Against Forgetting

By Budi N.D. Dharmawan

[Editor’s note: This essay was written by Budi for Stories Left Untold, an exhibition that he curated in 2015 at Yogyakarta. The text is also published on his blog.]

I visited Tuol Sleng prison and the Choeung Ek killing fields six years ago. I recalled these well-known sites of massacre again when listening to Rangga Purbaya (born 1976) talk about his grandfather and Nora Scheidler (born 1979) about her father. Their stories are the subject of the Stories Left Untold exhibition. Rangga’s grandfather went missing in Indonesia in 1965 for unknown reasons. Nobody knows whether or where he was murdered and buried. Nora’s father was detained without trial for one and a half years in a government prison in East Germany between 1968 and 1969.

Those detained at S-21 prison were also held without trial. Today, people can visit the prison, now renamed the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, located on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The buildings are preserved in their original 1975–1979 state when the Khmer Rouge converted the middle school into a prison and partitioned the classrooms into brick-walled cells. Here, wardens and prison guards, many of whom still teenagers then, were charged with torturing those suspected of being against the regime.

Over the span of four years, between 17,000 and 20,000 people were detained in Tuol Sleng. Men, young and old, children, even mothers with their babies. Archived photos of the detainees (registration numbers safety pinned on their necks) are now exhibited in one museum hall. They were tortured and forced to admit to crimes they did not commit. The torture slowly killed many of the prisoners. Others killed themselves or were murdered ruthlessly. Initially, the wardens buried the dead near the prison but after a year, they ran out of land.

Once the prison graves were filled, prisoners were killed at a field in Choeung Ek, a beautiful, peaceful farming village 15 kilometers from Phnom Penh. Tens, if not hundreds, of people were executed at a time. An amplifier hung from a nearby tree broadcasted songs, masking the victims’ cries. Over 8,800 bodies were exhumed from the mass graves at Choeung Ek after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Today, a Buddhist stupa stands near the site to appease the souls of those killed.

Terror is often used by regimes to perpetuate their power. Rulers spread fear to make people submissive, obedient. Those who rally against the establishment are suppressed, detained, tortured, killed, or made to disappear. Suspicion of anti-regime sentiment is enough reason to brand someone a rebel. This was the fate of those imprisoned in Tuol Sleng, killed at Choeung Ek, also Rangga’s grandfather and Nora’s father.

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Nora photographed the Hohenschönhausen prison in northeastern Berlin, where her father, Hans-Jochen Scheidler (born 1943), and his friends were held after distributing 800 flyers protesting the intervention of the Soviet Union in the Prague Spring uprising in 1968. Like Tuol Sleng in Cambodia, Hohenschönhausen is now a museum. The difference is that Hohenschönhausen inmates were subjected to psychological rather than physical torture. Inmates were not allowed to see one another, let alone have conversations. Cell windows had thick, opaque glass so that detainees could not see the outside world. Prison interrogations were riddled with lies; inmates were told that their wives had eloped and abandoned them.

Hans-Jochen knew that he needed to keep his mind active to prevent himself from going insane—not many people could cope with solitary confinement in a narrow, silent cell. He once went on hunger strike to request for a book to read to fill his time. When the warden finally gave him a book, he read it over and over again, from front to back, back to front, even upside down. “When we sat facing each other while I wrote, he could still read my handwriting with ease,” Nora said of Hans-Jochen’s later years.

Rangga’s grandfather, Boentardjo Amaroen Kartowinoto (born 1919), was a teacher at Tamansiswa. He took up arms against the Japanese colonialists. He joined the Barisan Banteng during the battle of Kotabaru, Yogyakarta, on 7 October 1945. Since 1947, Boentardjo had been active in the Peasants Front of Indonesia (Barisan Tani Indonesia, BTI) and even represented the organisation in the local Yogyakarta assembly. He was an instructor with the regional agricultural office. He was also active in the Setia Hati martial arts (pencak silat) community, and the Kepanduan Bangsa Indonesia scouts organisation. But on 10 November 1965, Rangga’s grandfather was taken from his house and never to be seen again, permanently altering the lives of his wife and seven children—Rangga’s father amongst them.

