taken away. This event unfolded in varying
ways across different camps. In the camp of Mrs. Holm-Boer, women rightly
suspected that a “restaurant” acted as a euphemism for a brothel.89 The night
before the final list of women to be taken away was confirmed, some older
women volunteered to go in the place of younger girls.90 While they may have
thought their fate would be better off in this new life where food, water, and
living conditions could be better, it seems their decision was underpinned
by the understanding that having already been sexually active individuals
themselves, it was humane and appropriate for them to take the places of
younger, sexually inexperienced women. Their volunteering was something

86. Mia Tjakkes-Grein’s diary relaying her experiences from Ambarawa 6 are no longer
available in the NIOD. This quote from her diary is cited in The Japanese Occupation in
Diaries, supra note 13, at 28.
87. The Japanese Occupation in Diaries, supra note 13, at 28.
88. Diary of H.C. Burger-Duyfjes (May 21, 1942-Dec. 17, 1945) (on file with NIOD, Am-
sterdam, Archive Nederlands-Indische Dagboeken en Egodocumenten, 401: 351), in The
Japanese Occupation in Diaries, supra note 13, at 33.
89. Interview with Holm-Boer & de Waal, supra note 50, at 6 (referring to Holm-Boer’s
interview).
90. Id.
2023 Suffering and Survival: The Experience of Dutch Women 713

sacrificial; it was a choice made with a consciousness of the community

of women in mind. It was also agreed by the women of the “Gedangan”
camp that should the Japanese use force to extricate girls from the camp,
the women would start a “riot” together.91 The next day a Japanese agent
“[grabbed]” a girl and “all the women hit him,” also “throwing themselves
in front of the car.”92 The Japanese auxiliary, the “kampvader” Asano, agreed
that the older women could go in the end.93
Hair emerges as a specific theme upon which a communal feeling
existed. The Japanese deployed shaving of a woman’s head as a brutal and
humiliating punishment, or in a less official manner, the ripping out of her
hair by dragging her by it along the ground. Those who returned to their work
team with their bloody scalp in the wake of such an incident were often
met with a profound symbolic gesture. Other women cut off some length
of their own hair and sewed it into a scarf or hat for their punished peer to
wear around her head.94 This re-feminization represented a re-humanization,
and an affirmation of commonality in their suffering. It was an expression
of understanding, a chorus of feeling for and with that woman. The diary of
Mrs. Corsmit-Lorz documents another incident of this nature. She observes a
woman dragged by a guard by her hair, her “scalp bleeding” and her “cotton
dress shredded.”95 The guard then screams at the watching mass of women
queuing for their food, “eat.” “None of them eat.”96 Foremost they have lost
their appetite, but their act of walking away after being commanded to do
the opposite is a potent moment of solidarity.
We can also see a commonality of feeling in regard to specific moments of
coming together in the camp, for example, the celebration of Sinterklaas and
Christmas. Almost all diaries, however intermittently they record their lives,
have an entry for both Sinterklaas and Christmas. Testimonies by memory
also tend to recall these days. They survive the silence absorbing memories
into nothingness as they are significant for the pressure they placed upon
each woman in a specific moment to feel. Singing is a central feature of the
celebration. The power of the sound of a choir of female voices all singing
at once cannot be underestimated. Amid the silence, the harsh commands
of the foreign Japanese orders, the “chatter”of the Dutch women themselves
and the bleakness of the camp environment, the beauty of this sound had
a real impact on women. Ida van Marle writes to Beppie Hupka-Barth—a
family member back in Holland—on November 18, 1945, of her mother’s

