Not Here, But in Another Place

This is a story of captors and captives.
Of hostages and their masters.
Of the strange things that happen to the minds and bodies of normal
people subjected to a long, abnormal, intensely personal kind of stress.
Of how the very people you want to hate and fear, you come to love and trust.
Of how it affects your mind and principles when you realize what you've done.

It is also a story of the evil that good men do.
Of how murder and humaneness, sincerity and trickery,
despair and determination,
all can exist in the same person at the same time.

It is ultimately a story of extreme human experience
where the issues are freedom, surrender of body and soul, bravery, death.

The captors were the children of exiles.
Their parents were from the South Moluccas, the famed Spice Islands east of Java.
Now they were in Holland and they wanted to go home,
a home they felt Holland had betrayed into Indonesian hands.
So they hijacked a train, and they took over a school, and a consulate.
Their message: Give us what we want or people die!

That's how it began..