Rangga’s grandmother died two years after her husband disappeared. The seven children were forced to scatter, entrusted to different relatives. They were only able to regroup in Jakarta in 1970. After their father’s disappearance in 1965, they did not dare mention the event. As the eldest child, Rangga’s father was now head of the family. To ease his siblings’ prospects at school and work, he falsified his father’s death records to say that Boentardjo did not disappear, but had actually died before 1965.

After the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998, Rangga’s father revealed to his children that their grandfather had disappeared. After some searching, Rangga’s father surmised that Boentardjo was brought to a vertical cave in Gunungkidul, Yogyakarta, and might have died there. Not all the relatives supported his search. Many said they would rather not dredge up the past. “They had this extraordinary fear, such that they could not even talk about events fifty years after they occurred,” said Rangga.

A few years ago, reporter Hilde Jansen and photographer Jan Banning revealed similar horrors when researching the jugun ianfu (Indonesian women forced to serve the Japanese troops as sex slaves during the 1940s). The stigma of “having been used by the colonizers” was considered such a disgrace to the victims that they were too scared to recall their painful past. For them it was like scraping a scab. Yet, that was precisely what pushed Hilde and Jan to record the victims’ stories through writing and photographs. The duo wanted to ensure that these events would not be forgotten or swallowed by the passage of time, but recorded and revealed instead, so they would not recur again.

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Celebrated American photographer Garry Winogrand famously said, “I photograph to see what the world looks like photographed.” Photography was the medium he used to make sense of the world, at least for himself. This is actually the nature of photography. It freezes one slice of an event for eternity. Photography cuts and frames events, so that we can focus on a single moment in the smorgasbord that is the daily world flitting before our eyes.

Photography offers evidence of things past. Photos offer us another opportunity to revisit events that they recorded. Events that we did not understand when they occurred, because our thoughts were unable to digest them as they were happening, could be re-examined more thoroughly, as emphasised by the framing of the photos. This is how photography helps us make sense of the world. Many photographers actually started their works and projects from curiosity and unknowingness.

Nora started her photography project from this starting point—she wasn’t even born when her father was arrested. In 1968, Hans-Jochen Scheidler disappeared. Nora’s grandparents found out that their son was imprisoned only months later. When Nora’s grandmother got an opportunity to visit her son in jail, he appeared thinner, different. Witnessing her son’s condition affected Nora’s grandmother and made her shut off from the world. Nora revisited the jail to understand what had caused the change in her father and grandmother.

Taking a documentary approach, Nora interviewed and photographed her father and other ex-political prisoners to dig up stories from behind Hohenschönhausen’s walls and steel doors. Many of them have returned to the prison to work as tour guides (including Nora’s father since 2009). They described their imprisonment to curious visitors. With a medium-format camera, Nora also documented segments of the prison complex that are still intact, room by room.

Rangga’s photo project was also a form of retracing. Rangga’s search, like his father’s, started from a place of unknowingness and morphed into a desire to shatter that ignorance. Rangga shot portraits of family members and interviewed them about their memories of Boentardjo Amaroen Kartowinoto. He also created landscape photos of places connected to his grandfather’s disappearance. He photographed one route that his aunt (his father’s youngest sister) took between college classes in Yogyakarta during the 1970s in her silent search for traces of her father.

For this project, Rangga gathered and documented his grandfather’s personal items which had been stowed in the homes of various relatives: his journal, his certificates and other documents, his briefcase, shaving implements, and also a treasure chest. Rangga and I tried to conjure an image of his grandfather’s life through these personal items. In his journal, for example, he drew a series of gestures. We thought he was making notes on martial arts moves.

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Documentary, from the word document, comes from the Latin word “docere”, which means “to teach”. On a daily basis, we encounter documents as official records (such as research reports), evidence (diplomas, land acts, charters), and lessons of the past (archives and documentation). Photography in documentary mode operates in this understanding: documenting events to serve as records, evidence, or lessons for the future. Documentary, then, is a function and not a mere form.

Documentary photography cannot be separated from the history of the medium, as a photograph is first a document. With a camera, we can capture within a fraction of a second events that will become history moments later. Photography allows us to imprison reality, so that we can possess the past, wrote Susan Sontag in 1977. The documentary mode of photography has always been shifting and in constant development through time.

