The Children of Adriaan Beukenkamp and Alida von Gorcum: Janna Beukenkamp Nienhuys

This post continues a series about the children of Adriaan Beukenkamp and Alida von Gorcum. Adriaan was the eldest brother of my great-grandfather, Gerhardus Beukenkamp (later George Beck). While George was beginning a life in the United States, his brother Adriaan was raising a family in The Netherlands. 

Adriaan Beukenkamp married Alida Johanna van Gorcum in Amsterdam on August 22, 1907. They had four children together.

1. Marinus Gerhardus Beukenkamp, b. 1910 in Vienna, Austria; m. Anna Elisabeth Keur; d. 1971 in Leipzig, Germany
2. Janna Gerhardina Beukenkamp b. 1911 in Vienna, Austria; m. Hendrick Coenraad Nienhuys; d. 1993 in Suffield, Connecticut, USA
3. Radboud Beukenkamp, b. 1914 in Graz, Austria; m. Jantina Ette Mensinga; d. 1993 in Shalimar, Florida, USA
4. Lourens Jacobus Beukenkamp. b. 1920 in Zaandam, The Netherlands; m. Margaret Smit; d. 2007 in Dothan, Alabama, USA

This post is devoted to Janna, Adriaan and Alida's only daughter.

Janna Gerhardina Beukenkamp

Janna was born in Vienna on July 13, 1911, the second child of Adriaan and Alida Beukenkamp. Adriaan and Alida had moved from Amsterdam to Vienna soon after their marriage, and their first three children were born there. When Austria's economy floundered in the difficult post-WWI years, the Beukenkamp family returned to The Netherlands and settled in Haarlem in 1922. There, Janna attended Kennemer Lyceum.

Unfortunately, Janna's brother Lourens barely mentions her in his autobiography, likely because she was nine years older than him and left The Netherlands after her marriage, but it's a shame to not have the sort of personal recollections about Janna that Lourens shared about his brothers. Luckily, Janna's life story was told in the book Heroic Nurses by Robin McKown (published 1966) and was digitized on Encyclopedia.com. Here is an excerpt from Encyclopedia.com about Janna's early years:

[Janna] was raised in the Dutch town of Haarlem, where she met and fell in love with her future husband Hendrick Nienhuys, the grandson of Jacobus Nienhuys, the founder of the Dutch Sumatra tobacco industry. They planned to marry and settle in Sumatra, where Hendrick intended to follow in his grandfather's profession. While Janna waited for Hendrick to finish his advanced agricultural studies and to serve in the Dutch military, she studied for a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, then returned home to attend teachers' college. Thinking that she might face some medical problems in the tropical climate of the East Indies, she impulsively enrolled for nurses' training and after three years earned an R.N. from the Binnen Gasthuis in Amsterdam.

Born in Amsterdam on October 22, 1912, Hendrick was the son of Jan Willem Nienhuys and Alida Maria Versteegh. Hendrik received his Masters Degree in Agronomy, the study of soil chemistry and economics, from Wageningen University, Holland in 1937. Janna and Hendrick were married on December 3, 1937, after his graduation. Encyclopedia.com provides more details about the events following Janna and Hendrick's marriage.

[Hendrick and Janna] immediately left for Sumatra, settling on a tobacco plantation outside of Medan, where Hendrick was employed as an agricultural consultant. Their first house was primitive, without electricity or running water, but they had five dedicated Sumatran servants to take care of their every need. The couple had a daughter and enjoyed an idyllic life until 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland.

The location of Medan, in North Sumatra (Indonesia), where Janna and Hendrick lived.

From 1937-41, Hendrick was a member of the research department of Deli Maatschappy, Indonesia, involved in research and development, breeding, fertilization and testing of tobacco, palm oil and rubber. He and Janna were happily settled in Sumatra, but the war was about to upend their lives. From Encyclopedia.com:

Initial concern gave way to true alarm in May 1940, when Rotterdam was bombed, and the Nienhuyses realized that they were cut off from Holland entirely. In 1941, they traveled to the United States to visited Hendrick's parents, who had fled there from occupied Holland. When they returned, they took up residence in a more modern house in Medan. By that time, it was clear that Sumatra would figure highly in Japan's quest for territory, and to prepare for possible invasion, the Dutch women of Medan organized a Civil Defense Corps for which Janna, who had just given birth to her second daughter, taught a first-aid course.

Given how horrific the war years were in The Netherlands, you might assume that Janna and Hendrick were very lucky to have left their homeland before World War II began. Unfortunately, moving to Sumatra put them squarely in the South-East Asian Theatre of the war, part of the Asia-Pacific War, and they ended up suffering perhaps more than any of the Beukenkamps.

The Pacific War, sometimes called the Asia–Pacific War, was the theater of World War II that was fought in Asia, the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and Oceania. It was geographically the largest theater of the war, including the vast Pacific Ocean theater, the South West Pacific theater, the South-East Asian theater, the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the Soviet–Japanese War. 

The Pacific War saw the Allies pitted against Japan, the latter aided by Thailand and to a lesser extent by the Axis allies, Germany and Italy. Fighting consisted of some of the largest naval battles in history, and incredibly fierce battles and war crimes across Asia and the Pacific Islands, resulting in immense loss of human life. (Wikipedia)

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Dutch East Indies declared war on Japan. Hendrick enlisted in the Dutch Army on December 7, 1941. Janna remained in Medan with her two young daughters. Encyclopedia.com explains what happened next.

