This was a memoir about a woman and her toddler who spent three years in a Japanese prison camp in Borneo in WWII. As you can imagine, it was not too good a time.
The part that really blew my mind was that everyone knew the Japanese were coming, and she had multiple opportunities to get out (e.g., the wonderfully poetic ‘last boat to Singapore’). She declined because she did not want to leave her husband. DAMN.
She is extremely, extremely hungry, so much so that she has to avoid watching her son eat so she will not steal from him. When she is finally freed, she is so malnourished her sight is affected, and she cannot read. She only cries twice: once, when they are interned, and then once again, when the Australian army drop flyers on the camp to say that Japan has surrendered. This was already rumoured, and so the Japanese prison guards had suddenly been treating them very well, including inviting them to a – get this – farwell banquet?!? This reminded me of COLD CREMATORIUM, another story about someone who made it to the last day of the war in a camp, and lived to see the prison guards start to worry about consequences.
The reason they had already heard about the surrender was that the British soldiers had managed to create a radio. It took them one month to make the radio, but three months to make the tools to make it. It is completely from scratch from various bits of waste metal, and one elderly civilian’s hearing aids. GodDAMN people in the 1940s knew how to do things! It ran on a hand cranked generator, and the strongest man was given extra food so he could crank it.
I think the most horrifying part was the section where the womens’ camp is moved on, and they believe the men, who are left behind, will be executed. The wives and husbands are allowed to speak to each other across a ditch. She thinks this is the last time she will ever see her husband. When the Australians finally arrive, and she is given paper to write home, she writes this:
“We are all alive. George thin, but well. The day we have lived for has come at last. There are no words to tell you what this means to us. I have no words to say what I feel. Peace and freedom at last. Thank god.”
Imagine the state you have to be in, that the first thing you right is, ‘We are all alive.” It was the first news her family had had of her since the beginning of the war.