Childhood trauma in Bandung has life-long consequences

By Thor Kerr

THE HAGUE (JP): Theo Corsmit was a happy eight-year-old living in Bandung when he saw a strange man in uniform with a samurai sword. Now 65, he still shudders when he sees a Japanese.

"I have big trouble sleeping, panic attacks, not well controlled habits in moments of shock... I'm really shocked if somebody calls us by telephone," he said.

Forty days after the Dutch surrender in Bandung in March 1942, Corsmit's father was put in a concentration camp. Then his brother was sent to prison and other relatives to concentration camps. Corsmit, his mother and sister, despite being Dutch, were allowed to stay at home but were subjected to regular searches and surveillance until the Japanese surrender in August 1945, when Indonesia at last gained the Independence.

He still remembers the loud speakers, blaring anti-Dutch propaganda, set up on posts every 100 meters in Bandung and Jakarta. The Europeans, followed by the Eurasians, were reduced to the lowest social status in this part of Japanese Greater East Asia. The Dutch language, currency and institutions were banned and new institutions created.

Corsmit was not allowed to speak or write Dutch nor was he allowed to leave his home in daylight. He was also beaten, tortured and strung up on wire for smuggling food into concentration camps where thousands starved to death. He is too upset to recall the deaths he witnessed. An estimated one in six of the quarter of a million Europeans and Eurasians living in Indonesia died during the Japanese occupation.

Corsmit's uncles and grandparents died but he was united with his remaining family in Bandung after the Japanese surrender. Their joy was short-lived. In November 1945, an overzealous Indonesian youth brigade took them and about 130 other Europeans and Eurasians hostage for protection against a perceived Dutch attack. In the last quarter of 1945, the Japanese-trained Peta brigades and other Indonesian nationalist groups unleashed their power on the frail, concentration-camp survivors as they left the camps under Japanese or allied escort.

Four times Corsmit's captors told him, "Tomorrow morning at nine o'clock you'll be killed."

But before they chopped him up like 100 fellow hostages, Corsmit was rescued by a British Gurkha brigade in January 1946. He was a skinny 12-year-old with malaria, dysentery, anemia and deep psychological trauma that wouldn't be diagnosed for more than 30 years.

"I took thousands of idiot pills before doctors diagnosed the problem," he said. The worst symptoms were "really bloody dreams" and "a feeling of disorientation."

About 30 percent of people who survive horrific events suffer mental problems, generally known as post traumatic stress disorder. Its symptoms include fear, nightmares, sleeplessness, a high level of arousal and the inability to suppress memories of the events.

Children are the worst affected, according to psychiatrist W. Seenstra, because trauma can impair the development of their personality and this may have life-long consequences.

"They can't hold down a job, keep a relationship going and can't trust anything," he said. Time, medication and psychiatry might never heal the disorder in some people.

Corsmit said that post traumatic stress ruined his life. "I was divorced in 1982 and, ya, you lose contact with society and get depressed and so on."

Seenstra knows all about the long-term effects of psychological trauma. For 17 years he has worked for Centrum '45, a Dutch foundation providing trauma treatment and research for victims of war and political violence. Sixty percent of the patients attending the foundation's clinic in Oegstgeest were traumatized during or directly after Japanese occupation in Indonesia. Many were children or infants at the time.

The clinic treats 1,000 patients with post traumatic stress disorder. It receives about 300 new patients a year, some who are just realizing that their psychological problems stem from a 50- year-old trauma.

The patients receive psychotherapy, involving regular consultation between a patient and psychiatrist or psychologist, and group therapy to recognize and deal with their trauma. The clinic also provides social therapy and art therapy, which enables patients to express their experience through sculpture and painting.

Seenstra said that people with post traumatic stress disorder often "try to avoid all kinds of situations that may remind them of the trauma."

Some patients at the clinic refuse to travel by train because they were attacked on them by Indonesian militia while leaving the Japanese concentration camps. Hundreds of Dutch are estimated to have been killed by the nationalist militia after the Japanese surrender.

Corsmit has returned to Indonesia twice since World War II. He feels no bitterness towards Indonesians despite being held hostage. Most of his school friends in Bandung were Indonesian and his family saw itself as Indonesian after four generations there. His family was finally expelled from Indonesia in 1957 with 45,000 other Dutch citizens when the Netherlands tried to maintain its claim to Irian Jaya.

He appreciates the wartime risks his former servants took while providing food for his family which was forbidden by the Japanese. The family's driver, Amat, was shot for helping his former employers. Some Indonesians even threw food over the perimeters of concentration camps to starving European inmates. Ambarawa in Central Java was the most notorious camp. Sixty inmates died each day there at one point, according to Corsmit whose father was interned at the camp.

Although the Japanese occupation did much to accelerate Indonesia's independence, many Indonesians suffered during the war especially because of starvation. One popular estimate has it that 200,000 to half a million Indonesians were drafted as romusha forced laborers to build infrastructure in Indonesia, Thailand and Myanmar to support the Japanese war effort. Only 70,000 are known to have survived. Some Indonesian estimates put the number of romusha laborers as high as four million.