Dedicated to my Mom and Dad.

First of all I have to thank every one for following my story on my blog.I wish you all a Happy New Year with lots of health ,Love and Peace.
For all my Indonesian friends; Selamat Tahun Baru!(means Happy New Year) The country my Mom and Dad loved so much.
I only started this blog in February 2010 and to see that so many people are reading it gives me the inspiration to continue.

Indonesia          238  followers
Canada            2372
United States   1233
Netherlands       546
U.K                  308
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Russia               249
Australia           185
Germany           143
France                59

It is interesting to know how many people all over the world are reading my story.I wish my mother would know. She kept silent. She had to work it out all alone.How hard it must have been for her.Mom your story is being told, you and your sister can rest in peace.

As a child I was never able to discuss my experiences, which were in my head. My mother always silenced me, and said that I had to forget about these dreams. For many years I did not understand.She always kissed me and said she would kiss the dreams away. Why did I have these things in my head and why did my mother always told me that I dreamed it?.. I knew I had not dreamed it , but I could not figure it out. She always told me that these dreams would go away," don't think about it anymore"she said.
I started to believe her.And what could a five year old remember from those horrible days???The days that my mother got whipped by these Japanese men and was bleeding.How can a child of 4-5 years old remember?Well let me tell you that I know now that a five year old can remember, although it is very vague.It's the horrible things you remember.They are forever there, and when you are a child adults can easy tell you that they were dreams.I can even describe and draw the Japanese prison camp in Moentilan.There was one building I could so vividly describe to her. I told her about a church I could remember,and people crying. I remembered my mother coming out that church throwing up and bleeding. She fell, she told me.After the war when we were liberated they took my mother to a hospital, she barely survived and  I was taken  to an orphanage. It took her three months to recover. For many years I told her the same story that I went looking for her and that I had run away, and when they found me after searching for hours the nuns tried to feed me some porridge, which I refused to eat. One of the nuns threw the plate with porridge right over my head. I must have screamed bloody murder.I wanted to be with my mother. I did not like it there.I still see the building in my mind, it had these big large pillars on which the orphanage was build and it was there they had found me fast asleep.When I was older my mother told me that she would never forget how insisted I was about this.It surprised her, she told me, and she said I tried so hard to let you forget all the bad things that had happened there.

When my mother passed away in 2003, and I found all these letters and photographs, I started to put things together.I was stunned at first, and it broke my heart:

All I knew is what you said

     You told me it was not so bad!

             When I found the pouch with letters,

      I realized why to me, it matters.

       The things I read froze my blood

          The tears I shed were like a flood.

I would burst out in tears just like that, for every little thing, when we talked about my mother.I think there are so many emotions bottled up. A child of only 4 or 5 years old can remember,specially when things are happening to their mother.But when you are young it is easy to put it aside.You are too busy to discover the world.You play with your friends, you grow up, and things what happened when you were 5 years old are pushed in the background.You believe that they were bad dreams, that is what my mother always told me. Even when I was older and I asked my mother about these dreams, I believed her."How come I always dream about the same things mom", I would ask.Well, my mother would say, you were in a camp and there were some bad man there, but it was not too bad. My mother tried so hard to let me forget.I started to feel for some reason that it was hurting my mother when I asked her about these Japanese camps. She became very quiet and asked me not to talk about it anymore.

But I know now that all that happened to my mother in these Japanese camps had serious consequences on the rest of her life. Even after the war, the struggle to cope was not over. The unimaginable brutality these women endured at the hands of the Japanese in these camps, trying to take care of their children with hardly any food to give them, has haunted her for the rest of her life.
I hope she rest in Peace.
Mom I have to let you know, that the women in South Korea, who survived the atrocities which were inflicted on them by the Japanese, had the courage to put up a monument in front of the Japanese Embassy.
But the Japanese government are cowards and have closed all windows and doors of the Japanese embassy in Seoul, so they do not have to see the truth, and  they continue to lobby for removal of this statue. I wish more statues would sit in front of each Japanese embassy all over the world. They have long enough pretended that this has not happened in World War 2.
It finally will be heard all over the world. Just like the holocaust and Anne Frank.Everybody knows about that. The silence about what happened in these Japanese prison camps has lasted too long.

Happy times, before the Japanese invaded the Dutch East Indies(now called Indonesia)  

My Mom on the right, 5 month pregnant from me.

This is the back of the picture on which my father wrote:

This is in front of our house
Siets (my mom) is standing with her head
right in front of bedroom.
The door with the glass window next to it
is our front room (sitting room)
behind the bedroom is another bedroom
and behind the front room is the living room.
Doesn't look bad, uh?

My mom in the middle, my dad on the right. Don't know who the other lady is. This is at their house in Bandoeng, Tjikoerailaan 7, Java.

                                                      I read this some while ago;

Its written by a 14 year old, his name is Alexander La Ponte.

War creates fighting that kills everyone.

War creates hate where love should be...

War creates tears that will never dry away....

War creates pain that won't go away...

War creates sadness that won't feel better...

War creates destruction that will take too long to fix...

War blinds us of what's right or wrong

War steals us of the right to be happy and young..War creates gaps that keep us apart....

War creates a fire you can't put out....

War drops bombs on our hopes and dreams.

War creates children without  a father , no one to tuck them in at night...

War makes it hard for a parent to say "everything will be alright",

when they don't even have anyone to say to"goodnight"'

War scares a child's mind with things they can't erase

War makes a goodnight sleep, a living hell.....

War creates nightmares that are never-ending dreams, and then, just screams...

War creates quilt that eats you alive inside....

War makes you see things that makes you scream inside.....

War creates scars when all you've seen is blood and more......

War only leaves death when every body drops to the floor.....

War creates silence after it ends, so how long till it starts again?

And when all the willing that will fight, die and say their last goodnight.

The war will end, the living will mourn, all for Peace but what was it all for?

For all those people who died, just so now everyone alive, can do nothing to cope, but cry......