It is more than a book launch. It’s living history.
That’s what Greenbank author Dorothy Read said of what folks can expect to hear when longtime Whidbey resident Ilse Evelijn Veere Smit takes the podium to introduce her memoir “End of Silence” at 3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 2 at Trinity Lutheran Church in Freeland.
Read co-authored and co-published the book with Smit under their Double Isle Press label. The collaboration came about when Smit stood before the Trinity congregation on the eve of Thanksgiving 2007 and told a heart-wrenching story.
Smit is an Indo-European woman who was born into well-to-do family in the colonial society of the Dutch East Indies before World War II. But her life was forever changed when the Japanese invaded her homeland.
Read listened with compassion as Smit recounted the arrest of her mother after the invasion. She describes it as “The Handkerchief” story.
Smit recalls “… I find the little handkerchief that I made for her when I was 6 years old. She had it in her pocket when she was taken to the jail. I see a message embroidered on it. Somehow, Mam has taken green threads out of one of her dresses to stitch these words:
My darling children,
Have you been good?
Be loving to each other
watch over baby sister
Does little brother enjoy school?
Does Mieke go also?
Pray that Mam comes home soon
Till I see you again, Darlings.
Read said that Smit was shaking as she told the story and then held up the handkerchief that was embroidered with her mother’s message on it.
“By the end of the story, the ushers were passing boxes of tissues down the pews,” Read said.
Read and her fellow parishioners were spellbound.
As a writer, Read was moved to offer her skills when Smit asked her to help compile the book. Until then, Read had spent a large number of her 30-plus years on Whidbey mentoring and showcasing writers as a South Whidbey English teacher and as an active member of the Whidbey Island Writers Association, for which she is currently chairwoman. It was Read’s turn to sit down and write.
So began the year-long process of creating what would become “End of Silence.”
Using Smits journals and a process of interviews, the book recounts Smit’s recollections of her years of internment in a Japanese
concentration camp on Java. It follows her to the war’s end when she walks out of Camp Halmaheira only to walk into the bloody Indonesian revolution that started in 1945, when she is targeted for execution by native freedom fighters. Finally, she tells of the pain she suffered trying to cope with her memories in a family that refused to talk about what had happened to them.
The two women met for two or three hours per week in Smit’s living room on Chip Shot Way in Freeland.
“Every session revealed far more than the journaling had addressed, and my questions would pull memories and images that had been buried for decades,” Read said.
“Oh, there was a lot of crying, by both of us. My “little girl Dorothy” identified with the little girl, Ilse, whose World War II memories were so different from my own,” she added.
Read would take notes, draw diagrams, sketch illustrations and then go home and research the information she collected. She would then write the scene for the book. At their next meeting, she would read what she wrote to Smit, making revisions as needed.
“Finally she would sit back, close her eyes, nod her head and say, ‘Yes, that’s the way it happened,’ and I would know I had it right. Then we would move on to the next scene,” Read said.
Read called it a “remarkable collaboration” in which Smit courageously opened her memory to images and scenes that had been suppressed; memories about which she had to build up the strength to talk.
“Ilse lived it, and I wrote it,” Read said.
“I am forever in Ilse’s debt for telling me her story and letting me be the conduit to put it on the printed page,” she added.
As a non-Indo-European person, Read said she felt privileged to be in the company of her friend Smit and the 400,000 others who lost everything, including their homeland during World War II and the Indonesian revolution.
“It started as a mission to get Ilse’s story out and help her to sleep through the night without gut-ripping nightmares,” Read said.
“The mission has broadened to get the Indos’ story out and help them make connections that will keep their beautiful heritage alive, and to share it with non-Indos who are as ignorant of it as I was before ‘End the Silence’ was born.”
Smit will be on hand to read excerpts from “End the Silence” during the event, which will go until 5 p.m. Copies will be available for purchase and for signing by both authors. Refreshments will also be served.
