Tjideng Reunion: A Memoir of World War II on Java

Overview

When World War II breaks out in Europe and the Nazis occupy their homeland, two Dutch families living in South Africa move to the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia) to contribute to the defence of the colony. But two years later, they are caught up in the Pacific war, when the Japanese occupy Java, and the two men become prisoners of war. The story follows the two women, a child and a grandmother through almost four years of increasingly hellish internment in Bandoeng and Batavia. The young women have no idea of the fate of their husbands. Miraculously, both families survive and are reunited, returning to South Africa as refugeesaonly to find that their bitter experience on Java is to give them new insight into the developments in that country. Tjideng Reunion is told against the backdrop of the dramatic political and military events that unfolded around the two families and changed the course of their lives.