My father Teunis van der Schilden was born in Aalsmeer on August 29^th 1897. His childless uncle had a greengrocer's shop and it was therefore destined that my father would take it over once the uncle became of age. As a boy he was sent with the dog cart into the Haarlemmermeer to deliver the vegetables to the customers.

He didn't like this image of the future and found the work with the dog cart in all weathers terrible. He managed to get a job at the town clerk's office in Aalsmeer through various other jobs and also studied Indonesian Law. Eventually, in 1920, he was sent to the Dutch East Indies and placed at the disposal of the Governor-General in Batavia.

He proved to have the gift of being able to deal with the Indonesian people there in an excellent manor. In addition, he had a great financial talent and was therefore the right person to take care of the various budgets. He was eventually sent to Surabaya, where he was given financial supervision over the regions.

My mother Gertrud Hedwig Susanne Hennig was born on August 5^th 1899 at her grandparents' estate, Klein Massow in Germany (this part is now part of Poland) and educated in Berlin. One of her first jobs was to teach the German language to the then Japanese naval attaché called Naokuni Nomura. She had no affiliation with the Nazis, so in 1930 she took the train to Rotterdam and on July 23^rd she boarded the m.s Baloeran with the Dutch East Indies as its destination. She actually wanted to immigrate to America but that country had closed its borders for immigrants at that time. So she arrived in Tandjung Priok, the port of Batavia, on August 22^nd 1930.

I was born in Surabaya the 7^th of September 1935, a year after their marriage, and was named Dietrich Willem Ferdinand, but was called Dieter for short. I grew up at number 3 Serajoesstraat, named after the river Seryu in Middle of Java. 

After my parents' European leave in 1937, during which I was baptized at my mothers' family in Berlin, we moved at number 17 Javastraat in Surabaya.Behind our house there were outbuildings, where the staff was housed. They could decide for themselves whether they wanted to go back to their kampong at night or sleep in their room at our house. Our staff, mainly Muslim, participated in all our holidays. During the Christmas celebration, for example, they helped to decorate the Christmas tree. In turn my parents would facilitate them when they had some sort of celebration.

When my little brother Tysk Jürgen Michiel was born on December  20^th 1939, our staff thought that a sacrificial feast should be held at home because otherwise mischief would take place. The ceremony took place in our garden and as a young child I took part in it as well. Next to us lived General Buurman van Vreeden and a few houses further on Schout-bijnacht Karel Doorman. I went to kindergarten together with his son Theo.

I was the one who always communicated with people at home in Javanese. As was customary at the time, we had a lot of staff. My parents did not understand that language, so when they interfered in the conversation I switched to Malay.

At that time my father was also chairman of the Boxing Federation and in 1938 it was his great pleasure to bring the Dutch champion half heavyweight, Hennie Quentemeijer, to Java. Hennie stayed at our house and he was invited by my father to come and play boxing matches on Java.

When the war broke out in Europe, he could not go back and stayed with us. There, when the Japanese were about to attack Java, he was called up as a conscript. So when Hennie had to go to the front, he visited us. He wanted to have my flask with a compass in its cap and then exchanged it for his accordion. It was agreed that we would reverse the exchange after the war. Hennie was a very important figure in my life and like an older brother to me. During the war Hennie served as Sergeant of the Air Force and was made prisoner of war. Most probably, like so many others, Hennie was transported by Japanese Hell Ship to Singapore and then put on a train to Thailand. On February 9^th 1943 he arrived in Thailand from the Java camp and was forced to work on the infamous Burma railway line.

Heinrich Quentemeijer, born in Germany on January 1^st 1920, who was called Hennie or Henk, survived the horrors of the Second World War in the Dutch East Indies and represented the Netherlands at the Summer Olympics in London in 1948. The last time I saw him was when he was on his way to these Olympic Games in London. Hennie died in Sydney, Australia, on April 22^nd 1974.

The indigenous people exercised independent professions. Our general practitioner was a Javanese, Dr Saleh a thoroughbred Javanese, who had studied medicine in Leiden. The dentist of the family was a Sumatran, Dr. Soetopo, also trained in Leiden. In this way we had our acquaintances and relationships all over the population.

