A special guest at the commemoration in Borger was Sabine Eisenring from Leiden. She is on holiday in Zweeloo and was therefore unable to attend the national Indies commemoration in The Hague. “I was looking for a memorial and this one was the closest,” she says. Her father was in the war in Pakanbaru and worked on the railway there. “What they have been through is indescribable. Hunger, pain and sadness.”
Eisenring himself went to Pakanbaroe in the 1990s. “I would do that with my father, but that was a bit too much for him. We did all the preparation together. The railway is very long. So I only did a small part, but when I was there I heard the people are still screaming.”
The war also had an influence on Eisenring itself. So she thinks we can embrace it too. “The war has always been in us and actually with the death of my father the war has disappeared from me. That we commemorate it helps us to bend it in our strength, in love and not in anger, because that is of no use to anyone.” so she decides.