From the Men They Took Their Labor, from the Women They Took Everything

Abstract: “From the Men they Took their Labor, From the Women they Took Everything” is a translation of the testimony of Sarbinatun (1947–2010), a Javanese woman who was one of the many thousands of political prisoners detained in the wake of the purported coup of September 30, 1965. Sarbinatun had been active in both Lekra and IPPI in her native city of Surakarta, Central Java. Both were left-wing organizations that were associated with the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI): Lekra, an organization of cultural workers, and IPPI, a union of high school students. She was also the newlywed wife of a PKI cadre. Only seventeen years old at the time of her capture, Sarbinatun was incarcerated without trial for fourteen years. Over those years she was moved from camp to camp across a series of detention centers in Central Java. Sarbinatun’s testimony details the conditions in these camps and the brutal torture, including sexual violence, that she and her fellow prisoners suffered at the hands of their captors. In addition to chronicling her experiences over those years of imprisonment, Sarbinatun’s testimony also includes recollections of her life as a teenaged activist in the early 1960s and of the decades of deprivation she endured following her release from prison. The translation is introduced and annotated to facilitate the readers’ understanding of this remarkable woman’s testimony.