Suffering and Survival: The Experience of Dutch Women in Japanese Internment Camps in Java, 1941–45

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The case of Dutch women imprisoned in Japanese internment camps in Java, 1941-45, is a little known chapter within the well-known context of the Second World War. This article deciphers the possibilities of their experience by examining two temporally distinct sets of sources from the women's perspectives. The first comprises a series of ego-documents and interviews written during the war and just after it, and the second is a collection of sources from the 1990s onwards, in the form of memoir, oral history, and children's testimonies spoken in front of the Japanese Embassy in The Hague in 2005. In the spaces and inconsistencies between these two sets of testimony a diverse and complex picture of female experience is found across three predominant themes: motherhood, female community, and sexual assault. Each section is an insight into how agency is sought when agency is denied, how the women held themselves, organized themselves, and supported and fought against one another within a regime indifferent to whether they lived or died.