Book Description

This memoir, written in novel form, is the true story of a legal immigrant family that had a price on its head, a dream in their hearts and a chance to come to America. The Wetzels were Dutch-Indonesian colonists living in South East Asia until 1950 when they made a harrowing escape from Muslim rebel insurgents in Indonesia and fled back to Holland. It includes family pictures and exclusive historical photos and brings transparency and truth to a complicated family history and disparages past vicious rumors and attempts to rewrite the history of the Wetzel family. Their journey brought them from Holland to the United States in 1956 where the family patriarch, Willy Wetzel, built an American dynasty around a successful family business bringing a previously close kept secret of Indonesian style martial arts to mainstream America. As children, Wim and his younger brothers and sister were trained and groomed to be the first Poekoelan Tjimindie karate instructors in the United States. As Willy Wetzel's oldest son, Wim takes the reader on a unique tumultuous journey through their family history and his personal experiences while walking in his father's shadow. He reveals his personal challenges and triumphs over a brutally dysfunctional family, undiagnosed dyslexia, typhoid fever, and the brothers coming of age while being engaged in the bloodiest battles of the Viet Nam war. The sons returned home from war with life altering injuries and were greeted by a family in crisis that was so intense that his brother Roy is forced to take their father's life in self-defense in order to save his own life and the life of his daughter. It is a story of family love and forgiveness and as the oldest son, Wim tells his personal story beyond his father's death and walks the reader through the good and bad choices that he made throughout his life.