Eight prison camps
Subtitle: a Dutch family in Japanese Java
By: Dieuwke Wendelaar Bonga.
Series: Monographs in international studies.; no. 98
Publisher: Ohio University Center for International Studies
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Athens
Language: eng
Number of pages: 219
Subjects: Bonga, Dieuwke Wendelaar; World War, 1939-1945 -- Concentration camps -- Indonesia -- Java; World War, 1939-1945 -- Prisoners and prisons, Japanese; Prisoners of war -- Indonesia -- Java -- Biography; Indonesia -- History -- Japanese occupation, 1942-1945 -- Personal narratives, Dutch
Description: Eldest daughter of eight children, the author grew up in Surakarta, Java, in what is now Indonesia. In the months following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, however, Dutch nationals were rounded up by Japanese soldiers and put in internment camps. Her father and brother were sent to separate men's camps, leaving the author, her mother, and the five younger children in the women's camp.

In this and later seven other prison camps in central Java, their lives gradually deteriorated from early days of fear and crowding to near starvation, forced labor, beatings, and seeing others disappear or die. On the family's return to Holland after the war, they found a nation recovering from German occupation and largely ignorant of the horror of the Far East experience.