(This article first appeared in the March 2004 issue of Reader’s Digest Canada, and subsequently in dozens of RD issues around the world.)
By Michael Geisterfer
On January 23, 2001, I was reading The National Post when I came across a full-page spread entitled, 41 Things to do this Winter. Number 27 was Find your mother’s hometown on a map. Now find your grandmother’s hometown. By way of illustration they had included a small map thumbnail of a foreign place with strange, barely pronounceable names and in the middle was a city called Leeuwarden, Friesland.
A tingle went down my spine. That’s exactly where my mother was born, way up in the northern part of Holland, and her mother too. My other grandmother was born just a few kilometers away, in the city of Groningen, but too far to fit on the tiny thumbnail map. That would have been an even more incredible coincidence, but still nothing compared to the way in which the lives of my two grandmothers intertwined over time and eternity.
Long before my first grandmother –Oma Jantje- even became a mother, her best friend, Anna, gave her a photograph of herself. The photograph was taken on the veranda of her home, and she is smiling enigmatically at the cameraman whose shadow can be seen in the foreground. On the back she had written, Anna, 1925.
“Why are you giving me this photograph?” my grandmother asked.
“Because I am going far away,” Anna replied. “You may never see me again.”
Sure enough, a few weeks later Anna packed her few belongings into a steel-clad trunk, caught the train to Amsterdam and then boarded a steamer for Batavia in the Dutch East Indies long before it ever became known as Indonesia. She told my grandmother that she would write often and that she would come back if things didn’t work out. But she never did. In fact my grandmother never heard from her again.
My grandmother took this photograph, pasted it into her photo album and in 1952 put it into a box that she took with her on her own train ride to Amsterdam. In Amsterdam, she and the rest of her family boarded a steamer headed, not to Batavia, but Halifax, Canada. When they arrived in Halifax a few weeks later, they boarded another train that took them virtually all of the way across Canada to a city in the rolling hills of Alberta called Edmonton. They moved into a house at the end of a street beside a steep ravine, and she took the album out of the box and put it onto a bookshelf where it remained until 1983 when my father took it down from the shelf and began flipping through its pages.
That’s when my grandmother learned what had become of Anna.
What happened was this: Anna took a train to Amsterdam and then a steamboat to Batavia in the Dutch East Indies to marry a man that she had never met. This man was an expatriate Dutch widower who had seen her photograph on the mantelpiece of a friend. Taken by her beauty, he wrote her a letter asking her out on a transcontinental date. The terms were simple: he would pay her passage to Batavia if she would at least consider marrying him. If in the end she chose not to, he would pay her passage back home.
The man she finally met when she stepped off the boat in Semarung was tall and robust, in his early thirties, with a blonde moustache and round spectacles that framed eyes so sad and intense and blue that she knew at once she would marry him. This was the thing about Anna. She was a practical woman with an unusually large heart. After a time, she agreed to be his wife.
A wealthy widower by the name of Johannes, he was part of the Dutch elite who had ruled the Indonesian archipelago for nearly three hundred years. He was proprietor of a number of thriving businesses in the town of Malang on the island of Java. He owned bicycle shops and car dealerships and lived in a large estate in the middle of town, with house-servants and maidservants and gardeners and cooks. He was a successful, well-respected man, and yet none of these things were what drew Anna to him.
This is what drew Anna to him, this air Johannes had of perplexed sorrow. In spite of all the outer trappings of success, he harboured a terrible secret. He had been abandoned at birth and grown up in a large orphanage in Amsterdam. Until Anna, he had never known the love of a mother.
In her heart of hearts, Anna was a compassionate woman whose kindness was often masked by an almost blinding practicality. She did not just take bewildered orphans into her arms and console them; she also fed them and clothed and gave them everything they needed to move on with their lives, for this is what needed to be done. The world was a hard place and in order to survive you needed food in your stomach, a shirt on your back and a bed to lie on at night, but most importantly, you needed to be able to fend for yourself.
If she missed her home country she never let on. Instead she set about to create a family for Johannes and herself. She provided a home that was as neat and tidy and well run as any home that lined the narrow cobble stoned streets of northern Holland where she had grown up many thousands of miles away. From the loins of their practical love came six children. One girl and five boys. Each one of them had blonde hair and blue eyes, just like their parents but unlike the servants who worked in their home and lived in the shanties no larger than tool sheds in the back. The servants had bronze skin and deep brown eyes. This is how you could tell them apart from their masters. In the well-ordered world that Anna found herself there was one over-riding certainty: servants were always bronze-coloured and masters were always white. It was never the other way around. You would never find a white servant in a bronze household, nor would you ever, ever encounter a bronze person treating a white person like they were mere possessions, or chattels, or worse yet, beasts of burden to be used and then discarded.
Something like that would never happen in Anna’s world.
And yet one day, amazingly, it did.
In 1941, emboldened by its successful exploits elsewhere in the Pacific Rim, the Japanese military force invaded the Dutch East Indies and overthrew the Dutch colonialist government. Signs were erected all over the country depicting two large, round, blue eyes. The caption read: The Eyes of the Enemy. All residents of northern European descent were rounded up and interned in large concentration camps.
Within days, Anna and Johannes went from being masters of their own small domain in Malang, to prisoners in overcrowded detention centers where three, four, five large families were forced to share one small bedroom. Over time, families were separated. Men were sent to one camp, women to another. In the initial confusion of separation, Johannes disappeared. Anna never saw nor heard from him again.
