In the years after the war of independence, some 300,000 people from Indonesia came to the Netherlands. Also the family of Carel-Vincent van de Graaff (33).
“On August 15, I think about what happened to them”, says Carel. “Like my grandfather, who was put to work in a Japanese internment camp and had to work on the Burma railway. And my grandmother, who as an outside camp could not just go out on the street and was starving.”
“But also the period after that, when the violence did not stop. For example, once a Dutch captain drove through the streets of my grandmother. His Jeep had all chopped off ears, as a kind of showpiece.”
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