Bowing to the Emperor

Editora:

Apple Rock Publishing

Código:

491_9780996411905

Vendido e entregue por Um Livro

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More than 10,000 women and children. That’s how many civilian prisoners of the Japanese were packed into Tjideng, reportedly the worst Japanese concentration camp in Java during World War II. Among these 10,000 mostly Dutch women and children were Hungarian-born Klara and her three young daughters. Meanwhile Klara’s Dutch husband, Wim, a captain in the Royal Dutch Air Force, was among the 1500 military men crammed into a hell ship and transported to Japan as a slave laborer. "Bowing to the Emperor: We Were Captives in WWII," a memoir/biography penned by Klara and daughter Robine, chronicles the Andrau family’s experience during those dark years in the then-Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and in Japan. The story reveals the fierce determination and ingenuity of a mother and the strength and leadership of a father when faced with starvation, brutality, and unspeakable living conditions.Klara’s part of the story details what she did to keep the couple’s three children and herself alive and well in body and mind, both during the Japanese occupation in 1942 and during the children’s and her subsequent internment. Left with no income after Wim was taken away, Klara scraped along by giving language lessons, teaching the three R’s to classes of children, and making and selling jams. Later, when interned in camp, she supplemented their daily diet of a handful of rice, a little piece of gummy bread, and a few leaves of a spinach-like plant by digging up the packed earth and planting some leafy vegetables, which she fertilized with night soil. She also pawed through the camp kitchen garbage looking for anything edible and knitted socks for the Japanese to earn some sweets for her children. She kept the wonder of Christmas alive one year by stealthily evading the patrolling Japanese guard in the predawn darkness, climbing a fir tree next to the barbed wire and bamboo camp fence, and sawing off the tree’s top with a t

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