Witnesses to horror Hidskes’ approach, as narrator, presents his quest ‘to know’ in the form, as it were, of every post-war child’s question: ‘what did you do in the war daddy?’ Not unlike many veterans around the world, ‘daddy’ rarely spoke of his time in the war, other than in innocuous generalities. In a sense, Hidskes then takes us on a paper chase through an extensively detailed archive that in fact has always existed. It describes the thousands – estimates range from 3,000 to 40,000 – of summary executions ranging from specific revolver shots to the head to random machine gun slaughter of assembled villagers. Hidskes (and the reader) can hardly believe it. As he opens one file after another, the son constantly asks: Did my father do this? How could this man – my genial father, kind husband, friendly neighbour in a polite town in Holland – have done this? In pinpointing his father’s presence in each terrible scene that the archive reveals, it also places the (Dutch) reader there as horrified witnesses.
Where the simplicity and raw emotionalism of Hidskes’ narrative turns the pages, Stolwijk’s beautifully crafted book seamlessly integrates extracts from the archival account with the memories of real Acehnese people. This achieves a fine balance between the personal present and the documented historical past. Stolwijk ‘walks the archive’ to the soundtrack of Acehnese oral memory. We travel with Stolwijk across Aceh to view where and what took place. It recounts Stolwijk’s own journey that he undertook over several years, and this shows by the intimacy with which he interacts with people and the countryside. If it doesn’t have the agonising starkness of Hidskes’ narrative, Stolwijk enables us to feel the pride and the sorrow of Acehnese history. This extends beyond the colonial war to include the struggle against Japan, Jakarta, the internal civil war, the tsunami, and the sharp contrasts between a globalised modernity and an orthodox religion.. In one chapter, as we arrive with Stolwijk in the city of Lhokseumawe, on the road between Banda Aceh and Medan, we are shown both the extensive rusty, now defunct, gas installations that symbolise Aceh’s struggle against Jakarta in the 1970s, and the barren landscape nearby where Royal Dutch Shell stole Aceh’s resources three-quarters of a century earlier. In other chapters that take the reader along Aceh’s coastline once invaded by imperial armies, we see the more recent destruction caused by the invading tsunami. Both accounts, then, are not histories in the conventional sense. But in ‘telling history’ both include and indeed depend upon, pieces of documented history. Not only do these extracts underscore the authenticity of what is described, but are themselves so obviously dramatic and revealing that they require little further commentary. While devoid of footnotes, there are lengthy citations indicated by quotation marks and both books include extensive bibliographies. Their dependence on the archive also points to the fact that these *are *histories that should have been known, as Piet Hagen notably lamented in his recent book <https://www.insideindonesia.org/review-revisiting-the-colonial-wars)>on 450 years of Dutch colonial wars. How do these two books resolve the wounds they open up? Hidskes ends by asking himself: If I knew then what I know now, would I have confronted my father with it? His reply to his own question is: Now that I see the contours of the events of South Celebes through his eyes, it is more likely that our conversation would have remained superficial. Because my questions would have been carefully framed. To protect him, because I love him. Is this also to imply how a nation can, will, or should come to terms with its past? Stolwijk’s concluding lines are more ‘historical’, and in some senses, ironic, given the way he has framed his account throughout the book. On the last page of the last chapter, he pictures the last Dutch soldier in Aceh to survive the Japanese invasion: It is March 1943, precisely seventy years after the first Netherlands invasion and Henry van Zanten, the very last lieutenant of the [Dutch colonial] gendarmerie, marches through the streets of Takengon to meet his death. Now the Aceh war has really come to an end. It was of course not the end, but the beginning of another episode, to be followed by another, and another, and another, as Aceh struggled on for peace and autonomy. Both books in their different ways provide fresh insight into the last years of Indonesia’s colonial history that will speak to present generations of Dutch and Indonesian readers. Maarten Hidskes, Di Belanda tak seorangpun mempercayai saya: Korban metode Westerling di Sulawesi Selatan 1946-1947 <http://obor.or.id/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=830>*, * Yaysan Obor Indonesia, 2018. (In Holland no one will believe me. Westerling’s way of killing in South Sulawesi 1946 – 1947). Originally published in Dutch as *Thuis geloofd niemand mij: Zuid–Celebes 1946- 1947* , Atlas Contact, Amsterdam, 2016. Anton Stolwijk, Atjeh: Het verhaal van de bloedigste strijd uit de Nederlandse Koloniale geschiedenis. <https://webwinkel.uitgeverijprometheus.nl/book/anton-stolwijk/9789035143777-atjeh.html> Prometheus, Amsterdam, 2016. (Aceh: The story of the bloodiest battle in Dutch colonial history). *Joost Coté is Senior Research Fellow at Monash University. His research focuses on Indonesia’s twentieth century colonial history.* Inside Indonesia 137: Jul-Sep 2019
