When Anis tells de Fretes that he was born in barrack 85 in camp Westerbork, people look at him in surprise. I’m sorry, but this isn’t a Jewish man, is it? That’s right. De Fretes’ father and mother were from Indonesia. But apparently few people know that some of the Indies Dutch who were forced to move to the Netherlands at the end of the 1940s were received in a place that served as a concentration camp a few years earlier. A few more facts: diplomas that Indisch Dutch had obtained in Indonesia were invalid in the Netherlands. And if there was work, 75 percent of the income had to be relinquished to the state. In addition, they were obliged to purchase furniture and clothing from the government. “So you were forced into poverty.”
Those words come from Hans Goedkoop, presenter of the exceptionally beautiful diptych The Indian Account, which aired Tuesday and Wednesday evenings. ‘We were Dutch in the Indies’, musician Wouter Muller, whose father was a sergeant major in the KNIL, quoted his mother. ‘If we go to Holland, we will meet many more Dutch people.’ That’s not how it went. How it went: ‘What are you doing here? Where do all those brownies come from?’ Muller was brought up with the message that he should keep a low profile in the Netherlands, that he was only a guest and that he should behave like a guest. Charles Goudsmit also felt this as a child. ‘You must keep a low profile. You hide.’ If he didn’t and behaved really exuberantly like a child, busy and wild, he was grabbed in the neck. ‘Blackie, calm down, huh?’ Keeping a low profile was what their parents did too. Do not tell about what they had experienced and felt, but remain silent. But that silence, Goedkoop (himself from a family with roots in the Dutch East Indies), analysed, was an act of love. “You want to give your children something, but not something that makes their lives harder.”
Well, you should – if you haven’t already – see the diptych for yourself. Must, yes. As every Dutch person should actually do. Because it is very well made, with enthusiasm and beautiful archive images and penetrating portraits. But mainly because it is a lesson that hardly anyone learned in school. A hidden page from Dutch history; one torn out and crumpled up in a corner. Books, films, exhibitions, teaching programs and documentaries as The Indian Account show that history in all its imperfections, smooth out that page as best as possible and give it the place that belongs to it: in the collective memory.
Earlier on Wednesday night, nearly two million people watched the popular history program The story of the Netherlandsthat primetime (8:30 PM) is programmed on NPO1. The Indian Account, just as much the story of the Netherlands, had to make do with a spot on NPO2 late in the evening. That is, I’m afraid, telling.