Gon and Eddie soon met and befriended another young couple, Arie van Empel, a lawyer, and his wife, Lennie.
Holland was quickly overrun by the Nazis. But the tiny Dutch community clung to their luxurious way of life on Java, uncertain of the future. But ice still tinkled in the gin glasses.
One house included two houseboys, two laundry maids, a cook, two gardeners, a chauffeur and a tutor for the children.
“The island was a paradise of lush vegetation, everything grew in abundance,” wrote Gon.
“In the evenings, while we played bridge, we would look out from Old Tjandi across Sompok and see the lights of the harbour. Behind us, even farther up the mountainside, we could see the beautiful holiday resort of Kopeng. Such was the prelude to my life, a blissful youth and a blossoming two years of marriage . . .”
But then, on December 8, 1941, the Dutch national anthem was played on radios across Java. The Japanese had bombed the American air-base at Pearl Harbour. The small Dutch fleet in the area was mobilised. War had come to Paradise. Eddie and Arie and the other Dutchmen left home to prepare the defence of the Dutch East Indies.
Lennie kept a diary of those days, which she would continue in the most hazardous circumstances, after being taken prisoner by the Japanese.
Lennie and Gon both became mothers on Java. Lennie and Arie had Martijn. Gon and Eddie had Romee, who is now sitting in the lovely garden in Gayton, Wirral, reading her mother’s memoirs.
These have been combined with Lennie’s diary into a book, which has just come out in an English language edition.
Japan enjoyed dramatic early successes in the war. The British colony of Singapore fell in February, 1942, and Java quickly followed.
Gon would never see her husband again. Both men had joined the Dutch equivalent of our Territorial Army in resisting the Japanese. Arie survived captivity.
For a while, life continued almost as before on the island. Gon gave birth to her second child, Romee’s little sister, Ies, that July. But the Japanese grip was tightening.
At the end of the year, the Dutch women and children were packed into the third-class compartments of a train to begin the journey to the Lampersari camp, Semarang.
The Japanese showed their contempt for the “soft” European women. The good looking ones were separated from the main group and used as prostitutes. Food was scarce, beatings frequent. The death count mounted.
One night, the crying from a sickly baby kept everyone awake for hours. The next morning they were woken by a scream. The mother had found her little boy lying dead beside her.
Such entries in the diary are mixed with observations that you would expect from any proud young woman.
The personal and the profound scribbled by stubby pencils on paper, hidden from the guards. Baby walking, baby’s first tooth, the weather.
“Martijn has chickenpox . . . Mussolini has resigned . . . We had a delicious meal today! Chicken ragout and soup. Ens’s dachshund had caught a chicken which strayed from the kampong. The plucking and cleaning was an unpleasant job, but it was well worth the effort.”
Families had, rather surprisingly, been allowed to keep their pets. However, these were often caught and eaten by other prisoners or visitors from other camps, much to the grief of their owners.
Snails were popped in the pot. “Tasteless bits of chewing gum, though they did fill your stomach,” wrote Gon.
Romee had been born in June, 1941, followed by her sister Ies 13 months later. What helped the mothers and children to survive? “Lots of love,” says Romee. “My mother had a fantastic family life which had made her strong.”
Lennie kept her diary throughout this period, but Gon’s memoirs were written many years later, as Romee explains. “She had gone on a course to learn to write never thinking of the camp, but she realised that she could never write fiction. Then she thought, ‘what I do know was the camp life and my memories’.”
Lennie and Gon remained friends after the war. So the diary and memoirs were published in Holland in 1981.
Romee’s own memories are faint, though she knows she was little more than skin and bones by the end.
Did she remember the Japanese?
“Once I was offered an egg through the bars when I was outside the camp collecting something,” she says.
“I didn’t take it. Can you imagine that? I just ran back in because I was so scared of them, having seen what they were doing, and I knew I was not supposed to be outside at that time.
“But I suppose I had just gone out there for some peace and quiet. Can you imagine what the tiny house (hut) was like with 40 people in it?
“I remember on the ship when we were going home, there were all these fabulously friendly people, Englishmen,” she says. “We would go out and say ‘good morning’ and they would give us chocolate and we shot back from the corridor to the cabin to eat it.”
“I have no memories of my father,” says Romee, “but at least I know he held me in his arms. Ies had nothing.”
Ies now lives in Amsterdam with her husband, Neil Walker, a retired advertising executive, with whom she had two children – one of whom, Nick, translated the memoirs and diary into English.
Lennie and Arie also lived in Amsterdam with Martijn. They had three more children. Lennie became a kind and sympathetic teacher. She died in 1999, eight years after her husband.
Gon married Toni Kunzli, a widower, with whom she had another three children. They divorced in 1972, by which time she was an established book translator, using her maiden name of Gon Bossevain. She died in 1997.
Romee is married to David Hindle, a retired timber importer and merchant. They met on a skiing holiday in the Alps in 1965, and married the following year.
They had two children, Mia and Richard. Now Romee loves golf, her father’s favourite game. It is a good life, but her childhood in the PoW camp is still important to her.
“It is good for the younger generation, who have got everything, to read these stories,” says Romee.
“It will make them think, ‘My goodness, look what we have got’.”
