The Flamboya Tree
Memories of a Family's War Time Courage
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4.8 • 5 Ratings
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As the Japanese Empire drew closer and closer to Indonesia during WWII, the four-year-old Kelly, part of a wealthy Dutch colonial family, found her world of servants, of strict and proper manners, of trips with her father to the rubber factory and exotic spice warehouse was about to come crashing down. Neighbors boarded up their houses and departed; a few weeks after her mother gave birth, the Japanese came with a truck, separating Kelly, her mother and her siblings from her father. Kelly's childhood impressions show us her mother's determined struggle to bring the family through the harsh conditions of a Japanese interment camp. One of the mother's many acts of care is to carry along the family's painting of a flamboya tree as they leave their house, and to put it up in their various places of internment. The camp is constantly crowded, and rife with food shortages, cruel guards and little cooperation between any of the detainees. Many people die of starvation, malnutrition, disease or maltreatment. Parallels between the conditions in the camps and the terrible conditions of the Javanese, with whom the prisoners trade, are not drawn. Still, Kelly, now a grandmother, has produced an affecting account of wartime deprivation, which ends up taking a serious toll on her parents' relationship when the family, eventually, is reunited in Holland. The painting now hangs Kelly's Bellingham, Wash., home. (On Sale Apr. 9)
