All ships follow me : a family memoir of war across three continents / Mieke Eerkens.

First edition.

New York : Picador, 2019.

xxi, 312 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

English

May 14, 2019