LOST CHILDHOOD

When Japan invaded the Dutch East Indies in 1942, four-year-old Annelex’s comfortable colonial world turned upside down. With her pilot father away at war, her family was among 300,000 Europeans and Eurasians interned for years in Japanese prison camps. Separated from her brother, Annelex, her mother and grandmother endured harsh punishment and near-starvation before the camps were liberated in 1945 and the family joyfully reunited. However, the Indonesian war of independence against 300 years of Dutch colonial rule soon dashed their hopes of returning to the life they knew. In spare, unsentimental language, the author lets events speak for themselves, focusing on details that matter to children: of fear, hunger, boredom and the devastating discovery that adults are helpless to protect them. The result is a powerfully concentrated portrayal of war’s brutalities seen through a child’s eyes. Like Yoshiko Uchida’s The Invisible Thread (1991), this memoir is an outstanding contribution to children’s literature about World War II, illustrating the astonishing ability of human beings to survive and overcome years of displacement, internment and exile. (Memoir. 10 & up)