Our Childhood in the Former Colonial Dutch East Indies

About the Book

This memoir of colonial family life presents the childhood recollections of Ralph Ockerse and his sister Evelijn Blaney, raised in the 1930s in the former Dutch East Indies, while major events gradually led to the disintegration of its colonial establishment. In October 1942, their family life as such abruptly came to an end with the intense suffering, hunger, extreme privation, and despair under horrifically dehumanizing conditions they and their family endured during their three and a half-year internment by the Japanese occupation forces in World War II, and succeeding terror that arose and targeted the Dutch after the 1945-proclamation of independence of the country, now known as Indonesia. The story takes the reader on a journey of their lives and that of their family, first as they memorably grew up on the islands of Poelau Kisar, Sumatera, and Java, on to their sequent struggle for survival inside the Japanese concentration camps and repatriation in 1946 to the Netherlands.

About the Author

Ralph Ockerse was born in Brussels during his father’s furlough in Belgium, and moved to Indonesia in his first year. After World War II, he first lived in the Netherlands and immigrated to the United States in 1957. He holds the PhD degree in plant physiology and biochemistry from Yale University and is professor emeritus of biology at Indiana University. Evelijn (“Meis”) Blaney nee Ockerse was born in Ambon, Indonesia. After the war, she lived in the Netherlands where she received her nursing Diploma A and postgraduate certification in obstetrics from St. Elisabeth’s Gasthuis at Haarlem. She emigrated for the United States in 1958 and earned her Board Certifications as a registered nurse and operating supervisor. She retired as case manager for Home Health Care nursing practice.