She was shipped by train to a sprawling camp on the coast, near Semarung. Her daughter and two youngest sons were with her. The other three boys were sent to a men’s camp five kilometers away. Sometimes, when they were all out working in the fields she would see them and they would wave at one another through the shimmering waves of the hot son. Often she assumed it was simply a mirage, a dream. They were not her sons at all and she would awaken back in her bed in Friesland.
She never did though. The Anna Drexhage that took the train to Amsterdam and then the boat to Batavia in 1924, died of starvation in that concentration camp near Semarung in August of 1945, just days before Allied troops liberated the camps. She died mainly to keep her young children alive, and this was her practical nature coming out. Her small ration of rice and water was better served by nourishing their young bodies than hers. If they survived they would have children of their own and thus life’s purpose would be served.
As it turned out, all of her children survived, although one just barely scraped by. His name was Api and he was the third youngest, a thin scraggly boy who had courted death since he was a child. There had been so many times that he had nearly given up the ghost in the throes of an asthma attack, that everyone assumed that if anyone was destined to die in the camps, it was he.
He didn’t though. When the war was over and they were all deported from Indonesia, he boarded the ship to Ceylon with the rest of his brothers and his sister. He was a scarecrow, just flesh and bones. From the refugee camp in Ceylon they were packed up and shipped off to Holland where attempts were made to integrate them into Dutch culture. For most of them, this was an experiment in complete frustration. Still reeling from their own personal hell, few people in Holland were prepared to listen to the travails of a few orphans from Indonesia. “At least it was warm where you were,” they were told. “In Amsterdam there were people freezing in the streets.”
Anna’s orphans quickly learned not to talk about the trauma they had endured. They remained mute on the subject and set their minds instead on learning how to survive in this foreign world. Unlike their mother, life was not for them an adventure, but a bewildering puzzle to be figured out one agonizing piece at a time.
Each found their own unique way of coping with their undigested trauma. Api, for example, used a camera to survive, a 1949 twin-lens Rolleiflex 2.8. He found that peering through the screened viewfinder of his camera was a safe way of looking at the world. You could view almost anything and not feel any of it. It was as if the lenses filtered out pain. There was no anguish even when photographing great suffering, like bus accidents or fires. Just pictures. Prints. Silver nitrate on Kodak paper.
In 1952, Api took the train from the town of Bussum to Amsterdam, and then he went down to the port and hopped on an ocean-bound steam liner. He’d had quite enough of Holland, quite enough of feeling dispossessed and ill-treated. Even though mother tongue was Dutch, his motherland was still and would forever remain Indonesia. He would have gone back there too, except he instinctively knew he would be incapable of holding back the onslaught of painful emotions that the familiar sights, smells and sounds would unleash in him. It would be like going back to the site of a nuclear explosion.
So he went in the opposite direction instead, to a country as far removed from Indonesia as bronze is from white. He took a steamer to the port of Halifax in Canada and then a train to the foothills of Alberta and the city of Edmonton where bitter Arctic winds whipped down the wide boulevards over six months of the year. Lonely and isolated, he sought refuge among a ragged enclave of poor Dutch immigrants who, like him, had fled Holland in search of a better life. Bound to them by language and common ancestry, he overrode the bitterness he still felt towards Holland, and began attending their Sunday morning Dutch language church services, sitting in the back row, letting the vestiges of familiarity wash over him.
It was there one Sunday morning in late autumn that one of the church matriarchs, a small, thin woman with long, lustrous hair tied up in a bun, first laid eyes on him. She did not know who he was, only that he was a photographer. With six unattached children approaching marrying age she would probably be requiring his services. “Why don’t you invite him over for coffee?” she prodded her eldest daughter, a tall, gorgeous brunette who had her choice of a healthy stable of suitors. She was not interested in this reclusive orphan whose hollow eyes and diffident nature kept most people at a distance.
Her younger sister Amelia though, was intrigued by him and extended an invitation to join them for coffee, and then meatball soup with coarse black rye bread and thin slices of Gouda cheese straight from Holland. With her charming smile and rapier wit, she was the perfect antidote to his unremitting loneliness and he soon became a regular fixture at their Sunday morning coffee klatches, sipping his brew quietly in the dark interior of their salon. At first Amelia thought he was there for her older sister, but he wasn’t. He was there for her. They began dating and three years later they were married. A year later their first child was born, the first of eight.
I was the third.
Of all the times over the years that my father drank coffee in the dark salon of Amelia’s parental home at the end of the street beside the ravine, he never noticed the photo album sitting on the bookshelf above the tea cabinet. Never that is, until 1983, when he pulled it down and began leafing through it. That’s when he came across the faded photograph of the young woman on the veranda.
“Hey,” he said. “That’s my mother.”
“No it isn’t,” my grandmother laughed. “That’s my friend Anna who went to Indonesia in 1924. I never heard from her again. Look,” she said, pulling the photograph off the page and turning it over. Sure enough, there in still legible handwriting were the words, “Anna, 1925.”
“That is my mother,” Aren repeated. “Anna Drexhage.”
Oma Jantje stared at him, unable to comprehend this incredible twist of fate. Then tears welled in her eyes. She had always wondered what had become of her dear friend, and now she knew the awful truth. Her sorrow was tempered by a sense of wonder: Anna’s orphan was now Jantje’s son, a fact that was no longer just dictated by law, but also by the mysterious winds of destiny.
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