91. Id.
92. Id.
93. Id.
94. Archer, supra note 11, at 151.
95. Personal documents of L. Corsmit-Lorz, supra note 18, at 4.
96. Id.
714 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 45

death on Christmas Eve while the camp sang “Stille Nacht.”97 At first she
wonders “was this really a rightful ending for someone so beloved,” but
then decides that “it was beautiful to fall asleep to the singing on a day
when everyone in the world tried to be free in their hearts.”98 It is because
her mother dies amid a chorus of peace, hope, and joy experienced by all
the women in that moment that Ida is able to be at peace with her death.
These events were also celebrated by other improvisations. Mrs. Holm-
Boer wrote of her camp’s celebration of Sinterklaas that they had “real fun.”
They made little parcels from what they could salvage for the young and they
“had never seen the children so happy.”99 Nineteen days later, Christmas had
a distinctly different outcome. In the middle of the celebration, the “kepala”
was called and “everything had to be stopped immediately.”100 The resulting
pain she describes is a real communal feeling across the camp that darkens
all interns’ morale over the subsequent weeks: “the pain of all the months
fell at once that night,” “tears everywhere,” and “no one had energy or will
for the new year.”101
But perhaps the most striking finding in these texts is the empathy the
women were capable of feeling for one another. Within the same experience
there is the sense of a hierarchy of suffering that does not seek to isolate
those who it was “not as bad for,” but feels for those who fared the worst
from the war years. Mrs. Corsmit-Lorz writes: “poor girls who spend their
most beautiful years in Japanese captivity, at the mercy of cruelty and arbi-
trariness, far from the realisation of childhood dreams and romance!”102 This
empathy transcends the war time years, still being felt in memory. Tineke
talks of a fellow survivor she came to know decades after the war; Lucy Bak-
ker, aged seventeen to twenty-one in her respective camp: “I feel sorry for
her in a way because her life was actually destroyed by them.” Her fiancé
left her after the trauma of both of their war experiences: “she got married
[to someone else], but I don’t think her happiness was all entirely there.”103
This empathy and acknowledgement that the women interned in Java found
within themselves, to extend to one another, is what Dutch society could
never afford them upon their return at the end of the war.

97. Letter from Ida van Marle, supra note 85, at 7.

98. Id.
99. Interview with Holm-Boer & de Waal, supra note 50, at 4 (quoting Holm-Boer).
100. Id.
101. Id. at 5.
102. Personal documents of L. Corsmit-Lorz, supra note 18, at 4.
103. Interview with Tineke, supra note 14.
2023 Suffering and Survival: The Experience of Dutch Women 715

IV. SEXUAL ASSAULT AND ITS MANY LAYERS OF SILENCE

Marking the material of the last two sections is the inherent violence of the
interaction between Dutch women and children and Japanese guards, or
their Javanese auxiliaries. The “Tenko” roll call timetabled this suffering twice
daily into their lives, as all members of the camp, even the sick, were to
stand in a bowing position until told not to. Elisabeth Payens-Fluyt describes
a roll call that started in the late afternoon: “It was not until four o’clock in
the morning that Sonei and his henchman had spent their rage.”104 Failure
to stay in this position often resulted in performative punishments, elevating
individually targeted acts of cruelty to impact the entire camp population. Ted
Hartman recalls that: “Under guard, every man, woman and child from the
camp was made to gather round. We were forced to watch the beating.”105
Phrases such as “the whole camp had to watch while” occur repeatedly in
testimonies. Mock-beheadings, beatings, being tied up by one’s arms to burn
in the sun, and other viciously devised tortures such as kneeling upright with
spikes behind one’s legs for hours, were recurrent. Evident is a desire from
specific Japanese officers to indulge in these tortures, most notoriously in
the Tjideng camp, Colonel Sonei. Will van De Corput writes of the guard
who knew the person missing from the roll call had died, but made them all
“stand at attention for a long time in the burning sun” as if to wait for him to
turn up.106 Will himself had already seen his “little five-year old playmate lay
dead beside his mother.”107 There is a deliberately humiliating air to certain
punishments. Petronella’s retrospective account of her wartime experience
in 1995 recalls the day upon which the women were made to “dig a big
grave.”108 “In that hole we had to throw the bread that approximately ten
thousand residents would receive that day . . . Then we had to close the
hole and dance on top of it” while the Japanese laughed.109
But while much of this violence is meant to be seen and to humiliate
beyond the immediate victim, there is also the sense in the literature that
there are punishments that many women do not see, do not want to see,
or are not meant to see in the camps. Anecdotal observations of conflict
moments between a Dutch woman and a Japanese soldier, observed by
another woman, often end with phrases similar to that of Petronella’s rec-
ollection: “she was taken to the office of the Japanese. I don’t know what
happened next.”110 There is a vagueness that demands attention. Analysis of

