An unflinching account of one family’s fight to survive Japanese occupation during World War II.

Herman de Jong, a Dutch immigrant to the United States, chronicles how she; her mother, Netty; and her younger sister, Paula, survived imprisonment by Japanese forces on the Indonesian island of Java. Using her deceased mother’s diary entries about the war, the author recreates her wartime childhood. Before the war reached the island, the author’s father, Fokko Herman, was a pilot with the Dutch naval air force. Netty, a homemaker, made sure that the children had birthday parties and visits from St. Nicholas, despite growing global tensions. There were daily air raid drills, then bombings. When Japanese forces occupied Java in 1942, Fokko was forced to go to war and leave his family behind. Netty, Paula, and the author faced illnesses, monsoons, and other difficulties while interned by the Japanese. In 1944, they were transferred to a particularly brutal camp, and Netty’s recollections describe scenes of suffering: Prisoners lived on strict portions of rice, slept in crowded barracks, and often died from malnutrition, edema, or torture. The account of Netty’s fight to keep herself and her children alive is intercut with Fokko’s desperate search for his family members. Overall, Herman de Jong delivers a shocking story of sacrifice, brutality, and faith in these pages. Her writing, alongside Netty’s diary entries, is consistently strong over the course of the book, although some of the later chapters begin to feel overlong. Even so, readers will cheer when the family is reunited at the end of the war, and they’ll admire Netty, an ordinary woman who refused to give up in the face of cruelty. Along with family snapshots, Herman de Jong includes photos and other documentation of the Java camps, which are educational and sobering.

An eye-opening remembrance that focuses on a courageous mother and her children.