As an embittered woman, Marianne (62) remembers her mother. She often responded harshly to her, the only girl in the family. Her father was on high speed and died when Marianne was young, so most of her childhood the Des Bouvrie family consisted of mother, two brothers and Marianne.
Slaughter chickens
“My mom didn’t tell us much about what she’d been through in the Japanese camp. I just remember telling her how to slaughter chickens, turning the neck, I hated that as a child.”
“And the most horrific story that has always stuck with me is that many people died, and they had to burn the bodies quickly to avoid infections. If they had thrown a body into the fire, she says, all muscles contracted, causing them to folded and it seemed like they were sitting down. “
‘If I start to feel then I will die’
“But while she didn’t say anything about the suffering that had been done to her personally, we noticed from everything that it had been traumatic. She made comments like ‘you don’t know what hunger is’ and told us that the first 16 years of her life were the happiest that she had never been able to pick up her life again after the camp. She also said: “If I start to feel then I will die” and “I can’t do anything with girls, just give me the boys.”
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The Japanese camps
Between 1942 and 1945, the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) were occupied by the Japanese. Because Asians had to be separated from ‘Western culture’, Westerners were placed in civilian internment camps. According to the NIOD (the Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies), approximately 105,000 people ended up in these camps, including about 100,000 Dutch and Indian Dutch.
In the camps, men were separated from women, boys up to 10 years old and girls. The houses were overcrowded and there was a great shortage of water, food and medicines. There were also many diseases around due to poor hygiene. NIOD assumes that between 13,000 and 16,800 people have died in the camps, including a conservative estimate between 600 and 900 non-Dutch people. Most died from illness or exhaustion.
There was little understanding for victims who returned to the Netherlands after the war. At least it had been warm in Japanese camps, they had not experienced the Hunger Winter, it was their own fault because they were colonials, and Japanese camps were not extermination camps, like concentration camps, so they hadn’t had a bad time. As a result, they soon learned that they had better keep their mouths shut and ‘not to whine’.
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Marianne also sensed that her mother found it difficult to deal with her as a girl. “The female body was really a taboo for my mother.” Her hair was always cut very short, as if she were a boy, and she had the feeling of being left out. Her mother always made comments that pushed Marianne away from her: she was too unstable, too sensitive, she did not track …
Feel love
When she was about 16 years old, she even heard from a shopkeeper in the village who had told her mother that Marianne had lived in a home for a while because the house was no longer working, which was not true. Marianne wanted nothing more than the love of her mother, but she never felt it.
“I had subconsciously taken it upon me from an early age to make my mother happier, to take care of her. That was too much of a burden for a child, there was little attention at the time. And I also felt guilty to my mom, I felt she was unhappy because I was a girl. “
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Extreme fears
Marianne always felt tensions, but around the age of 16 – the age when her mother had ended up in the camp – extreme fears also arose. For the outside world, but also for her own body.
“I got a boyfriend, but my feelings frightened me. You didn’t feel that in our house. No sorrow, no anger, nothing at all. I became claustrophobic, no longer dared to use public transport, the whole world became scary . “
Long search
What followed was a long search to find out what caused her problems. She applied for recognition as a second-generation victim, meaning her trauma was the result of the war, but she didn’t get it. She also struggled with her own identity: who was she and what did she want?
The search ended only after her son Jesse also suffered from fears around the age of 16. At home and at school, he was suddenly completely unreachable and unable to speak. Marianne made the link with her own problems and decided that it could no longer be done. She went back to therapy to deal with the trauma once and for all, and also arranged conversations with a therapist for Jesse.
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Completely different mother
Marianne is and was a completely different mother than she had, says Jesse. “She was very loving. I had a really good childhood. But looking back, I do feel that she overcompensated for what she had missed and wanted to keep control over my life.”
“She wanted to avoid getting into trouble and filled in a lot of things for me. When I wanted to go out, she was scared that I would get tired and I was asked questions like ‘would you do that?’ but I found it difficult. Can’t you just be enthusiastic or happy for me? “I thought.”
Physically ill
In the years after Jesse’s anxiety attacks started, he also often fell ill. “I was hospitalized several times, for example with a serious lymph node infection. I made myself physically ill.”
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When he said he went ‘really full’ in therapy, he also improved physically. He broke away from his mother and learned to make his own decisions and make mistakes. A difficult period, which ultimately resulted in a healthy bond between mother and son.
War trauma
Only the last time she went into therapy was it noted at Centrum ’45 that Marianne’s trauma was indeed the result of the war. “Because of my mother’s war trauma, I also suffered a trauma, and my trauma caused Jesse to have mental problems again.” She wrote a book about it: My mother’s war in me.
Marianne went to dig into the past, and heard from her aunt how traumatic the camp had been for her mother. “Shortly before they went there, her father had said: take good care of your mother, brother and two sisters. My mother had taken that quite literally.”
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Danger to one’s own life
“She took a lot of risks before that. For example, there was little food in the camp, to get some extras, she worked really hard. When she worked in the kitchen, she smuggled some food for the others at the risk of her own life.”
“Jewelry, which they had hidden in cuddly toys before going to camp, was sold through the barbed wire to people outside the camp, in exchange for, for example, a chicken. At one point she was caught and she gave a big mouth. She was then horribly abused by a group of Japanese. “
Protection
Marianne realized that her mother did love her. That in her way she did everything to protect Marianne from the things that had happened to her. “The way was wrong, but she did what she could.”
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If Marianne is a second-generation victim, is Jesse a third-generation victim? “I find that very complicated,” he says. “I certainly got some of the trauma, but I don’t want to say that my problems were purely the result of the war.”
“Of course, I have also experienced other things, such as my father having a heart attack and collapsing before my eyes at the age of 12, and my own struggle with my homosexuality.”
Not fair
“Besides that, it doesn’t feel fair to the people who actually went through the war. They have suffered physical trauma, have been physically abused or tortured, or have been afraid of being killed for years. If I called myself a war victim, that wouldn’t be right do the trauma they have experienced. “
Jesse is very happy that he got – and took – the opportunity to work with his mother on his ‘leftover trauma’. “Even though my fears are not completely over, I recognize them now and can deal with them in a healthy way. That is why I am convinced that I will not pass it on to my children anymore. For my family it stops here, with me. “
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