Mr Susanto Tirtoprodjo and Mr Subroto, delegates and members of the People's Council, were present as family friends at my parents' wedding. Mr Susanto became the first ambassador to the Netherlands after the transfer of sovereignty. My little brother and I played tennis with their children at the embassy in Wassenaar. He served under Sukarno invarious cabinets and was Minister of Justice.

We regularly went to a mountain, not so far from Surabaya, where we visited the plantations of friends. On one of those plantations I often went with the lady of the house into the forest to pick plants for dinner. 

It is from this knowledge that I gained that I later, during the war, in the very last camp, had a lot of use. There also was a natural history museum at the plantation with all kinds of stuffed butterflies and beetles. There were also poisonous frogs, which I found very interesting, and poisonous snakes.

In the Indies, there was a kind of three-way split in terms of population: Europeans/Indo-Europeans, indigenous people and foreigners from the East. The Chinese, for example, were among the strange Easterners, although Chinese made up a fairly large proportion of the Indonesian population.

However, the Japanese were classified as Europeans. At that time, before the war, many Japanese were living in the Indies.  They usually owned photographic and hairdressing shops. My father went to a Japanese hairdresser at that time. A few years later, in the last concentration camp, he discovered that his hairdresser held the rank of colonel in the Japanese army there.  He now understood that this "barber" had been sent to the Indies long before the war to spy and thus prepare for the war. The photo shops sent copies of the film rolls to be developed to Japan, so that the Japanese knew fairly accurately where everything was to be found.

In February 1942, Japan started bombing Surabaya. I regularly watched the bombardments. My father gave me a steel helmet, which would protect me sufficiently against possible shrapnel. My little brother got the hunting cap from my father and so we watched the planes and bombardments. We felt very safe with our helmets on.

On March 1^st 1942 the Japanese landed on Java and on March 15^th they were at our doorstep. At that time we had an attractive detached house in Surabaya and a Japanese officer in Surabaya wanted to move into this house. The Japanese confiscated everything of value that they found on their way. We were given some time to pack up, so my mother was able to hide a jewellery box and smuggle it with her. She gave this jewellery box to some Javanese friends for safe keeping (I will elaborate on this later. Then we were all put on the ox cart and sent away on March 17^th 1942.

In the meantime, the Dutch military and civilian leadership had partly moved to Australia and Ceylon. Initially we were welcomed in the house of a friendly Russian doctor. My father was instructed to continue his work for the board for the time being.  It was not until April 22 ^nd that my father, joined by 4,000 other men, was locked up in the Bubutan prison.

Once a week we were allowed to visit him there. The gate would open, a rope would be stretched and we could sometimes hand over soaps or other supplies. In the meantime, the Japanese evacuated a neighbourhood with detached houses in Surabaya and my mother, brother and I were put in a small room in one of those houses.

As the previous residents were forced to leave everything behind, I spent most of the time I was there by reading. I found all the Karl May books in the cupboard, which I devoured.

Life there was actually still reasonable as long as  just didn't get too close to the fence. In the beginning we could leave the complex to do some shopping, but at a certain point this was also forbidden.

There was a gatehouse at the gate, where the Kempeitai, the Japanese military police, held post. They had unlimited power. If, for example, the Kempeitai believed that a general had made a wrong decision, they could lift him off his bed and punish him without having to answer for it.

One of the captains of the Kempeitai was in the habit of handing out punishments at sunset to the women who, in his opinion, deserved it. You just had to make sure that you dissapeared. Just before we were locked up, my mother had managed to get hold of the birth certificates of me and my little brother.

She was able to do so partly because of my father's position. This was already strictly forbidden at the time. The irony is that the person who mediated in giving documents to my mother later, under Soekarno, was one of the fiercest nationalists and a great advocate of ejecting all Dutch people from the country. Later, after the transfer of sovereignty, he became the ambassador to Washington.

On his way to Washington via Schiphol he visited our home. There, an interview took place between him and my father, which I attended. My father said: "Ali, you guys are crazy that you are throwing out all the Dutch. You desperately need them to rebuild the country". Then Ali said: "Well, we'd rather break up than admit a single Dutchman". 

