Maria 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 when she was a young girl.
The riots took place between 11 and 13 December 1950 in Singapore, after a court decided that Maria should be taken from her Malay Muslim foster and adoptive mother's custody and given over to her Dutch Catholic biological parents. 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. 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.
Life with Aminah
Upon arriving with Aminah, Maria was given the name Nadra binte Ma'arof. For unknown reasons her new family moved to Jakarta for a period before moving back to Bandung, where Aminah worked for the Japanese military police as an interpreter until the end of the war.
In 1947, fearing harm upon the family during the Indonesian National Revolution because Maria was a putih ("white [child]"), Aminah moved back to her hometown of Kampung Banggol in Kemaman, Terengganu. By then Maria was the same as any other Malay Muslim girl of her age: she spoke only Malay, wore Malay clothes and practiced her religion devoutly.
Maria had an adoptive elder sister of Japanese descent, Kamariah Mohd Dahan, whom Aminah had adopted in Tokyo when she lived there with her husband.
Custody battle
In 1945, with the end of World War II, Sergeant Hertogh was released and returned to Java and reunited with his wife. The couple stated that they inquired about Maria, but could find neither her nor Aminah. They returned to the Netherlands after requesting the Dutch authorities in Java and Singapore to search for the child. Investigations were then made by the Red Cross Society, the Royal Netherlands Army, the Indonesian Repatriation Service, and local police. Finally, in September 1949, Aminah and Maria were traced to the kampung in which they were living.