The Devil’s Question

 

Sometimes the most terrible question isn’t “Will you live or die?” It’s “Who are you?”

In the sweating heat of 1942, when the Rising Sun cast its bloody shadow across the Dutch East Indies, that question became a knife twisted in the guts of every Indo-European soul who heard it. The Japanese didn’t just want to know your name or where you lived or how many guilders you had hidden under your mattress. No, sir. They wanted to crack you open like a lobster and peer inside at the soft, vulnerable meat of your identity.

Who are you really—European or Asian?

Christ, what a question. Like asking a man to choose which of his children deserves to live.

The Indo-Europeans—those mixed-blood folks who’d been dancing between two worlds their whole lives—suddenly found themselves center stage in a theater of horrors they never auditioned for. One day they were clerks and teachers and small business owners, living their quiet lives in Batavia and Bandung. The next day, they were specimens in a jar, being examined by men with dead eyes and bayonets who spoke of “Asia for Asians” while practicing the fine art of making people disappear.

Japan had a problem, you see. A real head-scratcher that kept the occupation brass awake at night, chain-smoking cigarettes and staring at maps until their eyes burned. They’d learned from their mistakes in Hong Kong and Singapore, where they’d danced around the Eurasian question like cats on a hot tin roof. Trust them? Don’t trust them? Lock them up? Set them free? It was enough to give a man ulcers.

So they tried something different in the Indies. Something that would make old P.T. Barnum proud.

In August of 1943, they set up the Kantoor Oeroesan Peranakan—the Office for Indo-European Affairs—and put a company man named Hamaguchi Shinpei in charge. But the real puppet master, the one pulling the strings from behind the curtain, was a fellow named Pieter Frederik Dahler. Now, Dahler was what you might call a true believer, the kind of man who could look at a pile of shit and see fertilizer. He’d been pushing for Indo-European integration with the locals for years, swimming upstream against a current of colonial racism that would’ve drowned a lesser man.

When the Japanese came knocking with their “Asia for Asians” song and dance, old Dahler—who’d taken the name Amir Dachlan by then—thought he’d found his golden ticket. Poor bastard probably thought he was gonna save his people. Instead, he was just another actor in a tragedy that was already written.

The Japanese had other players in their twisted little drama. There was Piet Hein van den Eeckhout, released from the Tjimahi camp like a hunting dog let off its leash. They gave him a mission: find Indo-European youths willing to play ball. Simple enough, right? Except van den Eeckhout had about as much warmth as a morgue slab and the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

He set up shop with something called PAGI—Asian Brotherhood of the Indo Group—which sounds nice enough until you realize it was just another name for “join us or else.” Van den Eeckhout didn’t believe in fence-sitting. You were either with them or against them, and neutrality was about as welcome as a rattlesnake at a Sunday picnic.

The agricultural project at Klapa Noenggal was supposed to be their shining example—take the troublemakers, put them to work in the fields, teach them discipline and loyalty. But it failed harder than a three-dollar suitcase. Turns out you can’t force people to love you at gunpoint, though that didn’t stop them from trying.

By September of ‘44, the noose was tightening. Every Indo-European kid between sixteen and twenty-three in Batavia and West Java got called in for a little chat. Picture it: rows of scared young faces, some still soft with baby fat, others already hardened by the realities of occupation. And there’s van den Eeckhout, pacing back and forth like a wolf in a cage, asking the question that would seal their fates:

Will you cooperate with Japan and Indonesia?

The silence must have been deafening. Then came the answers—not the ones the Japanese wanted to hear, but the ones that mattered. “No.” “Never.” “I’m Dutch, and I’ll die Dutch.”

Brave words. Stupid words, maybe, but brave all the same. The kind of words that get you killed in times like those.

On September 27th, eighty young men who’d had the balls to say “no” found themselves under arrest. But that was just the appetizer. The main course came on January 25, 1945, when the Japanese military machine ground into motion like some great iron beast. Mass arrests swept through the cities like wildfire, scooping up anyone who might pose a threat to their precious new order.

Six hundred and sixty-nine souls ended up in Glodok Prison.

