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Chargement... All Ships Follow Me: A Family Memoir of War Across Three Continents (édition 2019)par Mieke Eerkens (Auteur)
Information sur l'oeuvreAll Ships Follow Me: A Family Memoir of War Across Three Continents par Mieke Eerkens
   Aucun Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre.  Dreesie | Apr 9, 2019 |  aucune critique | ajouter une critique
"In March 1942, Mieke Eerken's father was a ten-year-old boy living in the Dutch East Indies. When the Japanese invade the island he was interned in a concentration camp, where he is forced to do hard labor for three years. Meanwhile, across the globe, police in the Netherlands carry a crying five-year-old girl out of her home, abandoned and ostracized as a daughter of Nazi sympathizers. This was Mieke's mother. It was the post-war period of reckoning, referred to in Holland as the so-called 'hatchet day,' where Nazi collaborators were beaten in the streets and sent to the same concentration camps where the country's Jews had recently been imprisoned. Many years later, Mieke's parents meet and move to California, where she and her siblings are born. But though her parents are far from their families and the events of the past, the effects of the war are still felt in their daily lives and in the lives of their children. All Ships Follow Me moves from Indonesia to the Netherlands to the United States, as Mieke recounts her parents' stories and journeys with them to the important places of their childhood, in an attempt to understand their experiences on two different 'sides' of the war and bring to light events and experiences often overlooked in WWII histories. All Ships Follow Me is a deeply personal, sweeping saga of the wounds of war and the way trauma is often inherited through generations"-- Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
Discussion en coursAucunCouvertures populaires  
 Google Books — Chargement...GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)940.53092History and Geography Europe Europe 1918- World War IIClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne: (4)
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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. (