I made Clowny and Sluggish Henkie not in the general camp Kramat 
but in the Jewish Camp Tangerang

Clowny and Sluggish Henkie

The Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, was from 13 October 2014 to 8 March 2015 holding an exhibition entitled ‘Selamat Sjabbat’ about Jews in the former Dutch East Indies.
A significant proportion of the objects on display come from internment camps, set up during the Japanese occupation during World War II, in which Dutch citizens were held. From 1943 on Jewish Dutch citizens were separated from the other prisoners.

There are several objects in the exhibition that belong to our family, items my mother carefully safeguarded for the rest of her life. One of these objects, for instance, is the Goose board game, which she made for us children out of cardboard from an old box. She also safeguarded the minature dolls which I made as a child from the few pieces of cloth that we still had left over after so many years in prison.

On the card for the cloth dolls Clowny and Sluggish Henkie at the exhibition, it states that I made them in the general camp for women and children, camp Kramat in Jakarta, where we started our imprisonement. That was what I actually thought too, until my sister Marijke The-Wertheim reminded me that Mrs Davidson helped me make the minature dolls. It is with her that we were interned in the Jewish women´s and children´s camp Tangerang, where she was our neighbour on the hard wooden platforms in the baracks.

We liked her. She had sad eyes and she often lay stretched out on a mat at her place on the wooden platform. But she liked to help me with needlework, I believed at the time that this was because she did not have children of her own.

One terrible day, I saw a group of women standing together whispering and when I got closer I overheard them talking about ‘showers´ and ‘gas’. I instinctively felt that something was terribly wrong and asked my mother out loud: “What is wrong, what are you talking about when you say showers and gas?!’’

My mother slapped my face and dragged me out of the room onto the gallery. She explained that she did not want Mrs Davidson to hear what was being said. But she did not tell me why and I was so shocked that I did not dare to ask.

It was only much later that I understood what had been going on. The women had heard rumours about the gas chambers in Poland. Something had been published about them in a Japanese newspaper and one of the women in our baracks who spoke Japanese had managed, one way or another, to read it and told the others. Of course, it is incredible that rumours like this could actually reach a Jewish internment camp like Tangerang in Asia. And that this could happen as early as January 1945. There may have been a connection with the liberation of Auschwitz.

My mother had a special reason for not wanting to let Mrs Davidson hear about it. All the adults in the baracks knew that she was gravely concererned for the safety of her two children in the Netherlands. She and her husband had sent their children to family back to the Netherlands some time before the German invasion, as did many Dutch citizens in the Dutch East Indies because the schools there were better. Later I heard that her chidren were killed in Sobibor.

Amsterdam, 2015

Anne-Ruth Wertheim