One of the problems with doing genealogy research is that it is easy to get distracted by new findings. They are the shiny new findings that are interesting and take one on a previously unexplored historical adventure. Without a doubt, I’ve done a lot of that in the last couple of years. I now have four family trees on Ancestry.com, a little over 2,900 people in the trees, and a decent system for organizing the documents that I find. Whew! There are so many fascinating stories out there, but now it’s time to get back to writing about my dad’s family.

My Opa – Johannes Hubertus Theodorus Gerardu

In my last post, I ended with my grandfather’s arrival as a POW in Pakan Baroe, on the island of Sumatra, in May 1944. However, before I write about Pakan Baroe, I want to go back to the period right before the occupation of the Dutch East Indies (DEI, now Indonesia) by the Japanese in March 1942.

It was a period of great uncertainty for everyone. After the Netherlands had surrendered to the Nazi forces in May 1940, the DEI operated somewhat independently for two years. Meanwhile, Japan was posturing that it intended to create a bloc of self-sufficient Asian nations, led by Japan, which was to be free of any Western influence. This intention was announced by Foreign Minister Hachirō Arita on June 29, 1940. Then on September 27, 1940, Japan, Germany, and Italy signed the Tripartite Pact. It was a defense alliance intended to discourage the United States from entering the conflicts. These events are only the high-level indicators of what was brewing. As the war continued to rage in Europe, the Koninklijk Nederlands-Indisch Leger (KNIL) or Royal Netherlands East Indies Army frantically prepared for a possible invasion in the Pacific.

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Continuing the story from Part 1

Chuka Maru

On Sunday, May 14, 1944, after five months of captivity at his second POW camp – the 10th Battalion in Batavia, Java (now Jakarta) – my Opa, Johannes Hubertus Theodorus Gerardu (Hubert) was selected to board the Japanese transport ship, Chuka Maru (aka Chukwa Maru). He was 43 years old. In relation to the World War II timeline, this was a few weeks before D-Day in France and a little over two years into the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia).

The Japanese moved prisoners from camp to camp, depending on the need for labor. New POWs to a camp would bring news of the places they came from – some good, but mostly bad news. As you can imagine, word of an upcoming transport was surely an especially stressful time for prisoners. Hubert’s group of POWs, known as Java Party 21, consisted of 310 English and 1,615 Dutch prisoners.

Google Translate is available at the bottom of the page.

It was after I read the book Unbroken, by Laura Hillebrand, that I started to wonder about my grandfather’s experience in a “concentration camp” during World War II. I knew that he was in a camp, but it was something he never talked about with anyone.

Then shortly after I published my last post, A Pivotal Moment for a Young Soldier, Comité ereschuld Onderscheidingen contacted me to inquire if my grandfather, Johannes H.T. Gerardu (aka Hubert), was a POW. This simple inquiry pushed my genealogical research forward twenty years and made me curious as to what had really happened to him during his time away from his family.

This is the story of my grandfather’s time as a POW based on information I was able to glean from his Stamboek (military record), internment card (see below), some extensive research done by Henk Beekhuis about the POW camps in Indonesia, and other sources. It is most definitely a watered-down version of the reality of his experience.

Note: Google Translate is available at the bottom of the page.