Embroidered apron : Maria Sprengers, Tjideng Women and Children's Internment Camp

Place Asia: Netherlands East Indies, Java, Batavia
Accession Number REL42142
Collection type Heraldry
Object type Heraldry
Physical description Cotton, Embroidery cotton thread
Maker Sprengers, Maria
Place made Netherlands East Indies: Java, Batavia
Date made c 1943
Conflict Second World War, 1939-1945
Description

Red and white check bib apron sewn together from tea towels. There are two ties for the neck attached to the bib, and two ties at the top of the apron for tying around the waist.

The apron features hand-embroidered motifs. On the bib, there are: an embroidered image of the Tjideng camp gates in green and yellow, with the title "Tji" apparently unfinished; under this, Maria Sprengers' POW identification (67) in blue. On the body of the apron (down the proper left hand side) there are: a clock (showing 8:10), a bell and a loudhailer accompanied by the words "Het is Koempoeltijd" (Roll call time) in yellow, blue, green and grey; a clothes line with clothes hanging from it, and a washing bucket alongside, in yellow, tan, black, white, red, pink and gray; and an embroidery of a tree and a pond, possibly representative of freedom, in green, brown and tan.

History / Summary

This apron was made and subsequently decorated by Maria Sprengers and her sister Theresia while they were civilian internees of the Japanese in Batavia at the Tjideng Camp for Women and Children. Maria was aged about 20 when she interned. Some 10,000 internees were held in the camp, which was formed by the Japanese by fencing off a number of blocks of suburbs in the poorer sections of Batavia (now Jakarta, Java).

The Japanese invasion of Dutch East Indies began on 28 February and was successfully completed on 12 March 1942. From about October 1942 the Japanese began rounding up Dutch civilians and transferring them into internment camps; Maria, her sister Theresia, two brothers and their mother were all sent to Tjideng Camp. They remained there until the end of the war.

The family suffered the privations and degradations of this camp – the overcrowding, lack of sanitation, lack of clean water, the brutal punishments (under the commander of the camp from April 1944 until June 1945, Captain Kenichi Snoei) and humiliations. At some point, Maria got a job in the Dutch Administration Office typing lists of internees held in the camps - not only Tjideng, but Kramat, Grogol, Adek and Gedon-Badak camps.

Upon her release, Maria learned that her future husband, Chris Willems, whom she had know before her captivity, had survived the war as a POW in Thailand. She travelled to Kanchanaburi to meet him and there they were married. After repatriation to the Netherlands, the couple had two children before emigrating to Pittsworth in Queensland.