A very personal story sheds light on an extraordinary point in our recent history. I found the human setting Jongbloed portrays brings the historical aspects hot and close, so close that I could really smell the reality in them and traces which explain where we are today. As a sweet and joyous baby, whose first world was a Japanese concentration camp in Indonesia, the baby Marijcke certainly saved the sanity of her parents, interned in separate camps and only able to communicate through infrequent letters smuggled in by locals. Jongbloed extends her own family memories with other sources,...

The chance discovery of a cache of letters rekindled Marijcke Jongbloed's lifelong fascination with the circumstances of her birth and her parents' wartime experiences in the Far East. The letters were written in captivity by her father and smuggled through Japanese controls to her mother in a different internment camp in Indonesia. Sixty-five years later, they form the basis of a fascinating and moving insight into survival under the cruel conditions of a distant and frequently ignored part of the Second World War. The author has had a varied career as a medical doctor, writer, amateur...