All Ships Follow Me: A Family Memoir of War Across Three Continents

by Mieke Eerkens

Overview

In the spirit of Susan Faludi's In the Darkroom and Edmund de Waal's Hare with the Amber Eyes comes a story of one family and two vastly different experiences during World War II, questioning our notions of victim and perpetrator and the lasting effects of war and trauma through the generations of one family.

In March 1942, Mieke Eerken's father was a ten-year-old boy living in the Dutch East Indies. When the Japanese invade the island he was interned, like a hundred thousand other Dutch civilians, in a concentration camp where he is forced to do hard labor for three years. His life is essentially saved by the terrible events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which caused the Japanese to surrender, setting him and his family free into a nation that plunged immediately into civil war. Meanwhile, across the globe police in the Netherlands carry a crying five-year-old girl out of her home at war’s end, abandoned and ostracized as a daughter of Nazi sympathizers. This was Mieke's mother. It was the post-war period of reckoning, what they referred to in Holland as the so-called “hatchet day,” where Nazi collaborators were beaten in the streets and rounded up and sent to the same concentration camps where the country's Jews had recently been imprisoned. Many years later, Mieke's parents meet and move to California, where she and her siblings are born. But though her parents are far from their families and the events of the past, the effects of the war are still felt in their daily lives and in the lives of their children.

All Ships Follow Me moves from Indonesia to the Netherlands to the United States, as Mieke recounts her parents' stories and journeys with them to the important places of their childhood, in an attempt to understand their experiences on two different “sides” of the war, to bring to light events and experiences often overlooked in WWII histories. All Ships Follow Me is a deeply personal, sweeping saga of the wounds of war and the way trauma is often inherited through generations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250117793
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	04/02/2019
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

MIEKE EERKENS teaches creative writing online for UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program and as a visiting instructor for the Iowa Summer Writing Program. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Creative Nonfiction, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Guernica, among others. She earned an M.A. in English from Leiden University in the Netherlands, and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. She divides her time between Amsterdam and California. All Ships Follow Me is her first book.

Table of Contents

A Brief World War II Time Line Relevant to the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies xi

Map of the Netherlands xv

Map of Dutch East Indies xvi-xvii

Preface xix

Part I Father

1 Selamat Datang di Indonesia 3

2 Infamy and Invasion 26

3 POWs 53

4 Men over Ten 68

5 Independence and Displacement 110

Part II Mother

6 Fascism on the Rise 129

7 The Occupation 140

8 End of the War, Beginning of the War 163

9 Hatchet Day 178

10 Starting Over 199

11 Fout in the City 211

12 Let the Record Show 220

Part III Coming Together

13 The Immigrants 233

14 Forming a Family 242

15 Things 251

16 Food 258

17 Home 266

18 Words 277

19 The Survivors 282

Epilogue 299

Acknowledgments 311

Editorial Reviews

2019-02-03

A generational memoir of war and its long-lasting effects on descendants.

History, the old saying goes, is written by the victors. The fortunes of the losers often go unnoticed, particularly if the losers are associated with a bad cause. So it was in the case of one side of Eerkens' family, her grandfather a member of a Dutch nationalist party with ties to the Nazi occupiers. She writes dolefully of discovering an article of his that she turned up in the National Library, "someone who supposedly had Jewish colleagues and friends whom he spoke highly of, writing clearly anti-Semitic, racist nonsense for a racist NSB publication." Understandably, that grandfather did not wish to discuss his past, and the author's mother was too young to comprehend events, though her older siblings recalled being shunned and cursed by their neighbors. On the other side of the family and politics was her father, imprisoned with his family in the Dutch East Indies; Eerkens focuses closely on the fact that the Japanese military ran "brutal labor camps for civilian prisoners including women and children," to terrible effect. The author examines the psychology of loss on the part of children caught helplessly in tumultuous events. In the case of her parents, who met as adults after the war and raised their family in California, their experiences lingered in large and small things—e.g., her mother's frugality, explained by her aunt with the meaningful phrase, "we aren't just automatically entitled to nice things." Privations and fears became ancestral memories "imprinted on my genes." Eerkens' work takes on a particularly timely note when, in closing, she notes the rise of a new wave of nationalism, a time when "people I know and care about have endorsed candidates and political positions that I find unconscionable," reverberating again through the generations.

