Amsterdam – Dutch Woman Reveals Mother’s Diary Of Life In Japanese-Controlled Jewish Internment Camp In WWII Indonesia

Amsterdam – A 78-year-old retired high school teacher from Amsterdam has come forward sharing her mother’s diary which she kept while imprisoned in a Japanese-controlled Jewish internment camp in Indonesia during WWII.

Asian News organization, The ASAHI SHIMBUN (http://bit.ly/1bNO8IZ) reports that while holding the diary, Anne-Ruth Wertheim told of how she, too, at the age of nine, was also imprisoned.

“When I was in Indonesia in my childhood, I was put in an internment camp for Jewish people,” Wertheim said.

In recalling her past, Wertheim told of how she was born in Batavia (currently Jakarta) to a father who was Jewish and principal of a law school, and a non-Jewish mother.

Upon Japan’s successful take-over of Indonesia in March of 1942, Wertheim’s father was taken immediately and placed in a camp containing Dutch and other European civilians, while the rest of her family stayed together.

Wertheim, her mother, sister, and brother were ultimately imprisoned in January of 1944 in a camp for women and children, where she remembers a Japanese office addressing the occupants, saying, “If even one drop of Jewish blood flows in your bodies, tell me.”

An entry from her mother’s diary at the time reads, “Though I am not Jewish, I wrote my name in the list of Jewish people in order not to be separated from my children.”

Wertheim proceeded to tell her horrific tale of transfers between camps, all of which featured deplorable living conditions, humiliation, and near starvation.

Wertheim and her family were ultimately released upon the surrender of Japan in 1945.

Wertheim said, “I am not holding a grudge against the Japanese people, but it is regrettable that what happened (in the camps in Indonesia during the war) was little known in the Netherlands, as well as Japan.

According to researchers, there is ample evidence that Japanese-controlled Jewish internment did, in fact, exist during the war, but the subject seems to have been under-reported for years.

For instance, the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation is currently in possession of several diaries kept by imprisoned Jews, and scholar and director of the Center for Asia Pacific Partnership of Osaka University of Economics and Law, Aiko Utsumi, possesses perhaps some of the most detailed knowledge Japanese policies towards Jews during wartime.

Another question that remains under debate is to “why” the Japanese sought to isolate the Jews from other civilians.

According to Utsumi, while she is certain that the camps existed, the reasons for them may have stemmed from the fact that persecution of Jews had extended by that time to Japan, and thus, by extension, to Japanese-occupied regions.

“In those days, incidents of persecution against Jewish people were also taking place in Japan,” Utsumi said. “There is a possibility that discrimination (against those people) appeared more strongly in areas occupied by Japan.”

Another explanation comes from Dr. Ayala Klemperer-Markman (http://bit.ly/11ebeT5) who teaches Japanese history at Tel-Aviv University.

In her post-doctoral work in the department of Asian Studies at the University if Haifa, Klemperer-Markman writes that the reason for Jewish isolation, “was derived from several elements, including heavy German pressure on the Japanese government to impair the Jewish population, anti-Semitic tendencies among the local population and anti-Semitic tendencies among certain Japanese groups that served as part of the occupying forces in Indonesia.”

Yet another theory comes from Esther Captain who, as a member of the Dutch national committee to mourn the dead, contends that the legacy of Jewish imprisonment in Indonesia has failed to grab headline due to the magnitude of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.