Three came home
Subtitle: a woman's ordeal in a Japanese prison camp
By: Agnes Keith.
Publisher: Eland
Published: 1985
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 320
Subjects: World War, 1939-1945 -- Prisoners and prisons, Japanese.; World War, 1939-1945 -- Personal narratives.; Women prisoners of war -- Asia, Southeastern.
Description: When the Japanese swept through Borneo in 1942, Agnes Keith was captured with her two-year-old son. Even though keeping notes was a capital offence, she wrote a diary on the backs of labels and in the margins of old newspapers, which she buried in tins or sewed inside her sons home-made toys. Unlike many other narrators of camp life, Agnes Keith gives an honest and rounded description of her Japanese captors. The camp commander, Colonel Suga, was responsible for a forced march which killed all but three out of 2,970 prisoners; yet he regularly took children for joy-rides in his car, stuffing them with sweets, and sent them back to camp with armfuls of flowers from his garden.