Mieke Eerkens

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 as a Dutch colonist in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), and her maternal grandfather was jailed post-war for being a Dutch 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. Eerkens 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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Thanks to NetGalley and Picador for providing me with an egalley in exchange for an honest review.… (altro)