Jewish girl in a Japanese Prison Camp - English (2025)

By our editor BART FUNNEKOTTER NRC-Handelsblad van 15 augustus 2013!
Foto Anne-Ruth Wertheim by: Merlijn Doomernik

Save SVP in case of fire! It’s written in large black letters on the cardboard box on the floor of the living room of Anne-Ruth Wertheim. She opens the lid. It’s full of memories of Wertheim’s youth in the Dutch East Indies and her stay in the Japanese Prison Camp, among which a Goose Board her mother made in the camp. “I think I behave so bad because I kept those things at home. Imagine something happens to them. Next year they go to the Jewish Historical Museum. There, at least, they are safe.”

Anne-Ruth Wertheim (Batavia, 1934) belongs to a special minority. Her father was Jewish, one of the approximately 3.000 Jewish people in the Dutch East Indies. Starting from the end of 1944, she was with her mother, little brother and sister in the camp Tangerang, where the Japanese had collected Jewish women and children. Later on they moved to camp Adek, where they experienced the liberation. The family Wertheim survived the war, including Anne-Ruth’s father, who, as a professor of the university of Batavia, had been in a barrack of prominent people in another Japanese Prison Camp. His family in Europe was almost completely massacred.

Today, August 15th, the capitulation of Japan was commemorated. “An important day,” says Wertheim. One that should get more attention. “A lot of Indischgasten think that August 15th comes off badly compared to May 4th and 5th. I agree with them.”

So Wertheim wants to tell about her war in the Dutch East Indies. She did it in schools, in a booklet she published at the end of the nineties and earlier this year in an interview session that lasted several days with a journalist of a Japanese newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun, one of the biggest in the country. The latter was very important to her. “Millions of Japanese had the opportunity to read that the Jewish people had been separated by them in the War, had been treated differentl y than other people.”

When on December 7th, 1941 World War II also hit Asia, Anne-Ruth Wertheim didn’t know she was half Jewish. Her parents never talked about the descent of her father. He did nothing at all with faith, just like his parents. They even became Remonstrant, to assimilate as well as possible. They had to flee twice in their lives: in 1917 from Russia, because they were bourgeois, and in 1933 from Germany, because of their Jewish descent. They could not bear to flee a third time, says Wertheim. “They committed suicide on May 15th 1940, one day after the Netherlands capitulated for the Nazis.”

It took more than a month before this news reached the Dutch East Indies. Anne-Ruth, who was five years old, heard about the death of her grandfather and grandmother when she caught her father on the phone crying. A white lie followed. “My parents told us they died of a disease.” At that point, the war for Wertheim was nothing but a rhyme in the school yard. “Playing tag we said a counting-out rhyme: Bang bang boom, Hitler is a crook, Goring is a swine, you have to be it.”

But the Dutch East Indies were not saved from the war. Immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Wertheim and her little brother and sister were sent to a tea plantation in the mountains outside of Bat

avia. “When the alarm went there – namely beats on a hollow tree – we had to go into the shelters. Those were excavated in the hills. Inside it smelled deliciously to wet earth.”

The Dutch forces in the archipelago surrendered on March 8th 1942. The Japanese threw Wertheim’s father as a prominent member of the Dutch Community in a camp. She remained free, together with her mother, brother and sister, for another year, after which they also disappeared behind barbed wire. “We ended up in a fenced residential area, in a house where we shared a room with another family. It was incredibly filthy there. There was one bathroom for a hundred people and it was full of vermin.”

Wertheim’s mother had taken paper and pencil and tried to learn something to her children under difficult circumstances. “She did everything to give us the impression that it wasn’t all that bad, to not frighten us. Even if someone in the camp had received a terrible corporal punishment, she said that that person would get well again with some water and rest. It was all not as bad as it seemed.”

On September 4th 1944, the commander announced that all Jewish people in the camp had to sign themselves up, says Wertheim. They were sent to another camp, the consequence of an anti-Semitic campaign that started the year before; partly at the instigation of German visitors of the Dutch East Indies. Wertheim doesn’t know for sure whether she heard only then from her mother that she was half Jewish, or whether she already heard it before. “My mother had to make a tough choice. She herself, wasn’t Jewish. Did she have to keep the descent of her husband a secret and wait whether they would discover, or not? In the end she chose to lie and said she was Jewish too. That way, at least she knew she could stay with her children.”

Wertheim can remember well the drive to the station of Batavia in December 1944. Her mother was in the front seat of the truck: she had typhus and erysipelas. The children were in the trailer. “Delicious, our hair in the wind.”

Subsequently they went with the train to Tangerang where the Jewish people were brought together. The camp was also inhabited by Freemasons. “The circumstances were a lot worse than in the first camp. We had less living space in our barracks and were fed even less.”
Most Jewish people in the camp, just like the Wertheims, did not pay much attention to their faith. “Only the so-called Bagdad-Jews, who came from the present Iraq, were orthodox. But they too, were too busy surviving to spend a lot of attention to religion.”

In March 1945 the Wertheims were transferred with all the inhabitants of Tangerang to another camp, Adek, where they saw the end of the war. In three years they received one card from father Willem Wertheim. They had no idea whether he was still alive. But he was. After the release of Wertheim, he had taken charge of the Red Cross in Batavia. There he had been able to discover the whereabouts of his wife and children.

Wertheim: “I was playing outside at the gate of the camp when he arrived on a bike. He recognized me immediately and I did too. It was great to be able to talk with him again. I remember being sorry that I had to bring him quickly to my mother. It was so good to have him completely for myself.”

The Wertheims left for the Netherlands in the beginning of 1946. Her parents completely changed their opinion during their stay in the camp about the Dutch East Indies, says Wertheim. “They were awfully rightwing when they arrived from the Netherlands. Apart from the children of the Indonesian elite my father encountered at the university, they thought the local population was stupid, lazy and childish. After the war they were convinced the Dutch East Indies had to become independent.”

Anne-Ruth Wertheim has fought since the war – she worked among others in education – against the exclusion of certain groups of people. That she as a Jewish camp victim claims

the attention, has sometimes been taken badly by other ‘Indischgasten’. “Some feel that the Jewish people already have the Holocaust, for which they receive a lot of attention. And then there’s me, with a Jewish variant on ‘their’ Dutch East Indies - story .”

Wertheim emphasizes that what happened to her cannot be compared to what the Jewish people in Europe experienced. “But when people say that we were ‘only’ separated, then I reply that this could be the first step in a process that could have led to much worse. Every prosecution starts small. I tried in my life to let people see the mechanisms that can lead to something horrible like the Holocaust.”

Wertheim has an outspoken opinion about the current Dutch politics. She uses harsh words towards the former minister of Foreign Affairs and Integration, Rita Verdonk. And she wrote a piece against Geert Wilders in the Volkskrant – with the title ‘Wilders’ deadly words’ which was later part of the process against this leader of the PVV. “What happens now with Muslims – the way they are placed outside of society – is a great concern to me. But I have hope. I rely on reason. If you only explain people how exclusion leads to violence in the end, then I think they understand that.”

Because she uses her past so actively to improve the present, Wertheim hardly suffers from a camp trauma, she says. But little things tell her she carries a special history with her. “When I’m at a tram station, and I don’t know when the tram arrives, I think I find it worse than the average human being. Because it reminds me of some form of arbitrary authority that decides when that tram will arrive. If I get the chance to walk to a stop with a digital board that counts the time for the arrival of the tram, I do it. Then I feel less like being surrendered to the whims of an authority outside of me.”