From 1943 onwards, young people joined various Japanese or Indonesian military and paramilitary organizations in large numbers. These teenagers and people in their twenties were the ones who went on to fight for a free Indonesia in the war of independence. There were more than two million of them. In the Netherlands, the young revolutionaries were notorious for their role in the Bersiap (Indonesian for ‘be prepared’) that lasted from October 1945 to early 1946, one of the most violent periods in the war.
The fighters called themselves pemuda, after Pemuda Indonesia, a nationalist youth organization founded in the 1920s. These photos show how the young independence fighters saw themselves: they present themselves in these portraits as fearless. Such a self-presentation of Indonesians is rarely seen in Dutch collections. Indeed, it is unclear how these images ended up in a Dutch soldier’s photo album.
Pemuda soldiers. Java, c. 1945. Photographer unknown. KITLV A216, KITLV 14044, 14048 and 14050.