REUNION WITH MY FATHER.

REUNION WITH MY FATHER

August 15, 1946. We were liberated, fittingly it is now August 18, 2007. Freedom, that you had thought, but now the Javanese wanted their freedom and went to war against us, their white invaders. In the meantime, we received postcards from my father through the Red Cross saying: stay where you are, I am coming to you. After a lot of trouble from attacking Javanese and after much wandering we finally arrived un scathed in Batavia. There my mother got a message from the Red Cross that my father, on his way to us, was picked up by the Indonesians rebels and they ended saying the final words: he is missing, presumably dead.
So my mother, as a widow, could go to Holland with us. On the ship the Klipfontein, which much later broke down on a clif, very appropriate as the name suggests. On this, for us wonderful ship, my mother withdraw herself with two nuns in a cabin, because she was an asthma patient.
On the entire trip, until we reached Attaca in Egypt, we had not seen or spoken to her. My brother and I wandered on the deck and enjoyed the lovely sea air and all the food we got and nobody paying attention to us. We ate a lot of mandarins and drank lots of coca cola. We didn’t wash ourselves, we weren’t used to do so anyway and slept outside near the ship’s chimney. Eventually the captain, who heard that there were two children wandering about the ship with nobody taking care of them, finally decided to appoint a guardian, who would take care of us. I came under the care of Dr. Provo Knuit, a retired cabin phycisian. I had a perfect life, he was very severe, bathed in sea water, pimples were cut open and still he was also very sweet to me giving me lots of good food and vitamins learning me to excercise. He was my first substitute father after 5 years and I was very happy with him. Once a week he drank too much and then I had to help him getting in bed instead of him helping me, but mostly he was a super good real father figure. Upon arrival in Holland in Amsterdam I sadly had to say goodbye to him and he gave me two wooden bookends in the form of horseheads. I cried a lot, all of a sudden I was fatherless again. In Amersfoort my mother placed us in the care of a couple of families who were complete strangers to us, I was then a girl of 13 years old. She went to live on her own. On Saturday and Sunday we were allowed to visit here for an hour. In this strange country for me, it was April 1947, I almost died from cold in the house of mrs. Ijf and her four children, who were not very nice to me and were always teasing me.They thought I was very odd, that yellow concentration camp child with strange manners and all those strange Indonesian words, such as pisang for banana and ketimoen for cucumber, etc. You can’t believe how lonely I felt. One day I wanted to visit my brother, I rang the bell and a servant opened the door of the house he was living in and she told me that my brother, for health reasons, had been brought to the country side to get better and stronger. I thought, it cannot get worse or could it? Blindness maybe, so I started walking on the street with my eyes closed, because I thought that it might even be like this, so it really wasn’t so bad after all, luckily I am not blind. After many bumps of many lampposts and scraped knees, I realized that my fate wasn’t so bad. I decided to take matters in my own hand and to look for someone who wanted to adopt me as their child. Sooner said, then done. Every day on my way to and from school I passed many beautiful houses. One of them was my favourite, there an old lady lived with a white dog, which she often took out walking when I passed. That was it. I started talking to her and later I took the dog out walking for her and sometime later I was drinking tea with her, it resulted in me going there a lot. One day I asked her whether she wanted to adopt me. She was stunned and after a lot of talking and begging from my side (the house inside was even more attractive than from the outside, it was very cozy and beautiful), she called my mother and told her about my wish to be adopted. Luckily she turned out to be a retired lady-in-waiting of Queen Wilhelmina and so the damage for me was limited. My mother went to visit her and explained everything to her from her perspective. I have shed many tears for this lovely dear woman, where I, unfortunately, was not allowed to live. I was desperate.
At that moment, the cosmos thought it was enough and the message came that my own father was found and was on a ship on his way to Holland. The day that he came back to us, I will never ever forget. My brother and I were bathed and dressed in our best clothes to visit my mother and wait for him, my father, after 6 years. It lasted and lasted and finally we went out to playing. The Jan Huigensstraat in Amersfoort was on a small hill and there in the distance I saw a white Van coming. I ran down the hill and the Van stopped next to me and a man got out with a very kind brown face and asked me the way to the Jan Huigensstraat. I showed him and the Van drove on and then it hit me: That is my father! God, I was so happy, I had a real father. I ran to my mother’s house and walked up the path. Dad, I shouted, Dad, it is me Dinkie. He turned around and took me in his arms. I was incredibly happy, he was back now everything would be all right. My brother and I cried and so did he. When we had to leave after diner, he was speechless and thought that was terrible and he promised us that he would arrange everything as soon as possible and that is what he did.
Two months later we, all four of us, were together living in an apartment in the Bergstraat in Amersfoort opposite the cemetary. Nobody could understand how happy I was. My mother, when she was old, became a great grandmother to her grandchildren. As a 7 year old child she had to go to boarding school because her mother, who had TBC, had to go to a sanitorium for a couple of years. Living with the nuns hadn’t been fun for her either.
Dinkie