Suddenly Wouter Muller is in front of the camera with clenched fists. Initially, the 73-year-old musician spoke thoughtfully about his parents, who came to the Netherlands when Indonesian independence was a fact, with him as a toddler. But after he sang one of his songs at his kitchen table (“You ate the kale and drank the cod liver oil/from sunstroke to goosebumps”), his tone changes. It’s as if his music turned him on. “What it must have been for my parents to leave that country behind. We were Dutch there, but here it was: where do those brownies come from?”
Muller is one of the main characters in The Indian account (NTR), the diptych that Hans Goedkoop made about the hundreds of thousands of people who came to the Netherlands from the ‘lost’ Indies around 1950. Among them, Goedkoop’s grandfather, who was an officer in the KNIL. It is a generation that has been silent about what they had gone through and is now almost gone. Muller sings: “They used to come all together, but they went one by one.”
The reception of the newcomers was a perfect reflection of the water-cold climate on the North Sea. Moreover, not everyone was allowed on board the ships. Saar Letsoin only learned after years that her parents had three more children, whom they had had to leave behind. At the end of their lives she would accompany her parents back to Indonesia. “I said: you carried me, now I will bring you back.”
The Indian diplomas of the newcomers were declared invalid to prevent competition with the Dutch workers. “They are especially suitable for precision work and for the assembly line,” stated the Polygoonjournaal cheerfully. Meanwhile, the newcomers had to pay large bites of salary to the government as compensation for crossing and reception. Charles Goudsmit tells how his father was admitted to hospital with a serious illness. No one was allowed in, could join or it was too complicated with the language. Anyway, the man died alone.
Post-war silence
Adjust, we’re guests – their parents’ kids were told. Nothing was said about what had happened in the Indies. “That silence was an act of love,” says Goedkoop – a patient interviewer who thinks aloud with his interlocutors. “I sometimes thought: open your mouth,” says Wouter Muller. “But I never said it.” Finally, his father moved on to America, from where he tried to persuade his children to come too. The US military, that was exactly what they needed. His son was too busy organizing demonstrations against the war in Vietnam.
The stories in The Indian account touch on the interviews Coen Verbraak made in Our boys in Java and Moluccans in the Netherlands – which also attempted to breach the wall of post-war silence. “All the men had PTSD,” says Anis de Fretes of the Moluccan community in which he grew up. “There was a lot of hitting. Any boy in any family can tell you that.” His classmates became train hijackers, his father was one of the protagonists in protest actions in Amersfoort, which led to fights between different residents of the camp. De Fretes saw his father being mistreated in the process: “They beat him everywhere, while he had a Bible in his hand!” It makes painfully clear where the bill ended up after decolonization.
Speaking of bills: war crimes are in the first part of The Indian account hardly been mentioned. But in a preview of part two, we saw a page from an old veteran’s photo book, with a photo of a group of Indians crammed together. The caption: “The whole booty, 23 pieces.”