There are places in this world where history doesn’t just
echo—it screams. Places where the past clings to the present like wet leaves to
a windshield, obscuring the view but never quite letting you forget what lies
beneath. Kampung Kramat was one of those places.
In the sweating heat of Jakarta, circa 1946, when the
newly-born Republic of Indonesia was still drawing its first ragged breaths,
Kramat stood like a fortress of the damned. Not damned by God, mind you, but by
circumstance, by the grinding wheels of history that crush the small and the
forgotten beneath their weight.
The Dutch colonial houses lined Jalan Kramat V through VIII
like tombstones in a cemetery nobody wanted to visit. Built by that architect
fellow Moojen—Piet Moojen, if you want to get particular about it—sometime
around 1910 when the world still made a different kind of sense. These weren’t
just houses; they were monuments to a dead empire, their thick walls and tall
windows staring out at a world that had changed while they slept.
And inside these houses, behind those Moojen-designed walls
that had once sheltered Dutch wives and children, lived the Moluccans. The Londo
Ireng—the Black Dutchmen, if you’ll pardon the expression that cut like a
rusty blade every time it was spoken.
Christ, what a name to carry.
The Weight of Names
Names have power, you know. Ask any kid who’s been called “four-eyes”
or “fatty” on a playground, and they’ll tell you that words can hurt worse than
fists. The Moluccans—former soldiers of the KNIL, the Koninklijk
Nederlandsch-Indisch Leger—they knew this truth in their bones.
They’d worn the Dutch uniform, carried Dutch rifles, took
Dutch pay. Hell, an Ambonese soldier pulled down 10.19 guilders when he got
decorated, while his Javanese counterpart made do with 6.39. Not a fortune,
maybe, but enough to matter. Enough to buy your children schooling, enough to
lift your family up from the red dirt of poverty.
But now? Now those same uniforms hung in closets like burial
shrouds, and the medals—if they hadn’t been pawned or buried—felt heavy as
millstones around their necks.
The revolution had come calling, you see, and it wasn’t
knocking politely.
When the Bersiap Came
Masa Bersiap—the time of upheaval. Sounds almost
gentle when you say it in Indonesian, doesn’t it? Like maybe it was just some
kind of political housekeeping, some bureaucratic shuffling of papers.
It wasn’t.
Picture this: August 17, 1945. Sukarno declares
independence, and suddenly Indonesia is free as a bird. Except birds, when they’re
caged too long, sometimes forget how to fly. And sometimes they turn on
anything that reminds them of the cage.
The Japanese had surrendered, but the Dutch were trying to
crawl back like some B-movie zombie that just won’t stay dead. In that power
vacuum—Christ, how nature abhors a vacuum—armed youth groups sprouted like
mushrooms after rain. Young men with fire in their bellies and blood on their
minds, hunting for anyone who smelled like collaboration.
Europeans, Indo people, Chinese Indonesians, Christians from
Ambon and Manado—they all got painted with the same brush. Traitors.
Collaborators. Londo Ireng.
One family—their name lost to history now, or maybe just too
painful to remember—got dragged from their home and thrown down a well. All of
them. Even the children.
That’s the thing about mobs, you understand. They don’t see
faces anymore. They just see targets.
The Architecture of Fear
So the survivors ran. What else could they do? By March
1946, about 120 KNIL family heads—maybe 360 souls if you count the wives and
children—had found their way to Kramat. Like wounded animals seeking shelter,
they crawled into those abandoned Dutch houses.
Ironic, isn’t it? Seeking safety in the bones of the very
system that had made them outcasts. But Piet Moojen had built those houses to
last. Thick walls, good foundations. The kind of place you could barricade
yourself in and maybe, just maybe, wait out the storm.
The houses had stories, those Kramat buildings. During the
Japanese occupation, they’d been used as internment camps. Dutch women and
children locked away like criminals, including the wife of the last
Governor-General. You could almost feel their ghosts in the walls if you were
the sensitive type.
Hell, maybe you didn’t need to be sensitive. Maybe the fear
was so thick in those rooms it had soaked into the plaster.
Stone of Help
In the middle of all this chaos, in 1945, the Moluccan
community did something that might seem crazy to an outsider: they built a
church.
Well, “built” might be generous. More like they gathered
together in one of those colonial houses and decided that if they were going to
survive this thing, they’d need something stronger than thick walls and locked
doors. They’d need faith.
Jemaat Masohi, they called it first. Then Jemaat
Eben Haezer in May 1946. Eben-Haezer—“Stone of Help.” From the Good Book,
First Samuel: “Thus far the Lord has helped us.”
Thus far.
Two words that carry the weight of hope and the shadow of
doubt. Thus far we’ve made it. Thus far we’re still breathing. But what about
tomorrow?
The church became their heartbeat, their gathering place,
their sanctuary in every sense of the word. By 1956, they’d scraped together
enough to build a proper church building. It still stands today, that little
church on Kramat, like a lighthouse in a storm that never quite ends.
The Choosing
When 1950 rolled around, the Indonesian government had a
problem. The KNIL was officially dissolved in July, and all those Ambonese
soldiers—the ones who’d made it through the Bersiap, who’d survived the
hatred and the fear—they faced a choice.
Join the new Indonesian army (APRIS), or go home to the
Moluccas.
But here’s the kicker: some hotheads back in the Moluccas
had declared something called the Republic of South Maluku (RMS) in April. A
separatist movement. And President Sukarno, he wasn’t about to let a bunch of
ex-Dutch soldiers go home and maybe join up with the rebels.
So he made a decision that split families like an axe splits
wood: the Ambonese soldiers staying in Java couldn’t go home. Period.
The Dutch, feeling guilty maybe, or just trying to clean up
their mess, shipped about 12,500 Moluccans off to the Netherlands. Put them in
old Nazi concentration camps, if you can believe the irony. From one kind of
prison to another.
But some stayed. Some looked at those houses in Kramat, at
that little church, at the life they’d scratched out of the red dirt of exile,
and said: “No. This is home now.”
They chose integration over separation. They chose to be
Indonesian.
What Remains
Today, if you walk down Jalan Kramat V through VIII, you’ll
find maybe seven or eight families left from those original settlers. Their
children grew up, went to school, became civil servants, married outside their
community. They disappeared into Jakarta’s great melting pot, and maybe that’s
the strangest victory of all.
The houses are still there, though. Moojen’s architecture
holding firm against time and weather. Wisma Dewanto, once a barracks for KNIL
families, now houses philosophy students. The Jesuit Order runs it now—another
layer of irony in a place built on ironies.
The church still stands too. Small and unassuming, but still
there. Still offering that stone of help to anyone who needs it.
And in the end, maybe that’s what this story is really
about. Not the fear, not the hatred, not the violence that drove people into
exile. But the choice to stay, to belong, to weave yourself into the fabric of
a place that didn’t want you at first.
Kampung Kramat, Jakarta. Where Indonesia stitched itself
together, one thread at a time. Where the future learned to make room for
everyone.
Even the ones who carried the weight of difficult names.
Even the ones who’d been Londo Ireng.
Even the ones who’d chosen to call a foreign place home.
Sometimes the best ghost stories aren’t about the dead who
won’t rest. Sometimes they’re about the living who refuse to give up.
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