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span class="inline inline-left">We want to believe in a just world where good things happen to good people and bad things only happen to bad people. We all expect that life will be meaningful and orderly. As the lyric of a popular 1960s song goes: '€œto everything there is a season ['€¦] and a time to every purpose under heaven'€.

Our faith in the meaning and order of life, however, are shaken by personal tragedies from time to time. Indonesia went through a great tragedy following an abortive coup in 1965 blamed on the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) that shook our collective capability to tell what is good and what is bad, and what is just.

The Sept. 30 Movement (G30S) triggered a wave of mass killings, led by the military, targeting almost anyone remotely associated with the PKI. Estimates put anywhere between 200,000 to 3 million people killed during the nationwide purge of communists. If we remove the contentious ideological aspect from this event, it was a case of Indonesians killing Indonesians. This was a civil war that our official historical book does not admit or recognize to this day.

Kenangan tak Terucap: Saya, Ayah, dan Tragedi 1965 (Unspoken Memories: Me, My Father and the 1965 Tragedy), a memoir written by Nani Nurrachman Sutojo, is a welcome addition to the still scant literature about that tragic episode in Indonesia'€™s modern history. If recent novels on the 1965 tragedy like Amba by Laksmi Pamuntjak and Pulang by Leila S. Chudori tell the story through the perspective of political prisoners and exiles, this non-fictional account is self-disclosure by a family member of one of the six army generals and a junior officer abducted on that fateful September night.

Nani draws on her personal experience in describing the trauma and psychological wound she suffered after her father, Maj. Gen. Sutojo Siswomihardjo, was kidnapped and later brutally murdered. She went through a deep depression, moments of alienation, difficulty of trusting others and insomnia due to the senselessness of the tragedy.

'€œI don'€™t understand the reason behind my father'€™s abduction and murder,'€ she writes.

Nani, then only 15 years old, and her family were rudely woken up when a group of soldiers shot their way into their home in the area of Menteng, Central Jakarta, on the night of Sept. 30, 1965. They smashed objects to pieces and took away, at gunpoint, her father who was still in his pajamas. Days later, his body was found along with six other Army officers dumped in a disused well in the Lubang Buaya district in East Jakarta.

This tragedy turned Nani'€™s life upside down. The Javanese culture that discouraged her from expressing her emotions led her to keep the grief to herself for a long time. Her family members chose to stay silent and never discussed the tragedy at all.

Nani'€™s turning point in life came when she accompanied her diplomat husband to his posting in New York from 1980 to 1985. There she met a woman who was a Holocaust survivor. From this woman'€™s tale of suffering and survival, Nani came to a humble awareness that what she was going through was not as painful as this woman'€™s experience. She writes in the memoir that the encounter made her '€œsee a new meaning of human suffering. Our endurance and capability to face trauma and suffering depend greatly on ourselves.'€

But the pivotal point in Nani'€™s trauma healing process came in 1986 after she watched Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (The Betrayal of the Sept. 30 Movement/PKI), a 1984 propaganda movie produced by the Soeharto government, with her 8-year-old son Nano.

'€œMa, what'€™s a communist?'€ he asked. '€œDid they kill Eyang (grandpa) Tojo?'€

Nani decided then that she had to resolve her own trauma before she could answer her son'€™s questions.

In her own search about communism, she gained insight about the complexities of history and found that historical events are multidimensional.

She learned that the personal dimension of history is important and valid. She recognized the need to hear the voices of all actors involved in a historical event '€” the perpetrators, the victims, the survivors '€” to understand the human dimension. The political dimension alone would be incomplete because it only presented the voice of the dominant regime.

A meeting with the families of the 1965 political prisoners and exiles in Belgium in 2000 further opened her eyes to their plight. She learned about the stigmatization and violence they suffered.

This personal encounter may have been the source of her insightful conclusion that in history '€œall of us are victims'€. The question of who suffered more became irrelevant. She became active in the rehabilitation process for the 1965 political prisoners. She is an active member of the House of Representative'€™s special committee on truth and reconciliation that seeks to rehabilitate the civil and political rights of 1965 survivors.

Nani narrates her story with force. Her words are prosaic and she uses rich metaphors to convey her thoughts.

'€œIt turns out that that the river of my life does not flow smoothly in a linear direction, because at some points, there are encounters with the rivers of other people'€™s life that might have strong currents and turbid waters,'€ Nani writes, using the metaphor of a river to describe her life journey.

She shares some hard-won insights about human suffering and how to cope with it. As a trained psychologist, she captured the dynamics of her own internal processes after the tragic loss of her father.

Through the help of compassionate individuals and her own rational contemplation, Nani was able to make sense out of her painful experience.

Finally, even though life is not just, it is not meaningless. Through reflections and dialogues, she managed to create meaning out of a tragedy.

Maybe if all of us can learn from Nani'€™s meaning-making process, there will be a time when Indonesia can eventually heal its historical wounds and let go of political grudges. (ogi)