The sins of the fathers are visited on their children, indeed. Eerkens' poignant book sheds new light on the history of World War II.

Kirkus Reviews

"Mieke Eerkens has written a unique and harrowing account of the era through the history of her parents, and while deeply moving and brilliantly written, the particular backdrops give the story's flavor an air of ambiguity and controversy.... Eerkens' book provides a unique look at a different aspect of World War II, and it's a beautifully told story of an ambiguous situation."—PopMatters

"This memoir is honest, unflinching, reflective, and carefully researched. . . . Eerkens’s self-awareness and desire to honestly grapple with the history in front of her is worth every sentence. Reality is never an absolute, and truth is always messy."—Book Riot

"A generational memoir of war and its long-lasting effects on descendants....The author examines the psychology of loss on the part of children caught helplessly in tumultuous events....The sins of the fathers are visited on their children, indeed. Eerkens' poignant book sheds new light on the history of World War II."—Kirkus Reviews

"A war memoir that reads as hauntingly and movingly as a novel...[A] fresh and courageous look at Dutch, and indeed global, history, and as importantly, at her parents, whose personal growth, strength, and perseverance are nothing short of marvelous. Highly recommended."—Historical Novel Society

“In this masterful memoir, Eerkens has written an epic account of her family's colonial and wartime past that reckons with the often mysterious and misunderstood legacy of intergenerational trauma. Lyric, meditative, and deeply reported, this is an essential book that reveals so much about what we need to know about being human.”—Jennifer Percy, author of Demon Camp: A Soldier’s Exorcism

“A thrilling, brilliantly told, briskly paced adventure story that could not be more timely. In exploring the resilience of her Dutch parents, who survive fascinating childhoods—he, as a young boy in a Japanese concentration camp in Indonesia, she, as a young girl in a family persecuted by their fellow Dutch citizens for assisting their German oppressors—Mieke Eerkens asks what it means to be at once a victim, a colonist, and a collaborator. All Ships Follow Me is an important work of literary nonfiction and essential reading for Americans wondering about the responsibility they bear in the modern age. It's a book you'll read in one sitting but will be haunted by for years to come.”—Kerry Howley, author of Thrown

“Setting her book within the chaotic and tragic aftermath of World War II, Mieke Eerkens has composed a provocative and beautiful story in All Ships Follow Me that boldly tightens its aperture on a single family's experience, and unflinchingly exposes the welts of history that can affect us all, and the inheritance of a sorrow we share.”—John D’Agata, author of About a Mountain

"The confluence of conflicting war traumas fuels the emotional heart of Mieke Eerkens’ insightful narrative. All Ships Follow Me is an excavation of the scars of war drawn from personal interviews, archival documents, and immersion in the physical and psychic spaces of the past. It is also an imaginative quest to understand how trauma influences generations, sometimes directly through behavioral quirks and aberrations but also through a vulnerability to sadness and the illusion of home.” —Patricia Foster, author of All the Lost Girls

“A remarkable and unique portrait of inter-generational family trauma and collective guilt, All Ships Follow Me troubles the waters, in the most nuanced and moving fashion, of more conventional journeys of victimhood and good guys triumphing over bad guys. In no way an apologist for her father’s side of the family, Dutch colonists of Indonesia for generations, or of her maternal grandfather’s participation in fascist politics in wartime Holland, Eerkens nonetheless spares us excessive mea culpas. Instead, she takes an unflinching and riveting look at the complex histories of both sides of her family and the persistent if invisible legacies of World War II and colonialism that followed her to her childhood home in Southern California.” —Robin Hemley, author of Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness

From the Publisher