Twenty minutes later, he asked my father if he wanted to come back to Indonesia to take on the restoration of the financial institutions. My father replied: "Yes, but Ali, you are going to Washington now, who will guarantee my safety? "Yes", Ali said, "You are right about that".  

On March 11^th 1944, we were told to pack our belongings and were ordered to go to the train. We were forced into a goods wagon, with narrow benches, and the doors were locked. Then we, 458 women and children, were driven from station to station. Sometimes the train stood for hours in the blazing sun and then we were shunted again.

This shunting was accompanied by shocks, so we fell off the bench and the suitcases flew in all directions. The journey was a hell that lasted 32 hours, without food or drink in a burning heat. When we arrived on our destination we were more dead than alive.

On March 13^th we finally reached Karangpanas, originally an orphanage, and were accommodated in the chapel.  It turned out to be one of the infamous camps with about 2600 people from which an average of 900 were sick.     

In the chapel there were only britches (as with market stalls) and per person there was 60 cm of space in which and under which all personal belongings had to be kept. We had to get food from the soup kitchen and it was very sparse, often only a slotted rice with some vegetables (juice) in it. In the morning there was usually "glass porridge", tapioca flour with hot water. In the Netherlands this commonly would be used as wallpaper glue.

Every day there was a morning roll call, and they were held continually, particularly the once that where held for punishments. Guarding women was seen as a very dishonourable occupation by the Japanese soldiers. The commander was therefore constantly punishing those women who, in his view, did not show him the requisite respect. Whenever and wherever he could, he beat them up. Everyone had to bow down to him as soon as he was around and stay like that until he thought it was enough. If anyone moved even a little, he would hit them. He was later tried as a war criminal.

There were roll calls day and night, and especially the nightly roll calls were feared. Usually people would get up late at night. The children didn't make a sound and always stood still, everyone was so afraid of the Japanese.

We also had to stand and watch when a certain punished person was beaten or, what was considered “fun”, women had to kneel in the gravel with a bamboo stick and stay kneeling in the heat for hours. When they finally fell over, they were beaten and had to get up again. When they were allowed to go back to their place of residence after hours, they were usually unable to walk because of the pain and screamed out and had to be carried.

The camp commanders were men who were mistreated in their own army. They were Asians and in general Asians are a lot crueller, including against one another, quite different than the Dutch. Although in certain circumstanced we Dutch are not much better.

At one point there was a little boy, a friend of mine from Surabaya, who happened to be lying next to me, who suffered from poliomyelitis and died. Then this became an epidemic as well as a measles epidemic and an meningitis epidemic, from which many children died.

As the Japanese were terrified of infectious diseases, they hermetically sealed the chapel and no one was allowed in or out. We could not even take our pans to the soup kitchen anymore. As a result, we had nothing left to eat for days, fortunately water was still available.

My mother fell terribly ill at one point and could hardly walk. As we had to stand in front of our mats at night before sunset and wait for the Japanese inspection to be completed, this became a problem. My mother and my little brother did not make it in time.

The commander started whipping my mother, after which my little brother, that little bundle attacked the Japanese soldier. Everyone thought: "Jesus, now hell will start". The Japanese soldier looked at my little brother and simply walked away. We were stunned. The next day we were back on the line for the inspection and again the same Japanese came straight at us. We stood neatly bent forward. He took something out of his pocket, a biscuit, put it in my little brother's mouth and then walked away leaving us stunned My little brother stood there still bent over with the biscuit in his mouth; "can I eat that?" he asked when the Japanese man was gone. I think my little brother had struck made an impression on the man and touched a chord.

My mother was put in the infirmary and from that moment on I was with my little brother, who I had to take care of on my own. Some women wanted to go and get our food in the soupkitchen on our behalf but this I definitely refused.

Franziska Koblitz, an Austrian lady, has written a book about it, "Die Frauen von Lamparsari". She was transported from Surabaya to Semarang in one transport later than us. Karangpanas is also described by some as the Hell of Semarang. When the women of Karangpanas came to Lampersari it was mostly just to die.

At one point, the infirmary was evacuated, on November 25^th 1944, and the sick, including my mother, were transported by truck.

