The exhibition highlighting the letters of Aaldert Wachtmeester from the Dutch East Indies was finally opened in the library of Ter Apel on Thursday.
‘My dear sunshine, this morning I went for the inspection and I had all ones and one two’.
This is how the first letter that Aaldert Wachtmeester wrote to his Ypkje, on July 10, 1945, begins. In the following years he wrote many more, from the Dutch East Indies. 360 epistles to ‘My sweet sun’, which have been preserved and form the heart of the Tabeh Sobat exhibition. It was opened on Thursday in the Hesse Library in Ter Apel, in the village where Aaldert and Ypke lived.
Shoebox
“And more than three years later than planned,” says son Melle Wachtmeester, former councilor of Bellingwedde, who found all those letters in a shoebox and put together Tabeh Sobat (which is Malay and means ‘farewell friend’) with his brother Gerrie. “We already had this exhibition here in 2020, but then the corona crisis broke out. It didn’t happen then.” But now it does, at a time when the debate about Dutch colonial history is in full swing.
Aaldert Wachtmeester, born in 1922, lived in Weerdingermond when he volunteered for the Dutch East Indies immediately after the Second World War. He was dating Ypke, who worked as a maid and lived in Ter Apel. “He wanted to help liberate ‘our’ colony from the Japanese,” says son Melle. “That was important, as was instilled in him by Radio Oranje and the other few media at the time.”
Pregnant
He wrote that first letter, about the successful inspection, from the barracks in Zuidlaren. He then returned home, married Ypke and embarked in early 1946. “It went to the Dutch East Indies via England,” says Gerrie. “The writing started along the way. He sent long letters and then he also learned that my mother was pregnant. So he tried to return but that didn’t work.”
And so Aaldert began his time as a mortar gunner of the Drenthe battalion. He mainly stayed in Sumatra, fighting against Indonesians who wanted independence. And he wrote to his Ypke, about the fighting and other matters.
‘While the house was surrounded, one of the boys managed to shoot two pigs. A very fat one and one that was smaller. The smallest pig was eaten this afternoon and the other was sold for 275 guilders.’
Son Jaap born
He wrote this in August 1946 and at the same time he received a telegram from Ypkje stating that their son Jaap had been born. ‘Dearly beloved wife and son, how are you, darling? I was completely shaking when I got the telegram,” were some of the words he used to express his joy.
The contrast with the letter that went to Ter Apel a few months later is enormous. ‘At the place where I fired with my mortar, we found those two bodies close to each other. So they were killed by me. These are the first that I can say with certainty that I have killed them.’
“During his stay there, he quickly realized that the Dutch East Indies could not remain a colony,” says Melle. “That the situation was different than he had in mind when he volunteered. This also became apparent in later years when he openly talked about his years in the Far East.”
Worried about the country
In 1948 he returned to Ter Apel, the last letter he wrote on a ship on the Red Sea (‘Another big hug from you Aaldert’). “Jaap was already 2 years old at that time,” says Melle. “Until then, my mother had lived in different places in Ter Apel. After his return they moved into a small house, where I was born and after me Johan and Gerrie. As mentioned, he talked very openly about those three years, about what had gone wrong. He always followed the news about Indonesia and had concerns about that country.”
Father Aaldert died in 2007 and Melle found the shoebox with all those letters in the attic of the parental home. “I knew he had kept them. My mother no longer had the letters she had sent to Sumatra, she had destroyed them. The box also contained photos that my father had taken in the Dutch East Indies and sent home with the letters. Gerrie, a visual artist, used those photos to create paintings that show soldiers and the Indonesian landscape. Melle wrote a book in which he wrote down many of the letters and that he Tabeh Sobat mentioned. Because those words, Goodbye Friend, had also been the theme of Aaldert’s cremation.
Based on incorrect information
“Gerrie and I made an exhibition of my father’s book, canvases and other things that was already in the Museum Bronbeek in Arnhem and is now finally in our home port of Ter Apel and will be in the library there in the coming months. Farewell Friend is a tribute to our father, but also gives the image of someone who left for the Far East based on incorrect information and saw that things were different.”
Ypke Wachtmeester, the recipient of all those letters, did not witness the opening. She died during the corona crisis.