Eight Prison Camps: A Dutch Family in Japanese Java (Volume 98) (Ohio RIS Southeast Asia Series) Paperback – May 15, 1996

Enjoyed this book as it echoed my own fathers experiences in a concentration camp in Java. Thoughtfully described a young girls perspective surviving multiple camps over three and a half years.

True story. I was in 6 of those camps myself.Some descriptions I disagree with, ( i.e. rooms were barracks) I was in Malang, Solo, Moentilan myself and was part of the outside stone quarry at age 13, Ambarawa, and Banjubiru.After the war we were transported on a troop ship called the" Boissevan" to Holland.This book is well worth reading although it does not really describe the horrors we went through.

Very interesting book which sheds light on a subject that has been forgotten.

This book very much told the story of my family in Indonesia at that time

In my opinion, this type of memoir is essential if we are to learn from the past. This generation is aging now and I have great concern that these experiences will be lost to the ages, particularly as the current government and prime minister in Japan are eliminating all mention of these and other atrocities they committed in the war from their text books and education system. Please read this and other memoirs and make sure these events are not forgotten in the same way we do not forget the Holocaust.Mrs Bonga's book is well organized and easy to follow the sequence of events that her family experienced. She was urged by her adult children to write this book, and is a member of the August 15th group seeking acknowledgment and reparations. Thank you for writing this book and all the best to you and your family Dieuwke Wendelaar Bonga!

I am a surviving prisoncamp child myself, and would like to be able to get a copy of this book. Started my own autobiography, but need some help with names of camps, and dates. I was there with my mother, brother and 2 sisters, while my father was a prisoner of war and taken to Singapore. We all survived. So please help. Thank you

Very accurate. My Mom's and Dad's familys went through the same things.