Janna, the only trained nurse in the area, continued her Civil Defense work, readying the women of Medan for what appeared to be inevitable attack. They had their first hands-on experience in the wake of a Japanese air raid, during which a number of young Sumatran soldiers were injured. They performed magnificently, treating the wounded and keeping them comfortable until the Red Cross arrived to transport them to the hospital.

The small armies of the Dutch East Indies were helpless against the invasion of the Japanese, and on March 11, 1942, Janna was confronted by several Japanese soldiers stealing supplies from her kitchen larder. Days later, several officers entered her house without knocking and ordered her to pack her things and move out. Janna collected what household supplies she could carry and with her young children took refuge in the house of a friend. A month later, the entire town—now only women and children—was rounded up in the town square and then taken to a deserted rubber plantation, where they were interned under Japanese guard.

The rounding up of civilians was taking place all over Asia, as explained by novelist Isabel Wolff for the BBC.

Once Japan had conquered South-East Asia, the Europeans, Americans and Australians who had been living there as planters, teachers, missionaries and civil servants were rounded up and trucked away to the 300 "civilian assembly areas" - in reality concentration camps - that the Japanese had created. Ten thousand British were interned in China, Singapore and Hong Kong, while 3,000 Americans were interned in the Philippines, at Santo Tomas.

By far the largest group were the 108,000 Dutch civilians, 62,000 of them women and children, who were sent to camps on Java, Sumatra, Borneo and Timor. Their ordeal was to last three and half years and would claim the lives of 13,000, due to starvation, exhaustion and disease.

These civilian camps were horrifying, and the women and children confined in Sumatra were subjected to overcrowding and brutality. Encyclopedia.com relates what Janna experienced during her imprisonment.

Placed in dozens of small houses originally built for Sumatran workers, the women and children lived six to each 9×9 room. They slept on the floor, and the able-bodied chopped trees and cleared land for planting, under the careful watch of their Japanese guards. Food, though scarce, was adequate for the adults, but not for the children, although the Sumatran women were expert at utilizing native plants for spices to enhance the bland food. Nienhuys quickly assumed the position of camp nurse, using what few medical supplies she had thought to pack with her household goods. She treated cuts and scrapes, tended to the malnourished children, and even delivered the babies of women who had conceived before their internment. Without a doctor to consult, she frequently relied on intuition and common sense, which worked in most instances, although a number of the younger children died during their first year in camp.

By the end of the first year, food rations were cut and hunger became an ever-present problem, and Janna feared more and more for her own children. She also knew nothing of her husband's plight, as news from the outside never reached the camp. The women were eventually ordered to pack up and once again march to the train, which transported them deep into the jungle. They were then marched through the rain and thick mud to yet another converted rubber plantation, surrounded by barbed wire. This time, they were housed in long wooden barracks with earth floors and wooden benches along the sides, providing them with no privacy. Sanitation was primitive and as the level of the wells sank, water was rationed. What food was available was inedible, and Janna was eventually forced to trade the treasured diamond she had hidden in one of the children's rag dolls for a single cup of rice. She continued to tend the sick and injured, although she was now completely out of supplies and there was little she could do but make her patients comfortable and see to it that they did not die alone.

What Janna did not know was that her husband, Hendrick, was also a prisoner of war. His unit surrendered to the Japanese Army in March 1942, and Hendrick was imprisoned at a different camp in Sumatra from that date until March 1946. In his POW camp, Hendrick contracted beriberi, a disease caused by vitamin-B deficiency, due to the meager food rations given to the prisoners. He also struggled with malaria.

In September 1945, Janna received a note in her husband's handwriting asking for her whereabouts. She replied, but never got a response. At that point, it was becoming clear to the detainees that the tide of the war was changing, and that perhaps the war might actually be over. Of course, the war in Europe had ended on May 8, 1945, but the Japanese fought on. Allied victory was declared in Asia on August 15, 1945. British planes dropped food and supplies on Sumatra, and British doctors were allowed to enter the civilian detainee camps. It was then that the imprisoned women and children learned that the war was over. 

The women prisoners were not immediately released, as the English occupation army had to arrange transportation and a place for them to stay. They left camp in small groups, but Janna stayed on to tend the sick until the camp was emptied.

After Janna and her daughters were freed, she was able to locate Hendrick and nurse him back to health. The Nienhuyses left Sumatra, briefly returned to The Netherlands, and then settled in White Plains, New York. They later moved to Massachusetts and then Connecticut. Once recovered, Hendrick resumed his work. He and Janna had two more daughters, in 1948 and 1953. In 1951, Hendrik was named Vice President of H. Duys Co., Connecticut Valley, managing all aspects of shade grown wrapper tobacco. He did research and development for the control of blue mold on the Connecticut Valley grown crops. Later, he became the General Manager of Duys Nurseries, in charge of all aspects of starting and developing a container grown nursery. Janna traveled the East Coast, giving speeches about her war experience.

Janna died in Suffield, Connecticut on August 3, 1993, at the age of 82. Henrick died in Suffield on October 27, 2001, at the age of 89. Their descendants largely remain on the East Coast.

Obituary for Janna Nienhuys in the Hartford Courant, August 4, 1993