Commemorations at the end of WWII in the Dutch East Indies

[pieter]

[pieter]

87 years old Dutch Marine emotional at the commerotation of the liberation of the Dutch Indies which were occupied by the Japanese.
Maybe Dutch, Indo (Eurasian) and others died in Japanese concentration camps. Peole came back traumatized to the Netherlands after the
war, without mothers, fathers or brothers and sisters that we killed by Japanse guards or starved to death.

[pieter]

During the Japanenese occupation of the Dutch East Indies, most civilians who were of Dutch, or mixed heritage usually ended up being interned in a series of camps. These camps were dotted over the islands of Indonesia, but one place Tjideng, became one of the more infamous of these camps. The Tjideng internment camp was in the heart of the old city of Batavia (now Jakarta), and housed tens of thousands of women and children.

Witness the camp after the first British Indian troops liberated it,shortly after the surrender of Japan. The conditions you see would have been much better than when the camp was under Japanese control.

Tjideng today like many of these camps remains a housing area in the heart of modern Jakarta, and many of the houses in this video still remain. A visitor would not realise that this was area, used to be an infampus prison camp, as there are no signs indicating it.

We can only imagine, that perhaps in the darkness, the ghosts of Tjideng remain, a silent testiment to one of the darker sides of Dutch East Indies/Japanese/Indonesian history, and a reminder that camps like Tjideng should never exist anywhere in the world.

[pieter]