Eighteen former students from the horticultural school in Frederiksoord secretly came together in the Dutch East Indies during the Second World War, while that was forbidden. That shows a study by Nina Litsios. For her master’s thesis, she read more than a hundred yearbooks from the school and came across interesting stories that are not known to the general public.
While the men were in an internment camp, they consulted about overdue contribution. “We knew that the bond between these former students was strong. You always feel that when you walk through the gardens,” says Litsios. “But so strong that you can school in a camp, even if it is forbidden to talk about membership, that is another level.”
It is Monday, July 17, 1944. For more than two years, what Java has has been locked up to Europeans in Kampen. Here, in this camp of the IVDE battalion, just under thousand men have been brought together. There are around twenty former students from the GA van Swieten Horticultural School.
They find each other on the initiative of Martien van Diedenhoven; Meetings are held in two meetings. They come from all sides, steel -wise, at most with two. Together schools is forbidden and the Jap does not play with it. And there they are. Behind one of the sheds each on his stool or box. In a short of Lappen, barefoot or on boards, a few with a shirt on, but shofel and loss. But unbroken!
Former students, also known as garden hare, who survived the camp reported three years after this event in the yearbook. What did Frederiksoord have to do? The garden hare describe the secret meetings as a ‘bright spot’ in the dark period.
Some students were also instructed to construct a herb garden in collaboration with military pharmacists to help the high number of asthma patients. In wartime, the horticultural knowledge also came in handy.
According to NIOD researcher Jeroen Kemperman, it was not exceptional that meetings of 15 to 20 people were held in Japanese internment camps. “I have not heard about members’ meetings in which apparently were made. That is new to me, but I am not surprised,” he says.
“When discovering a clandestine meeting, the death penalty did not threaten so much, but a substantial exhaust and temporary lonely imprisonment under miserable conditions,” he explains the danger. “Although the Japanese were not always consistent in distributing penalties, caution was indeed offered.”
All yearbooks in Frederiksoord are made up of several parts. They all provide Litsios information about numerous topics: a preface with the minutes of the presidential meeting, the stories with the latest position of the gardens, the stories of students who came to work in the Netherlands or outside the Netherlands and at the back of an address list of the active members with their name and address.
Where the stories in the first yearbooks are mainly about gardening and, for example, the breeding of cucumbers, the stories of the garden hare themselves are becoming increasingly important in the later booklets.