Fifty Years Of Silence

How can you tell your daughters? Your grandchildren? I mean, the shame, the shame was still so great. I knew I had to tell them but I couldn`t tell them face to face… So I decided to write it down. Jan RuffO`Herne`s idyllic childhood in Dutch colonial Indonesia ended when the Japanese invaded Java in 1942. She was interned in Ambarawa Prison Camp along with her mother and two younger sisters. In February 1944, when Jan was just twentyone, she was taken from the camp and forced into sexual slavery in a brothel for the Japanese military, where she was repeatedly beaten and raped for a period of there months. She was then returned to prison camp with threats that her family would be killed if she revealed the truth about the atrocities inflicted upon her.