Book description
"Why didn't you try to escape?" That was all she said. I
had imagined my grandmother telling us how lovely it was to see us at
last. I saw again in my mind's eye the barbed wire fences and the
soldiers with the glistening bayonets, and felt once more that
excruciating fear in the pit of my stomach. Try to escape? Lots of
people had tried to escape.
When the Japanese invaded the beautiful Indonesian island of Java
during the Second World War Clara Kelly was four years old. Her family
was separated, her father sent to work on the Burma railway, and she
together with her mother and her two brothers, one a six-week-old
baby, was sent to a 'women's camp'. They were interned there until the
end of the war. Clara's descriptions of the appalling deprivations and
impersonal brutality of the camp, easily recognisable as the same
techniques used in the infamously cruel Japanes prisoner of war camps
- standing in the baking heat for hours of 'Tenko' role-call, living
on one cup of rice a day - are countered by the courage and resilience
shown by all the internees, most poignantly her own mother.
Clara Olink Kelly
now lives in Bellingham, Washington with her husband. She spends much
of her time with her children and grandchildren.
The Flamboya Tree
is her first book.
