Maria Hertogh

Maria Huberdina Hertogh (born Huberdina Maria Hertogh; 24 March 1937 – 8 July 2009), also known as Bertha Hertogh, Nadra binte Ma'arof, Nadra Adabi or simply Natrah, was a Dutch woman of Eurasian descent and Malay upbringing. She is notable for being at the centre of the Maria Hertogh riots when she was a young girl.

She was born to Dutch Roman Catholic parents in Java (then part of the Dutch East Indies). During World War II, her parents were imprisoned by the Japanese and she was given to a Malay Muslim, Che Aminah binte Mohamed, and raised as a Muslim under the name Nadra. After the war, Maria’s biological parents sought to reclaim her and a custody battle ensued between the Hertoghs and Che Aminah.

The British colonial court in Singapore ruled in favor of the Dutch parents in 1950, ordering that Maria be returned to them. The court's decision was seen as an insult to Islam, since Maria was taken from a Muslim home and forced to leave her faith. A protest by outraged Muslims escalated when images of her were published showing her kneeling before a statue of the Virgin Mary and Saint Blaise, leading to riots that took place between 11 and 13 December 1950 in Singapore. 18 people were killed and 173 injured; many properties were also damaged.

Birth and baptism

Huberdina Maria Hertogh was born on 24 March 1937 to a Dutch Catholic family living in Cimahi, near Bandung, Java, then a part of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia).

Her biological father, Adrianus Petrus Hertogh, came to Java in the 1920s as a sergeant in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army. In the early 1930s, he married Adeline Hunter, a Eurasian of Scottish-Javanese descent brought up in Java. Maria was baptised in the Roman Catholic Church of Saint Ignatius at Tjimahi on 10 April by a Catholic priest.

Early life

At the outbreak of World War II, Adrianus Hertogh, a sergeant in the Dutch Army, was captured by the Imperial Japanese Army and sent to a POW camp in Japan, where he was kept until 1945. Meanwhile, Adeline Hertogh stayed with her mother, Nor Louise, and her five children, among whom Maria was the third and youngest daughter. On 29 December 1942, Adeline gave birth to her sixth child, a boy. Three days later, Maria went to stay with Che Aminah binte Mohammad, a 42-year-old Malay woman from Kemaman, Terengganu, Malaya (now Malaysia) who was a close friend of Nor Louise.

Adeline Hertogh's version of events

According to Adeline Hertogh, in testimony given in evidence before the court at the hearing in November 1950, she was persuaded by her mother after the birth of her sixth child to allow Maria to go and stay with Aminah in Bandung for three or four days. Consequently, Aminah arrived on 1 January 1943 to fetch Maria. When the child was not returned, Hertogh borrowed a bicycle on 6 January and set out to retrieve her. She claimed that she was stopped by a Japanese sentry on the outskirts of Bandung as she did not possess a pass and was therefore interned.

From her internment camp, she smuggled a letter to her mother, requesting for her children to be sent to her. This Nor Louise did, but Maria was not among them. Hertogh asked her mother to fetch Maria from Aminah. Her mother later wrote and told her that Aminah wanted to keep Maria for two more days, after which she herself would bring the child to the camp. However, Hertogh did not see Maria throughout her internment. After her release, she could not find either Maria nor Aminah.

Negotiations were opened to retrieve Maria in early 1950. The Dutch Consulate offered $500 to make up for Aminah's expenses in bringing up the girl for eight years. Aminah rejected the offer. Attempts were then made to persuade Aminah to travel with Maria to Singapore in April to discuss the issue with the Dutch Consul-General; Aminah again refused. The Consulate then applied to the High Court of Singapore on 22 April for Maria to be delivered into the custody of the Social Welfare Department, pending further order. The Chief Justice heard the request the same day and approved the application ex parte. The next day, an officer from the department served the order to take Maria from Aminah's custody, and Maria was then placed in the Girls' Home at York Hill.

From this point on, Maria made it clear that she wanted to stay with Aminah and did not wish to be returned to her natal parents. Aminah contended that Adeline had given Maria over to her willingly, and this was supported by the testimony of Soewaldi Hunter, Adeline's elder brother, who bore witness to the adoption. However, after a 15-minute hearing on 19 May, the High Court ruled that the custody of Maria be granted to the Hertoghs.

As Aminah and Maria exited the court via the back door, a car from the consulate was waiting to take Maria away. Maria refused to enter the car and clung on to Aminah, both shouting in Malay that they would kill themselves rather than be separated. A large crowd quickly formed around the commotion. It was only after much persuasion that Aminah agreed to enter the car together with Maria and pay a visit to her lawyer, who explained that Maria had to be given up until an appeal was made. The duo then parted in tears, with Maria returned to the convent for temporary safekeeping.

Maria stayed at the convent for two more months under a further order from the Chief Justice pending appeal, which was filed on 28 July. The verdict was an overruling of the earlier decision; aside from the ex parte order to hand Maria to the Social Welfare Department, the Appellate Court found ambiguity in the Dutch Consul-General's representation of Maria's natal father. Both Aminah and Maria were overjoyed.

Controversial marriage

On 1 August 1950, 13-year-old Maria was married by way of a nikah gantung (to be consummated when both parties were of age, valid under Islamic law) to 21-year-old Mansoor Adabi, a Kelantan-born teacher-in-training at the Bukit Panjang Government School.

At her trial, Maria was quoted as saying: "I was a slave in my own home. I lived in a prison. I was not allowed to do anything. Joep [Johan] kicked up a row even if I went to drink a coffee somewhere."

In her defence, Maria's lawyers brought up her background, which the court acknowledged. With this in mind, and because the plot was never executed and there was no proof that she offered any inducement to the other three, the three-man bench acquitted Maria. Meanwhile, Maria had also filed for divorce on the grounds of the irreparable breakdown of her marriage. Several days before Christmas 1979, Maria married, for the third time, one of her co-conspirators, Antonius Christianus "Tom" Ballermans. Their domestic life was happy at first; however, three years into the marriage, Ballermans' behaviour became troublesome and worrying. He'd started drinking in excess. Suspicious, Maria followed him to a cafeteria, where she discovered he was having an affair. They would divorce in 1983. Pichel was originally from Jakarta, Indonesia and a sailor by profession. Maria's son and two daughters spoke about witnessing their mother's frosty relationship with Adeline, and her struggle to come to terms with her painful childhood. Her son testified that she was not happy and felt betrayed. The siblings also paid a visit to Kemaman and met several elderly kampung residents who remembered the young Maria, then known to them as Nadra. In an interview sometime before her death, which was featured in Days of Rage, Maria had once said she despised her natal mother for forcibly separating her from her adoptive mother.

Rokayah Yusof (Kamariah's daughter and therefore Maria's adoptive niece) stated that during the 1998 visit, Maria still spoke Malay fluently and that she'd missed all the traditional Malay snacks when she celebrated Hari Raya together with Kamariah, whom Che Aminah adopted in Tokyo where she lived with her lecturer husband before Aminah returned to Malaya. Rokayah, who was 68 years old when she spoke about the visit in 2015, added that Maria had visited the grave of Che Aminah during her visit and even after the death of Maria, Maria's children maintained contact with her and her own children. Additionally, Maria had also been evidently unhappy in her life in the Netherlands, "a far cry from the kampong life she had enjoyed".