104. Accounts of Dutch Victims, supra note 1, at 38 (quoting Elisabeth Payens-Fluyt).

105. Accounts of Dutch Victims, supra note 1, at 43 (quoting Ted Hartman).
106. Id. at 55 (quoting Will van de Corput).
107. Id.
108. Report of Mrs. Donk-Zeeman, supra note 33, at 2.
109. Id.
110. Id. at 1.
716 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 45

these ambiguities, noting the explicitness with which non-sexual violence is

recounted, reveals that these unknowns involved sexual abuse.
The sexual abuse of Dutch women in Java remained a silent element of
memory in the fifty years following the liberation. Then, women broke this
silence with their recollections of women extracted from camps, supposedly
to work in “restaurants” or other hospitality jobs, but really to be “Comfort
Women” in Japanese military brothels, or more accurately, sex slaves. This
is the process we see described in contemporary testimonies from specific
camps: Gedangan, Halmaheira, Ambarawa 6, and Ambarawa 4.111 Mrs.
Holm-Boer’s interview in the previous section is one of these testimonies.112
Her interview is marked by the camp’s uncertainty as to what the fate of
these women would be beyond the camp gates. Testimony decades later
breaks this contemporary unsureness. Ellen Corry Van Der Ploeg, a victim
taken from the Halmaheira camp, achieves such in her recollection of her
own fate as a “Comfort Woman”:
One day all the girls and women between 15 and 30 were called to assemble.
We had to parade in front of five high-ranking Japanese officers . . . For three
days, they inspected us. Every day a few were rejected—the youngest and the
least pretty. On the third day, a group of fourteen girls and women remained.
We were told that we were needed to work in a hospital and an office. I never
doubted whether they were telling the truth . . . My work place, however, was
not in a hospital or an office but in a brothel for Japanese officers. For them,
it was a house of pleasure; for us, a hell of fear, shame and sorrow. What did
I know about sex? We were forced to participate in drinking tea or alcohol
with the Japanese in their immaculate uniforms. And we had to satisfy them
sexually. Some women resisted. I could not . . . I lay down on the bed and the
only thing I did was pray that it wouldn’t hurt and would be over quickly . . .
I got through it by stepping outside of my body and shutting out all feelings.113

Jan Ruff O’Herne’s description of her experience also as a “Comfort Woman”

is equally harrowing: “In the so-called ‘Comfort Station’ I was systematically
beaten and raped day and night. Even the Japanese doctor raped me each
time he visited the brothel to examine us for venereal disease.”114

111. Id. at 77.

112. Interview with Holm-Boer & de Waal, supra note 50, at 6 (referring to Holm-Boer’s
interview).
113. Accounts of Dutch Victims, supra note 1, at 80 (quoting Ellen Corry Van Der Ploeg).
114. Jan Ruff-O’Herne, Statement of Jan Ruff O’Herne AO Friends of “Comfort Women” in
Australia, Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, and the Global Environment Committee on
Foreign Affairs, U.S. House of Representatives, Hearing on Protecting the Human Rights
of “Comfort Women” Thursday, February 15, 2007, FCWS Australia (Jan. 25, 2023),
https://issuu.com/fcws/docs/cwh_jan_ruff_o_herne. I use here the name she used when
publishing her book telling her experience: 50 Years of Silence: The Extraordinary Memoir
of a War Rape Survivor, but her memoirs also go by the name “Jannie.” Though born
Jeanne Alida, she took the names Jan or Jannie throughout her adult life. Her surname
denotes her identity as a Dutch Australian of Irish ancestry.
2023 Suffering and Survival: The Experience of Dutch Women 717

