THE FLAMBOYA TREE

A new voice sings an earnest but commonplace paean to her mother, whose grit and imagination helped her three young children survive nearly four years of imprisonment during the Japanese occupation of Java in WWII.

Kelly, whose parents were Dutch, was only four years old when the Japanese invaded Java and began rounding up able-bodied men, her father among them, to build the Burma Road and forcing women and children into squalid camps. After an introduction that is a museum of clichés—her experiences, Kelly says, were like a “horrendous nightmare”—she offers a snapshot of the family in 1946: The war is over, and they have arrived back in Holland virtually penniless but with one dear possession they managed to retain—a painting of a flamboya tree. She then returns to 1942 and her Javanese life before the invasion. Her father inherited his own father’s spice company, and the family enjoyed the easy quasi-colonial life of private swimming clubs, exotic food, and cheap servants. Throughout, Kelly seems blithely unaware of the moral algebra of her situation. Was the Japanese displacement of the Dutch so much different from the Dutch displacement of the Javanese? Kelly sees few if any connections. Instead, she notes without irony, “Our wonderful servants stood ever ready with their kindly faces to indulge our whims.” Soon enough, her father is taken away and the family is arrested and confined to a round of near-starvation, endless roll calls in intense heat, physical abuse by guards, and odious physical labor. Kelly recalls the children’s terrorizing by a guard’s fierce pet monkey, brutal fights among the prisoners, and a Christmas chorus of “Silent Night.” Eventually, the family returns to Holland and an oddly cold grandmother who cannot understand why they didn’t just escape. Kelly still has the painting of the tree.

Dutiful but dim. (b&w photographs throughout)