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A review by dreesreads
All Ships Follow Me: A Family Memoir of War Across Three Continents by Mieke Eerkens
4.0
This book is both a biography of Eerkens' parents, and a memoir about her time spent researching their lives during and after World War II. As children, each of her parents had fairly unusual experiences during and immediately after World War II. As a child she always knew there was something "wrong" with her family, and this book is the result of trying to understand her father's experiences as a POW and the actions of her maternal grandfather.
Her father survived Japanese POW camps, and her maternal grandfather was jailed post-war for being an NSB party member. She looks at their experiences, reads and researches both her grandfather's trial records in the Dutch archives and the notes of other boys interned like her father. She looks at what they went through during and after the war, and sees how both of her parents' personalities reflect traits that enabled them to survive. Her father never gives up, and drives his family crazy with the tenacity that helped him survive the camps. Her mother has an inferiority complex, derived from years of being told she and her family were "fout" (a Dutch word meaning more than just "wrong").
Her parents meet, marry, and raise a family in California, their children do not fully understand the trauma their parents suffered and how it affects their adult behavior—and how it reflects in their children as well. Eerens examines this, and also looks at the attempts by Dutch colonists to get repatriations from the Japanese government, as well as the fact of having colonizers in her immediate family. She looks at the idea of "good" vs "bad" during WWII and in today's current events. She does not attempt to give an answer, as there is no one answer. There is a lot of self-reflection on her part, as she attempts to better understand and heal from the internalized guilt she carries.
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Eerkens' father grew up in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), as did his father and possible his father and grandfather before him. When Japan invaded Indonesia, the Dutch were moved into POW camps, and as an 11-year-old her father was soon housed in a camp for older boys, away from his mother and siblings and his father. He spent years in this camp, watching other boys starve, die of illness, and suffer horrible illnesses and parasites himself. After the war, the Indonesians fought a war for their independence and the Dutch ended up back in the camps for protection, and were then evacuated. Her father was 15 when he set foot in Europe for the first time. He never felt at home there.
Eerkens' mother grew up in the Netherlands, and her father (Eerkens' grandfather) was a member of the NSB, the Dutch political party that allied itself with the Nazi party after the Nazi invasion. Though he did not accept jobs or items form looted homes, nor inform on those who hid Jews or had radios, he did write some articles. Her mother was 5 at the war's end, and some of her first memories of are her father's post-war arrest as a collaborator, and then her mother's arrest and she living in the young children's ward of a Children's Home. After her mother was let go with time served, she reclaimed her children and finally found a place to raise them. Her father was jailed, and later had to work in Amsterdam and only see the family on weekends.
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Thanks to NetGalley and Picador for providing me with an egalley in exchange for an honest review.
Her father survived Japanese POW camps, and her maternal grandfather was jailed post-war for being an NSB party member. She looks at their experiences, reads and researches both her grandfather's trial records in the Dutch archives and the notes of other boys interned like her father. She looks at what they went through during and after the war, and sees how both of her parents' personalities reflect traits that enabled them to survive. Her father never gives up, and drives his family crazy with the tenacity that helped him survive the camps. Her mother has an inferiority complex, derived from years of being told she and her family were "fout" (a Dutch word meaning more than just "wrong").
Her parents meet, marry, and raise a family in California, their children do not fully understand the trauma their parents suffered and how it affects their adult behavior—and how it reflects in their children as well. Eerens examines this, and also looks at the attempts by Dutch colonists to get repatriations from the Japanese government, as well as the fact of having colonizers in her immediate family. She looks at the idea of "good" vs "bad" during WWII and in today's current events. She does not attempt to give an answer, as there is no one answer. There is a lot of self-reflection on her part, as she attempts to better understand and heal from the internalized guilt she carries.
———
Eerkens' father grew up in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), as did his father and possible his father and grandfather before him. When Japan invaded Indonesia, the Dutch were moved into POW camps, and as an 11-year-old her father was soon housed in a camp for older boys, away from his mother and siblings and his father. He spent years in this camp, watching other boys starve, die of illness, and suffer horrible illnesses and parasites himself. After the war, the Indonesians fought a war for their independence and the Dutch ended up back in the camps for protection, and were then evacuated. Her father was 15 when he set foot in Europe for the first time. He never felt at home there.
Eerkens' mother grew up in the Netherlands, and her father (Eerkens' grandfather) was a member of the NSB, the Dutch political party that allied itself with the Nazi party after the Nazi invasion. Though he did not accept jobs or items form looted homes, nor inform on those who hid Jews or had radios, he did write some articles. Her mother was 5 at the war's end, and some of her first memories of are her father's post-war arrest as a collaborator, and then her mother's arrest and she living in the young children's ward of a Children's Home. After her mother was let go with time served, she reclaimed her children and finally found a place to raise them. Her father was jailed, and later had to work in Amsterdam and only see the family on weekends.
————
Thanks to NetGalley and Picador for providing me with an egalley in exchange for an honest review.