I have found it to be an easy, interesting, moving, and often profoundly irritating book to read. On the one hand, I am delighted that Dieuwke Wendelaar Bonga, also called Joke for short, wrote her war memoir. On the other hand, I wish she had researched some of her stuff better, used the correct tense, (if that is the right term), and had been a bit more honest in her description of what happened.The first thing that hit me is a "here we go again" with what is often a profoundly Christian religious book that fails to mention the fact that the Dutch en masse turned the occult in the camps of the Dutch East Indies ... and this from woman aged around 20 at the time she was a prisoner of the Japanese. That as a two year old you miss it is one thing. That as a twenty year old you miss it smacks of profound dishonesty.On page 64 the author writes "What bothered everyone the most was that we did not hear a thing about the war ..." On page 87 it is "When would it end?" These questions, and others like it, were "answered" by camp astrologers. Playing with Ouija Boards and running séances was commonplace in the camps, particularly, though not at all exclusively, the women's camps. There were two ways the author could have gone: (i) Yes, it took place and it was abysmal, (the attitude taken in De Hel van Tjideng by Elise Lengkeek, and also by the author of a diary of a POW who worked on the Burma Railway in the book Birma-Siam Spoorlijn by Heijmans-van Bruggen). (ii) Yes, it took place and so what? Thank you for entertaining us. This is the attitude taken in Mijn Kamp. Niet door Hitler maar door M G Hartley.As relatives of mine who were in the camps have confirmed, the occult was a major part of camp life in the Dutch East Indies. It follows that to not mention it at all is at best irritating, and, at worst, quite frankly, dishonest.That the Dutch in the Far East were often critical of the British, and sometimes disliked the British a lot, came as a surprise to me when I first realised it, but it was reciprocal. The British often had an anti-Dutch attitude. At the same time, this book was written in 1996. The author could have researched her history and medicine just a bit better ... and, if not skipped the anti-British sentiments, certainly explained them better.That there were anti-British sentiments expressed by the Dutch in the Far East is an historical fact, and Dieuwke Wendelaar Bonga is entirely right to mention it, but two things: Firstly, she has to mention them more fully, and, secondly, put them into context.On page 155 the author writes "The British, who had been put in charge of South East Asia by the Allied forces, had come six weeks too late. Besides, they had not allowed the Dutch volunteers to move on the main islands. That was quite a revelation for us. Had they come sooner, then the extremists would not have had time to plan and attack the women's camps and many lives would have been saved!"On page 166 the author writes "Holland had been liberated in May 1945, and now it was early December 1945. ... On arrival in Singapore the British had very diplomatically and politely refused to send these troops to the main islands of the Netherlands East Indies. The result had been that the liberation of the POW camps was delayed until after 15 August 1945. "Why?" we asked. Had there not been enough suffering?" The proof-reading on that paragraph is abysmal. We get the picture, but in the book it is even worse.The date of 15 August 1945 is when Japan surrendered. There is no way, of course, that the Allies in general, let alone the Dutch, could have turned up on that island prior to that date, so, yes, liberation had to take place afterwards. The rhetorical question that is being asked is whether the Dutch could have turned up earlier than they in the end did on Java if it hadn't been for the British stopping them, and if that would not have curtailed / ameliorated the suffering of Dutch internees. The author is making a statement of fact that is actually incorrect, and asking a question to which she thinks she knows the answer, but to which historians might profoundly disagree with.Whilst it is interesting to know that there was a significant amount of anti-British sentiment, (and it isn't limited to the late arrival of British troops to Java in 1945, but also includes criticism of the British effort in Malaya and Singapore in 1942, plus disappointment that Java itself wasn't better defended in 1942 ... by the British), this book is from 1996. A little bit of research by Dieuwke Wendelaar Bonga would have told her that it was MacArthur who ordered all Allied troop movements in South East Asia to stop pending the signing of the surrender in Tokyo Bay because he was worried that the Japanese in the Southern Region might fight unless and until it was 100% clear that Japan had surrendered.A bit more research by Dieuwke Wendelaar Bonga would have told her that the Republic was up and running by the time the Allies arrived in Java. Maybe not 100%, but enough to be in control of public utilities and, crucially, such armed forces as there were on the island. What would have happened if ill-trained, ill-equipped, and often just simply ill ex-POW Dutch troops really had tried to land on Java and reimpose Dutch rule is a matter of conjecture, because, as Dieuwke Wendelaar Bonga correctly points out the British stopped it from happening, but when an attempt was made a Soerabaja there was an uprising that cost a lot of lives, including as the author herself notes, those of Dutch internees, so a more thoughtful writer could reasonably have concluded that the Dutch lacked the means to reimpose their rule, and that had they tried the principal victims would almost certainly have been Dutch internees.An excellent book on the topic is Troubled Days of Peace by Peter Dennis, although there are plenty of Dutch and English language books on what happened in the Dutch East Indies at that crucial time. They all come to more or less the same conclusion. The Dutch had nothing in theatre on 15 August 1945 that could be called an army, let alone a navy, and the British were stretched to breaking point. If at first the British thought it was about repatriating Japanese Surrendered Personnel and Recovery of Allied Prisoners of War & Internees, with the Dutch civil authorities taking up where they had left off in 1942, it soon became clear that the Republic was up and running. The British Officer Commanding, General Christison, came to the conclusion that agreements had to be made with the Republic if the internees were going to be recovered safely. On what I have read, I think that he was right. The internees were hostages. Negotiating their release was, I think, the least worst option.Once back in Holland on page 201 the whole family went down with scabies. According to Dieuwke Wendelaar Bonga they had contracted it from the grey ships blankets on board the [British troopship] Alcantara, saying that these blankets were never cleaned. The incubation period for scabies is 2 to 6 weeks. The family travelled from Singapore to Southampton without any sign of scabies. They then went on a Dutch ship from Southampton to Amsterdam, and then had been a few weeks in Holland when the outbreak of scabies occurred. So whilst it is possible that it was the blankets on the Alcantara, the more likely source would be the blankets on either the Dutch ship that took the family to Holland, or, once in Holland, it was the blankets at one of the places they stayed at.In fact, the whole book is full of how good the Dutch are. The Dutch were wonderful colonists. The Dutch had courage. There isn't a word of criticism of the Dutch. Dieuwke Wendelaar Bonga should have read a Dutch history book or two just to get a more balanced picture.On page 202 Dieuwke Wendelaar Bonga complains that the family had been sarcastically called "The Wise Ones from the East" by the Dutch inhabitants of the town in the north of The Netherlands were they were staying. I, personally, think that the sarcasm was entirely justified. The Wise Ones from the East had indeed lacked all wisdom, from what I can tell, and, even by 1996, still lacked it. For someone with strong Christian beliefs to be able to write in 1996 that she "sincerely hopes that whoever reads her story may learn that hate destroys, that wars should not be fought, [and that] they should be prevented" clearly has learnt nothing from her experiences in the Far East in the period 1942-45.There will always be wars, and sometimes it is right to fight them with all ones might. The Japanese of World War II had to be beaten. Dutch parsimony and Dutch pacifism in the interwar years had left the Dutch East Indies ill-prepared for an onslaught that just about every thinking person knew was coming. World War II was never going to be prevented. It had to be fought and won, which, fortunately, it was.This book is worth three stars, tops. More realistically it is probably just two stars, and maybe even only one star. It is worth reading if reading a lot around the topic, but as a stand alone book on the topic of what happened in the interment camps in the Dutch East Indies during World War II a reader would get a hopelessly biased and monumentally incomplete account of what happened on Java in 1942-45.It is my opinion that the Dutch language war memoirs and diaries are much more honest than the ones written in English, almost as if the Dutch writing in English are wanting to be super patriotic, when, sadly, at least to me they come across as simply lacking in wisdom.