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All Ships Follow Me
All Ships Follow Me: A Family Memoir of War Across Three Continents | Mieke Eerkens
2 posts | 1 read | 2 to read
An engrossing, epic saga of one familys experiences on both sides of WWII, All Ships Follow Me questions our common narrative of the conflict and our stark notions of victim and perpetrator, while tracing the lasting effects of war through several generations. In March 1942, Mieke Eerkens father was a ten-year-old boy living in the Dutch East Indies. When the Japanese invaded the island he, his family, and one hundred thousand other Dutch civilians were interned in a concentration camp and forced into hard labor for three years. After the Japanese surrendered, Miekes father and his family were set free in a country that plunged immediately into civil war. Across the globe in the Netherlands, police carried a crying five-year-old girl out of her home at wars end, abandoned and ostracized as a daughter of Nazi sympathizers. This was Mieke's mother. She would be left on the street in front of her sealed home as her parents were taken away and imprisoned in the same camps where the countrys Jews had recently been held. Many years later, Miekes parents met, got married, and moved to California, where she and her siblings were born. While her parents lived far from the events of their past, the effects of the war would continue to be 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, and spans generations, as Mieke recounts her parents' lives during and just after the war, and travels with them in the present day to the sites of their childhood in an attempt to understand their experiences and how it formed them. All Ships Follow Me is a deeply personal, sweeping saga of the wounds of war, and the way trauma can be passed down through generations.
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In this biography/memoir Eerkens explores her parents‘ lives during/after WWII. Her tween father was held in a Japanese internment camp in the Dutch East Indies and was later evacuated during the war for independence. Her mother‘s parents were arrested post war as Nazi collaborators. Eerkens also looks at how these childhood experiences of rejection, hunger, illness, etc, affected their life choices and their children. Excellent and unusual.

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Book and dinner. Yes, the soup is green. It‘s cream of parsley and is one of the recipes I‘ve been wanting to try from my soup cookbook. Not sure the boys in my family will appreciate this as they seem to be allergic to green stuff. 😂

DivineDiana How was the soup? 5y
robinb Such gorgeous color! 💚 5y
Purrfectpages I‘m intrigued by the soup! 5y
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BookNAround @DivineDiana I thought it was delicious. My husband has a dinner meeting so he won‘t have it until tomorrow and my 16 year old son took his “no thank you bite” and promptly said “No thank you.” 😂 5y
BookNAround @robinb I sort of regret not making it for St. Patrick‘s Day! 5y
BookNAround @Purrfectpages I was too. That‘s why I‘d bookmarked the recipe. 5y
Cathythoughts Looks great ! I love green soups 👍🏻💚 5y
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