A Ohio University Press Book
“Bonga’s writing style is simple and direct and her living tesitmony is uncomplicated by academic jargon, which vastly increases its power. Although brief, her account succeeds marvelously in communicating the emotional and physical trauma that she as a teenage woman and her family went through. … This is not just a good book about Indonesia or Southeast Asia or World War II, it is just a good book.”
Paul A. Rodell, Georgia Southern University, Journal of Third World Studies
“Dieuwke Wendelaar Bonga’s memoir is important as the testimony of the survivor: it shows us how war is directed against women and children, and it tells the end of Dutch history in Indonesia.”
Jean Gelman Taylor, University of New South Wales, The Journal of Asian Studies
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.
Dieuwke Wendelaar Bonga, who immigrated to Canada in 1952, is a member of the August 15, 1945 Foundation, an organization of survivors of the Japanese prisoner of war camps. Now retired from public service in Ontario, she has written this candid personal account of her experience in the internment camps of Japanese–occupied Java. More info →
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Research in International Studies, Southeast Asia Series, № 98
Paperback
978-0-89680-191-2
Retail price: $32.95,
S.
Release date: May 1996
22 illus.
·
219 pages
·
5½ × 8½ in.
Rights: World
Electronic
978-0-89680-400-5
Release date: May 1996
22 illus.
·
219 pages
Rights: World
Realizing the Dream of R. A. Kartini
Her Sisters’ Letters from Colonial Java
Edited by Joost J. Coté
Realizing the Dream of R. A. Kartini: Her Sisters’ Letters from Colonial Java presents a unique collection of documents reflecting the lives, attitudes, and politics of four Javanese women in the early twentieth century. Joost J. Coté translates the correspondence between Raden Ajeng Kartini, Indonesia’s first feminist, and her sisters, revealing for the first time her sisters’ contributions in defining and carrying out her ideals.
History · Java · Indonesia · Southeastern Asia · Asia · Southeast Asian Studies
Camp Life Is Paradise for Freddy
A Childhood in the Dutch East Indies, 1933–1946
By Fred Lanzing
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Translation by Marjolijn de Jager
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Introduction by William H. Frederick
In this lyrical but controversial memoir of his childhood in a Japanese internment camp for Dutch colonialists during World War II, Lanzing enlivens ongoing discussions of the politics of memory and the powerful—if contentious—contributions that subjective accounts make to historiography and the legacies of the past.
Memoir · World War II · Southeast Asian History · History | Modern | 20th Century · Southeastern Asia · Indonesia · Southeast Asian Studies
Silenced Voices
Uncovering a Family’s Colonial History in Indonesia
By Inez Hollander
Like a number of Netherlanders in the post–World War II era, Inez Hollander only gradually became aware of her family’s connections with its Dutch colonial past, including a Creole great-grandmother. For the most part, such personal stories have been, if not entirely silenced, at least only whispered about in Holland, where society has remained uncomfortable with many aspects of the country’s relationship with its colonial empire.Unlike
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