I Remember the Time: A Dutch Boy in a Japanese Concentration Camp

In World War II the Japanese imprisoned 100,000 Dutch women and children and 40,000 Dutch men in concentration camps in Indonesia. This first-person story recalls the experience of one family. The father, mother, seven-year-old boy and three-year-old girl entered the camps in 1942. Men and boys 12 and older went one way, women and children another, not knowing if they would see each other again.

You’ll see it unfold through the eyes of the seven-year-old boy. What skills got people through? Did the children go to school? What one subject did everyone want to talk about? What kind of world did the women and children create behind the barbed wire? Why was the dump a place of opportunity?

Imagine it was you. What would you do? And what happened when the war was over?