Sexual violence narratives of any time or place are marked by a dual

silence: the shame of people knowing and the fear of people not believing.
In relation to the Japanese “Comfort Woman” scheme, the latter concern
of people not believing was beginning to recede by 1992. Several factors
contributed to the confirmation of this scheme as an incontrovertible reality.
Korean survivors of the sexual abuse began a lawsuit against the Japanese
government. This created a context in which Dutch women could contrib-
ute their own versions of the same event.115 Furthermore, the establishment
and recruitment process for military brothels had been institutionalized by
the Japanese. As something bureaucratically documented, the occurrence
of sexual abuse was further proven. Retrospective investigations using this
documentation, such as that undertaken by Bart van Poelgeest’s in 1994 on
behalf of the Dutch government, made it safer for victims to speak to their
own experience to support existing facts.116
The sad consequence of the political attention afforded to the “Comfort
Women” narrative is the latent assumption that this was the primary instance
of sexual abuse under the Japanese occupation in the East Indies. Ellen writes
of her return to her camp after being in the brothel: “Back at the camp,
I could hardly talk about it. I didn’t have to because everybody already
knew.”117 This communal memory has had the accidental consequence of
diverting attention from the diversity of other idiosyncratic experiences that
are less categorizable abuses. It has unintentionally silenced enquiry into
environments of abuse behind closed doors in unseen spaces, known only
by the survivor, relying on memory and trusting individual word of mouth.
There is no context for these experiences; every person speaking out about
a singular abuse speaks alone, and thus silence is far more enduring. This
has been the case for incidents of the sexual abuse of women and children
by Japanese and Javanese auxiliaries within the camps.
Stories that have broken these silences tend to be not from the survivor
but their families, those they told, or those who saw and were not meant to.
Liesbeth List, as part of her testimony in front of the Japanese embassy, reads
a letter from her father to her maternal grandmother sent immediately after
the liberation, outlining her mother’s suicide: “The only thing she suffered
from were delusions, that she had to have a black baby, that she was an
outcast and a pariah, that everyone hated her.”118 The reader’s suspicions as

115. Accounts of Dutch Victims, supra note 1, at 80 (account of Ellen Corry Van Der Ploeg).
For an account of Korean “Comfort Women” entering the public sphere see, Ahn Yonson,
Whose Comfort?: Body, Sexuality and Identities of Korean “Comfort Women” and Japanese
Soldiers During WWII (2019).
116. Bart Van Poelgeest, Report of a Study of Dutch Government Documents on the Forced Prostitu-
tion of Dutch Women in the Dutch East Indies during the Japanese Occupation (Asian Women’s
Fund trans., 1994), https://www.awf.or.jp/pdf/0205.pdf.
117. Accounts of Dutch Victims, supra note 1, at 80 (quoting Ellen Corry Van Der Ploeg).
118. Accounts of Dutch Victims, supra note 1, at 35 (quoting letter written by Liesbeth List’s
father to his mother-in-law after the war).
718 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 45

to why her mother had nightmares of this kind are confirmed as she con-
tinues: “[I]n 1982, I received a letter from a woman who had been in the
same camp as my mother . . . [Liesbeth reading:] ‘[S]he once told me that
she was raped by the Japanese soldiers.’”119
Children, in their physical ability to go unnoticed, were most likely to
witness these moments without meaning to. This was the unfortunate case
for Liesbeth Konings-Van Toorenenbergen. She recounts her childhood un-
derstanding of what she witnessed one day in the camp at the age of four
or five, when she escaped from roll call by crawling through legs:
I realised full well that this could have serious consequences, so I remained
as careful and invisible as possible. I remember a very large empty barrack .
. . A door was open and I went in. There was a strange kind of silence inside.
Occasionally strange sounds could be heard and a sort of groaning . . . which
I could not place . . . I carefully walked into the darkened barracks and looked
around until my eyes adjusted to the dark. Not far from me I saw the backs of
two or three Japanese. They were pushing something against the wall of the
barracks. And that something was groaning. It surprised me. They were women
from the camp. Why were they groaning? What were those Japanese doing with
them? They were keeping them under control, overpowering them by force,
doing something to them, which made them groan.120

To undertake a “quasi-literary critique of women’s [and children’s] . . .

