When All You Have Is a Sketch - Getting It Right The First Time

Pencils and paper are not always available, and not every artist has the luxury of perfecting his craft.

This drawing was made by my Opa, (grandfather) Augustus van Breugel, in 1942 in the Tijdeng Japanese Concentration Camp in Indonesia, then known as the Dutch East Indies. He is the great grandfather of my half Thai 16 year old daughter, @ploimrt, who enjoys to share her drawing practice on Hive.

My Opa, the Dutch Colonial Inspector of Police, was imprisoned together with my Oma and their six children. The second youngest son, my Oom Coen, was 4 years old at the time this portrait of him was drawn. Opa traded some of his last food in the Tijdeng Camp for a sheet of paper and a very small left-over stub of a pencil to draw this portrait of his little son. To get some colour in the face, he used a tiny little bit of hot chili juice, taken from wild chilies growing round the camp borders.

I can't imagine how he felt drawing it, knowing that he and my then 10 year old father were being moved to the Men's Camp, not knowing if they would ever see the rest of the family again. I suspect he drew it to sear the image of his little boy in his heart.

This treasured sketch survived the war, thanks to my courageous and resourceful Oma, who smuggled it from place to place concealed inside the lid of the small trunk the family used to carry what very little they had. They spent the whole war in the prison camps of Grogol and Tijdeng in what was then Batavia. The repairs to the back of the sketch with cellotape have obviously damaged the drawing, and yet somehow (to me) they contribute something of the fracture felt in this young boy and throughout my father's family.

The whole family miraculously survived the war, were reunited and, after recovery from malnutrition and treatment for a host of tropical diseases, were finally deported to Holland. The war-criminal camp commander, Kenichi Sonei, was sentenced and executed by the International War Tribunal in the Hague, where I was eventually born.

This drawing was shared online this week by my uncle, Coen, the subject of this drawing and himself now a celebrated artist in Holland. I share it here, with all the Hive sketch artists, to show how important and how treasured a sketch can be.

My uncle, Coen van Breugel, now 82 years old, at work in is art studio in The Netherlands. He was awarded the Dutch King's Highest Honour for Services to Art in 2019.

And this? This was Tijdeng a year after the camp was liberated, after the bodies were buried, the Japanese expelled and the camp prettied up for western media. As the text under the video says, the ghosts of Tijdeng remain silent. But this week, I heard my Opa whisper his anguish through a small sketch of his little boy.

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