My little brother (4 years old) and I (9 years old) were left alone. We had no idea where our father was, where our mother was....we had to find out for ourselves. Camp Karangpanas was evacuated on November 27^th and 28^th 1944. Because of the heat all of us (1,600 women and children) had to walk to the next camp at night. At one point, my little brother fell and one of the supervising women said: "Leave him, he's going to die anyway". I then took him piggy back and dragged him to our final destination.

As a result, the groups of Pemudas, rogue youngsters, who had been trained militarily to track down and kill whites, were formed, while fighting broke out among themselves. Their own people were not spared either, because if they did not agree with something, they were also brutally murdered. In short it was an huge violent chaos.

People in the Netherlands had no idea what was going on in the East. The first group of war volunteers was stopped by the English in Malaysia. It was not until March 1946 that the first Dutch troops landed in the East Indies. Subsequently, conscripts, scarcely prepared, were sent to the East, boys who actually did not know what was going on at all and did not know the language and were not used to the climate.

On August 15th 1945 Japan capitulated and the Bersiap period began.

During the war you were sometimes allowed to send a postcard with some Malay words such as 'we are doing well'. A Japanese stamp would be placed on it and the postcard would either arrive or it would not. A Chinese friend of my father's in the camp could read those stamps and so my father knew where we were being held. He got on the train on September 11^th 1945 and in no time he was sitting in a closed compartment smoking a cigarette with a bunch of Javanese. At one point, when the train stopped at a small station, somebody said "We have to hide you because misery is on its way". Almost immediately after that, Pemudas took all the Dutch from the train and killed them. My father was the only Dutchman to survive this massacre.

On September 12^th 1945 my father walked into the camp where we were being held and asked where he could find his wife. A woman brought him to our house. "Mrs van der Schilden, your husband is here" she shouted. I can still vividly see the reaction of my mother lying sick as a dog on our suitcases. She tried to get up, went with her hands through her hair to try and look decent and asked "what do I look like? ... "As miserable as your husband" was the answer she got.

Our father took us to a little hotel, owned by a Chinese doctor, who immediately treated my mother and gave us shelter.

On October 11^th we were attacked in the hotel by a gang armed with bamboo spears. There were another two Dutch families there.

The Pemudas stood around us with their spears and argued fiercely whether they would kill us now or save us for later.

The Pemudas decided to take the Dutch men out of the hotel and bring them to the Boeloe prison and hold the families captured in the hotel. In the prison, 1,100 Dutch men and 100 Japanese soldiers were crammed into overcrowded cells (60 men in a cell measuring 6 by 6 metres).

Karangpanas ca,ü

Lampesari camp houses

Gate of the Lampersari camp

The jewellery box:

We have never heard from the friends to whom my mother gave the jewellery box in 1942. When my uncle, who was a naval officer, was in Surabaya in 1946, he was approached by someone who asked if he was related to T. van der Schilden. He told this person that Teunis was his brother. This person then said that he had something for Teunis' family and gave him the jewellery box.

There was a Dutch submarine in Surabaya, which had to go to Fremantle for maintenance. My uncle contacted the commander to ask him a favour. The Dutch consul in Perth (Australia) called my father (we lived in Sawyers Valley not far from Fremantle) and said "there is a commander on a Dutch submarine, which is stationed there for maintenance in the harbour of Fremantle, who has something for you". This is the way my mother got all her jewellery back after all these years. Unfortunately, we never managed to get in touch with our Javanese friends again...

After some research on the Internet, it is highly likely that the Dutch submarine, which sailed from Surabaya to Freemantle for maintenance, was Mr Ms K XIV, who was responsible for the sinking of two Japanese troop ships, the SS Katori Maru and the SS Hiyoshi Maru, in WWII.

(Source: www.wikiwand.com/nl/Hr.Ms._K_XIV_(1933)

My mother died at the age of 72 and my father, who was seriously ill the last years of his life, died when he was 78 years old.

I myself am already 85 years old and regularly give lectures both for business clubs and at schools, where the children are always very interested and hang on every word I say.

My life story is one with many aspects and different colours. The great positivity is that our family in our so beloved  Dutch East Indies, has survived all the horrors of the war.

Dieter van der Schilden, October 2020

In Australie with my brother who is 4 years younger in December 1945