testimonies” here, as Zoë Waxman condemns in relation to similar testimo-
nies of sexual violence in the Holocaust, is deeply unhelpful.121 The child
perspective has a purity to it in its literal description, not understanding
what is before them but understanding it is a different kind of violence to
that they have seen before. Instead of questioning the exactness of recalled
experience, we should appreciate the essence of the memory: this holds its
own historical truth.
The family memory of Margaretha Johanna Maria, Lucy, and Maria Emelie
Bakker includes the awareness and extreme fear of this possibility happening
to their own family, as Margaretha (Lucy’s mother) slept on top of her every
night in the camps, hiding her under the bed frame from the lusts of the
guards.122 In this recognition of rape within the camps as a real possibility
for Lucy, we can understand that women were aware that sexual abuse was
indeed occurring, despite not seeing it firsthand. It seems, therefore, that
there is a deliberate omission of sexual violence from testimony. The 1995

119. Id. (quoting letter written by a woman who knew Liesbeth’s mother in the camp).
120. Accounts of Dutch Victims, supra note 1, at 83 (quoting Liesbeth Konings-Van Toorenen-
bergen).
121. Zoë Waxman, Testimony and Silence: Sexual Violence and the Holocaust, in Feminism,
Literature and Rape Narratives: Violence and Violation 118 (Zoë Brigley Thompson & Sorcha
Gunne eds., 2010).
122. Interview with Tineke, supra note 14.
2023 Suffering and Survival: The Experience of Dutch Women 719

memoir of Petronella, for example, written explicitly for her “children and
grandchildren,” outlines that “after the liberation I lived with my husband
on the Panaroekanweg in Bata,” where she heard their female neighbor
“screaming terribly” at night, provoking her to visit after finding out that she
also had been in Tjideng camp.123 Petronella immediately recognizes her
neighbor as “the lady who wouldn’t bow to the Japanese,” out of “pride,”
and reveals that as punishment they had tied her up to a “bench” every-
night where she was “horribly mistreated.”124 What happened to this lady
when tied up to this bench is not clarified, the “horrible mistreatment” not
elaborated. This obscurity implies that Petronella chose not to elaborate. The
ease with which she recounts other moments of cruelty and violence suggests
strongly that her neighbor’s punishment was sexual in nature. Second-hand
testimony paired with an historical approach attuned to the possibilities of
the enigmas within first-hand testimony can decipher the real sexual threats
and abuses these women faced.
Uncovering child sexual abuse in the camps faces another layer of
silence, that of not understanding what has happened to them until they
are older. There is only one explicit record of child sexual abuse relating to
the Dutch interned in Java, but its content implicates the abuse of another
young girl. Even sixty years later in front of the Japanese Embassy, the teller
remains anonymous:
I was . . . seven years old when a Javanese man shouted at me and pushed me
with a stick into a “gudang” (shed). “You come and look,” he hissed. He turned
and watched me angrily. The first thing I saw after the door closed behind me
was Rina. She was on her knees in front of a Jap who was sitting on a stool
with his legs spread widely. That man held her blond hair on both sides of her
head. He pushed and pulled Rina’s face in his lap . . . She said nothing, but it
seemed as if she was gurgling. The Jap had his eyes closed and groaned. “You
keep watching,” whispered the Javanese, who stood with his back to Rina and
. . . leered at me. I started to tremble and felt sick to my stomach when I saw
what Rina had in her mouth. Suddenly the Jap groaned. He moved Rina’s head
faster and faster and started to groan louder and louder. Then he pushed her
away. The Javanese man poked her with his stick. She stood up and, without
looking at me, walked past me on her way out. Her blond hair was wet from
sweat. “Don’t say anything to Grandma,” she said before she started to vomit.
Rina was eight years old and smaller than I was. After the Javanese man said
that I had to come back tomorrow with Rina, I was allowed to leave. With
trembling legs, I walked away. I don’t know where I went. Not to my aunt. I
couldn’t possibly tell her what had happened.125

123. Report of Mrs. Donk-Zeeman, supra note 33, at 2.

124. Id.
125. Accounts of Dutch Victims, supra note 1, at 82 (quoting Anonymous).
720 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 45