Now, prisons are bad enough when they’re trying to be prisons. But Glodok had been pressed into service as an internment camp, and it showed. The place squatted in Batavia’s Chinatown like a concrete tumor, surrounded by walls that seemed to lean inward with the weight of all the misery they contained.

Inside, the architecture of despair was simple and effective: ten large cells arranged around a central courtyard, each one packed with forty to fifty bodies. The air was thick as soup and twice as rancid, heavy with the smell of sweat and fear and human waste. The floors were mud most days, concrete on the good ones. Light came grudgingly through barred windows, just enough to see the rats that had claimed squatter’s rights long before the first prisoner arrived.

Water came from a single well in the courtyard—when it worked. Most of the time it was contaminated with God knows what, but you drank it anyway because the alternative was dying of thirst, and that seemed like giving up too easy.

Food was rice. Sometimes rice and cassava. On special occasions, rice and some vegetables that looked like they’d been dead longer than some of the prisoners felt. Protein was a memory, a ghost that haunted empty stomachs and made men dream of steaks they’d eaten in better times.

Disease moved through the prison like a slow-motion plague. Dysentery, tuberculosis, beriberi—the trinity of suffering that claimed more lives than bullets ever would. Men wasted away on their mats, reduced to skin and bones and eyes that had seen too much.

But the worst part—the part that would wake survivors up in cold sweats for decades to come—was the interrogations. The Kempeitai, those black-uniformed apostles of pain, had turned torture into an art form. They beat men with clubs and fists and anything else that came to hand. They burned them with cigarette butts, the smell of searing flesh mixing with the acrid smoke. They hung them by their arms until consciousness fled like a frightened bird.

And through it all, they kept asking that same damned question: Who are you?

The prisoners were sorted like cattle at market—pro-Japanese in one pen, anti-Japanese in another. Your answer determined whether you got an extra cup of water or an extra kick in the ribs. It was a binary world where gray areas went to die along with everything else.

Five men died inside those walls. More than seventy others made it to the hospital before their bodies gave up the fight. Toni Harting, who lived through it and wrote about it later, put the final count at eighty souls who didn’t make it home. Eighty families who got telegrams instead of sons and husbands and brothers.

The prison warden, Koyama Yoshizo, was a puzzle wrapped in a contradiction. Here was a man who’d been ordered to treat his prisoners like criminals but couldn’t quite bring himself to embrace the role. After the war, when the tribunals started grinding through their grim business of assigning blame, Yoshizo walked free. His crime had been mercy in a world that had forgotten the word.

By July of ‘45, even the Japanese could see the writing on the wall. A transfer to Halimoen Camp was planned—another prison with a prettier name. But history had other ideas. On August 15th, the Emperor’s voice crackled across the radio waves, speaking words of surrender that fell like rain on parched earth.

Ten days later, the gates of Glodok swung open for the last time. The survivors stumbled out into the blinding Jakarta sun, blinking like moles, their ordeal over but never really ended. Some wounds heal. Others just learn to live with you.

For years afterward, the men who’d survived Glodok found themselves in another kind of prison—the prison of official indifference. They were victims, the records said. Casualties of war. But not heroes. Not resistance fighters. Just men who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time, carrying the wrong blood in their veins.

It took until 1990, forty-five years after liberation, for the truth to finally claw its way to the surface. A court case—Ahrens vs. the State—established what should have been obvious from the beginning: that saying “no” to evil is its own form of resistance. That choosing to remain Dutch when being Dutch could get you killed was an act of courage worthy of recognition.

Two monuments stand today as testament to that recognition. One in Jakarta, where it all happened, among the graves of those who didn’t make it home. Another in Arnhem, in the Netherlands, where the survivors could visit and remember and maybe, just maybe, find some peace.

The question the Japanese asked in 1942—Who are you?—was meant to divide and conquer. Instead, it revealed something they never expected: that sometimes the most important answer isn’t about race or nationality or politics. Sometimes it’s simpler than that.

Sometimes it’s just: “I’m the kind of person who won’t break.”

And in the end, that was answer enough.