Termination Shock [calibre 4.99.4]

At war’s end, during a chaotic few weeks of being shuffled from place to place, Hendrik encountered his father, alive, but sick and emaciated, as they were being loaded into boxcars. It ended somehow with the two of them finding their way back to their house in East Java. This was half burned down and stripped of all items that could be moved. They lived in the ruins for a few months trying to figure out what had become of Greta, Alexandra, and Mina. The answer turned out to be that the women had wound up in a camp in western Java, surrounded by increasingly hostile and aggressive Indonesian bravos: teenaged males who had grown their hair long and ran around in packs brandishing bamboo spears with sharp, hardened tips, and sometimes more advanced weapons that they had acquired from the Japanese. This period was named bersiap, meaning, roughly, “get ready” or “be prepared.” What they were getting prepared for was to run all the Europeans, as well as the Europeanized Indos and the Chinese, out of the Indies for good and make it an independent country. Loudspeakers were nailed up to trees and strung together with wires so that rousing speeches by Sukarno could be broadcast everywhere. They naturally focused their attentions on the camps into which the Japanese had conveniently rounded up all the people they didn’t like. At first these were still guarded by the Japanese—who had no way of getting home—and later by Gurkhas and Sikhs parachuted in by the Brits, who were supposed to be in charge of the place until further arrangements could be made. Those camps, as bad as they still were, were safer than anywhere else.

In their little enclave in East Java, across the bay from the Royal Dutch Shell petroleum docks, Johannes and Hendrik felt comparatively safe for the time being. Johannes renewed an old friendship with the Kuoks, a local Chinese family who before the war had found a niche as middlemen, buying the produce of the interior and selling it to overseas customers. Feeling threatened by the overall climate, and now effectively stateless, they wanted guns to protect themselves. Johannes knew how to get them, exploiting his privileged status, and traded some to the Kuoks for food, which they still knew how to obtain from their connections in plantations up-country.

In time they got word that Greta, Alexandra, and Mina had been evacuated by their Gurkha and Sikh protectors to a more easily defended location closer to what was then called Batavia and would soon be called Jakarta. Johannes reckoned that he would be able to reach the place via railway and, along with Hendrik, set out to do just that. The journey was halting as the train kept getting held up in provincial towns by local gangs of revolutionaries. In some places a kind of order was being maintained by what would eventually become the government of Indonesia, or by vestigial British or Dutch forces. Other places it seemed more like mob rule. As anyone who wasn’t deaf could tell, the latter were communicating up and down the line by the “coconut telegraph,” which was a traditional system of sending information from village to village by beating on hollow logs.

In one of those towns, all the European-looking passengers were marched off and made to run a gantlet of thrusting spears and thudding clubs into the town square. Hendrik and other children and women were separated from adult males, who could be heard screaming. The next, and last, time that Hendrik saw his father, Johannes was kneeling naked in the town square. He was blindfolded. On closer inspection, he was bandaged over the eye sockets, and the bandage was soaked and streaming with blood, because his eyes had been gouged out and tossed into a bucket along with a lot of other eyes of the wrong color. One of the young rebels had got a samurai sword and was going down the line cutting heads off. Johannes’s last words were “Leve de Koningin!” (“Long live the Queen!”).

Whatever plan their captors might have had for the women and children never came to pass as word of the situation somehow got out to better-armed and more disciplined Indonesians who released them from the crowded cells where they had been detained and sent them back whence they’d come on the next train. Thus did nine-year-old Hendrik become effectively a member of the Kuok family. They took him in and made up a Chinese name for him: Eng, which was easy for him to remember (it meant “scary” or “spooky” in Dutch) and to pronounce. Anyone could see at a glance that he was Indo and not Chinese, but there was nothing they could do about that.

As they found out later, Mother Greta, while climbing over a wall topped with broken glass, cut her hand. The wound became septic and she died. Sister Mina at that point became, for all practical purposes, the daughter of Aunt Alexandra. They made it to a better-protected site in Batavia whence the British evacuated them to a camp in Australia.

That was a much better situation than what faced the Kuok clan during the struggle for Indonesian independence, which consumed most of the second half of the 1940s. The port city where they lived became the focus of a lot of fighting, including aerial and naval bombardment. Their family compound, after being heavily damaged, was expropriated. So they moved to a plantation up in the hills where they had business dealings going back several generations. This area later became the locus of insurgent and counterinsurgent warfare. Some Dutch commandos parachuted in and used it as a base of operations for a few days until new orders came in over the wireless and they abruptly departed. Indonesian freedom fighters, who had been watching all this from only a few hundred meters away, then moved in and conducted what were known euphemistically as “reprisals.” The only females who survived the reprisals were those who had the presence of mind to flee into the jungle at the first sign of trouble. Hendrik, who put his tree-climbing skills to good use, saw some of the reprisals from a distance and still refused to talk about them. He, a few girls, and “Rudy” Kuok, a relatively senior member of the clan, escaped with the clothes on their backs and eventually found their way to an enclave on the coast that was still under Dutch military control. Hendrik at this point stopped claiming to be Eng Kuok and identified himself as Hendrik Castelein, a Dutch boy, and told the whole story. They were evacuated by ship to the Dutch base at Ambon, a predominantly Christian island to the east.