Her words speak to both the repeated nature of the sexual abuse of children,
the coordination of this abuse between Japanese and Javanese guards in the
camps, and the silence that this entrapped children in. She continues: “Never,
not once, has anyone asked me: ‘How was life in the Japanese camps?’ My
brothers could tell what they had experienced in the boys’ camp and that
was terrible. As a girl, I could never tell anything. Never!”126
Her testimony alerts us to real historical possibility: that sexual abuse
marked many children’s experiences of the camps. This is a possibility that
should include male children. This victim was “never” asked about her
experience, not because she was a girl, but for the assumption that her ex-
perience as a girl would include violence relating to sex. The pornographic
tone behind scenes describing boys being removed from their mothers at ten
is insidious: “The boys had to strip and stand naked in front of the soldiers.
If they were not quick enough they were severely beaten.”127 Equally, Hank
refers laconically but importantly to having to actively avoid sexual abuse:
“Nor will I forget the intense shock I got . . . if ‘Bluebeard,’ a Japanese guard
and notorious paedophile, suddenly stood behind me. One can run very
fast if required to.”128 The notoriety of Bluebird as a pedophile certifies that
sexual assault was a concern of girlhood, womanhood and boyhood in these
camps. An historical investigation has the power to overturn this silence, in
its capacity to find, between the linear fragments that these sources have
left, the pervasive nature of sexual abuse.

V. CONCLUSION

In the beginning days of liberation . . . a car drove into the camp. There were
a couple of white men in there . . . Sonei was in the back of that car. The men
stopped and asked us, about ten women standing at the gate, if we could say
that this was Captain Sonei. We knew straight away that it was of course. A few
women sat with hatred in their eyes and said “well, let’s take a closer look.”
They snuck up close with a murderous look . . . The two soldiers were shocked,
gave it full throttle, and drove out the gate. It was [in that look] that they were
sure they had Sonei.129

This article began with the words of Lieutenant Colonel Nicolai Read Collins
at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. He observed the women in the Tjideng
camp as “no normal human beings” at the moment of the liberation. Against
this alienating description, I have sought to recover the female voice to

126. Id.
127. Accounts of Dutch Victims, supra note 1, at 40 (quoting Nel Van Zijl).
128. Accounts of Dutch Victims, supra note 1, at 44-45 (quoting Hank Heijn-Engel).
129. Report of Mrs. Donk-Zeeman, supra note 33, at 5.
2023 Suffering and Survival: The Experience of Dutch Women 721

decipher the complex and diverse nature of their experiences. The framing
words of this conclusion are from the same historical place and moment that
Collins spoke of, but from the perspective of an interned woman; one of the
women he observes. It is one of the final excerpts of Petronella’s testimony.
Its central emotion is indeed a most “human” one: anger.
The women’s anger is at their maltreatment and is an anger that Petronella
and the Australian officers driving this car think could kill. Retrospective
women’s voices throughout this article have shown us a second anger also;
the anger at not being asked about their suffering. Poignantly, women have
had to lend each other the recognition they have not received elsewhere. Jan
Ruff O’Herne asserts: “I want to pay tribute to the courage and endurance
of these brave women. They did not return from the war like heroes, wear-
ing medals. They came back wearing the scars of war.”130 Clara Olink Kelly
ends The Flamboya Tree by recognizing the struggle of her dead mother:
“I wrote this book as a tribute to my beloved mother, who never gave up
on her family and the ultimate struggle to survive.”131 “I’m sorry I never
thanked her for bringing us all safely through the most horrendous time . . .
with so much love and strength and that no-nonsense attitude . . . Thank
you, Mum. I love you.”132
This article shows the great potential there is still to study brutal incar-
cerations of the mid-twentieth century, and how much possibility there is to
study the incarceration of these Dutch women and children. In the NIOD
lies more words, more voices, and more silences to be uncovered. As the
lives of the final generation of these survivors come to an end, I hope this
article marks a beginning.

130. Accounts of Dutch Victims, supra note 1, at 78 (quoting Jan Ruff-O’Herne).

131. Kelly, supra note 7, at 199.
132. Kelly, supra note 7, at 204.
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