The chance discovery of a secret cache of letters rekindled Marijcke Jongbloed’s lifelong fascination with the circumstances of her birth and her parent’s wartime experiences. The letters were written by her father and smuggled through Japanese controls to her mother in a different internment camp in Indonesia. Sixty-five years later they form the basis of a fascinating insight into survival under the often cruel conditions of an ignored part of the Second World War.

The Dutch in Indonesia were resented almost as much as the Japanese conquerors, and their lifestyle before the occupation was typically colonial, so this is very much a story of the privileged brought low, and there is an undertow to the book that in some ways this was only what they deserved, although the author offers somewhat of a counter-apology as one might expect. Whilst very much a family-oriented story of birth, life and survival, the extra research that has been carried out gives a convincing picture of what life was actually like in the camps on a day-to-day basis and there are a number of surprises along the way, not least concerning the morality and approach of the Japanese themselves.

All in all this is a book which you may read in one sitting but which will carry messages which will stay with you, and is a deserved addition to our History collection.