At war’s end, during a chaotic few weeks of being shuffled from place to place, Hendrik encountered his father, alive, but sick and emaciated, as they were being loaded into boxcars. It ended somehow with the two of them finding their way back to their house in East Java. This was half burned down and stripped of all items that could be moved. They lived in the ruins for a few months trying to figure out what had become of Greta, Alexandra, and Mina. The answer turned out to be that the women had wound up in a camp in western Java, surrounded by increasingly hostile and aggressive Indonesian bravos: teenaged males who had grown their hair long and ran around in packs brandishing bamboo spears with sharp, hardened tips, and sometimes more advanced weapons that they had acquired from the Japanese. This period was named bersiap , meaning, roughly, "get ready" or "be prepared." What they were getting prepared for was to run all the Europeans, as well as the Europeanized Indos and the Chinese, out of the Indies for good and make it an independent country. Loudspeakers were nailed up to trees and strung together with wires so that rousing speeches by Sukarno could be broadcast everywhere. They naturally focused their attentions on the camps into which the Japanese had conveniently rounded up all the people they didn’t like. At first these were still guarded by the Japanese—who had no way of getting home—and later by Gurkhas and Sikhs parachuted in by the Brits, who were supposed to be in charge of the place until further arrangements could be made. Those camps, as bad as they still were, were safer than anywhere else.