Leon Salim

Prisoners at Kota Cane Leon Salim

Very little has been written about the twilight of Dutch rule in the Netherlands East Indies, in the period immediately after the Japanese army swept through Java and parachuted its forces into south Sumatra. When the Commander-in-Chief of the Netherlands Indies Army, Lt. General Hein Ter Poorten, surrendered to the Japanese in Kali Jati on March 9, 1942, that incident did not mark the end of Dutch control throughout the Indies. Major elements of the colonial government on Sumatra held out for a further three weeks before finally capitulating on March 28. The following memoir, Prisoners at Kota Cane by Leon Salim, presents the events of these final days in Sumatra from the perspective of an Indonesian arrested by the Dutch shortly after Ter Poorten's surrender. Although this diary was brought together into the form of a memoir shortly after the events it describes, the Indonesian version has never been published. I am grateful to Leon Salim for letting me translate and publish it, and for checking the translation and answering queries on it, for I think the memoir is an important contribution to our understanding of this period of Indonesia's history. - Audrey Kahin, November 1985