Visionary practitioners have pushed the boundaries of this mode contextually. Pioneering photographers have recorded contemporary events, developments, and explorations since the birth of the medium in 1839. Entering the 20^th century, documentary photography found its classic outline. Due to this outline, during and after the World War II period, documentary photography was often considered to be in the same category as photojournalism.

In general, photojournalism is understood as the recording of current news events while documentary photography is the covering of more complex narratives over a longer period of time. In the decade following the war, documentary photography was pushed into a more complex universe as photographers embedded their personal point of view, not limiting themselves to the mere recording of events. Later on, numerous photographers even photographed themselves and their own stories. The artistic choices taken by these documentary photographers emphasised the distinction between documentary photography and photojournalism.

Many contemporary photographers have explored the documentary approach in artistic works, as well as the artistic approach in documentary works. The line between documentary photography and art is getting blurry and it has spurred debates. However, the more personal and artistic approaches are generally still accepted in the documentary realm, as long as there is no manipulation in what is recorded—still considered taboo in documentary and journalism.

Though photographs are based on reality, a photographer’s bias—his perspective, exposure and lighting, composition, and other choices—is inevitably present. Photography is, again, a photographer’s commentary of the world; it is a photographer’s way of making sense of the world. It is within this framework that Rangga Purbaya and Nora Scheidler have delved into their stories with a documentary approach, extracting not just a moment in time, but also portraits, landscapes, and still life, referencing classical art.

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In the years that passed, the world changed; still there are many questions that have gone unanswered. Questions kept aside for too long become harder to answer because the people with answers have aged or died with their memories. It is necessary to record because we tend to forget. The efforts to gag the sounds of memory will not silence us, or make us push aside or forget events. Instead they make the questioners ask even louder what is not supposed to be known. I think this is what Milan Kundera meant when he wrote in 1978 that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

It is this struggle against forgetting that made Nora’s father and the other Hohenschönhausen prisoners return to the building where they had been imprisoned to work as tour guides. Initially, they did this on a voluntary basis, but the museum management finally recruited them officially. It is the same struggle against forgetting that drove Nora to document the prison as it looked like when it was operational. Right after Nora finished her project, the second and third floors were tidied up, so that they no longer looked as they did when it was a functional prison.

Because of the limited access to information and the fear still present in many peoples’ minds, Rangga and his family could only guess that Boentardjo Amaroen Kartowinoto’s arrest was linked to his activities in the Peasants Front of Indonesia. The government started putting pressure on the association in 1965. However, no one knows exactly why Boentardjo was arrested and still missing to this day. Although his family’s search efforts led them to the vertical cave at Gunungkidul, no person or record could verify that Boentardjo had been there, or met his death there.

Boentardjo is just one out of hundreds of thousands of people missing or killed during the events of 1965. The Indonesian government has yet to explain what happened then. Since then, there are many others who were killed or had gone missing. Munir Said Thalib was poisoned to death on a flight from Jakarta to Amsterdam on 7 September 2004. His case went to court and implicated a high ranking intelligence officer, but the judge did not indict. At the dusk of the New Order administration, Munir advocated for the search for people missing around the Reformasi of 1998—an event that the government denies. One of those who disappeared in that “non-event” was Wiji Thukul.

Wiji Thukul disappeared in 1998 after saying goodbye to his wife, as he ran in hiding from the government security forces pursuing him in connection to the events of 27 July 1996. This son of a bicycle rickshaw driver from Solo was a frequent participant in various protests against the government and its financiers. He was arrested and nearly blinded by beatings. Yet, he never gave up, continuing instead to speak out against injustice. Under a repressive regime, it is no wonder that this man of letters was targeted.

As in Boentardjo’s arrest and Munir’s assassination, Thukul’s family is also left with a mystery. They still know nothing of his whereabouts. This unknowingness is a shadow that haunts them and us. If the authorities permitted what happened to Thukul, Munir, Boentardjo and others, then it could also happen to us. I would like to think that these unrevealed tales can spark hope, stoke the coals, so that those whom are lost can be found and justice can be upheld.

Budi N.D. Dharmawan
Yogyakarta, August 2015