Film of Dutch woman surviving Japanese POW camp

On December 27, 1942, the first Japanese POW camp for women in Ambarawa went into use. From the article:

"Film of Dutch woman surviving Japanese POW camp

Women standing behind bars in a concentration camp in Indonesia in 1945.

As a child growing up Thomas Watson knew that his grandmother had survived the horrors of a prisoner-of-war camp. But like so many others who suffered in the Second World War, she never spoke about it.

The ordeal of Yvonne Watson (nee Holman) was largely shrouded in mystery.

Mrs Watson spent four years as a captive with thousands of other Dutch civilians who were incarcerated when Indonesia fell to Japan in 1942.

"I'd known that she had survived a Japanese-run concentration camp in Indonesia, which was then the Dutch East Indies, and that her experience was incredibly violent," Mr Watson said.

He knew little else, but carried his curiosity into adulthood.

After his grandmother's death in 2013, Mr Watson teamed up with filmmaker Jean-Baptiste Breliere to make a feature-length documentary about Mrs Watson's experiences titled The World Ended on Mango Street.

"My grandmother was imprisoned in a small hut with around about 15 other women in Mango Street Number 7," Mr Watson said.

"Her whole life as she knew it in Indonesia completely ended on Mango Street — that's where the title comes from."

Production of the film has sent Mr Watson on an emotional quest to discover the truth about his courageous grandmother who survived the starvation and disease of the camp, living to be 92.

When the Japanese invaded the Dutch East Indies in 1942, the young Yvonne Holman was studying to become a lawyer.

The Australian War Memorial estimates that some 130,000 allied civilians were interned by the Japanese during their occupation of the Dutch East Indies, including American, British and Australian civilians.

Mr Watson believed most evidence of what went on in the camps had been destroyed.

"A lot of the buildings have been destroyed and a lot of the first-hand witnesses have either died or disappeared," he said.

However, he does have the first-hand account of his great uncle, Robert Holman, who was a 10-year-old boy when he was separated from his mother and imprisoned in a boys' camp in Semarang.

He too features in the film.

He is now 87 and living in the Netherlands where the filmmakers met him.

"Basically, it was a method of slow extermination by starving 12-year-old boys, and a process of complete humiliation," Mr Watson said.

"He said there were regular beatings, starvation, even a lot of betrayal between the boys, not through any malice but simply because people were so desperate; they had to think of nothing but themselves."

"I can't tell you how heartbreaking it is because it is my great uncle.

Not only did Yvonne Watson survive, she succeeded in burying her trauma deep enough to begin a new life in Australia.

Getting to Australia, falling in love
At the end of WWII, Mrs Watson was transported on a Red Cross hospital ship to Sorrento, Victoria.

"She was there for around about two months recovering," Mr Watson said.

"She was walking down the stairs of a hotel and there was a very handsome RAAF pilot walking up the stairs.

"They locked eyes and later danced at a ball. They fell in love. And he became my grandfather."

When she had to leave Australia and move to Holland, Yvonne's new love-interest joined the merchant navy to follow her.

Eventually they married and immigrated to Australia.

Mrs Watson's family describe her life as two halves that don't make a pair: the first half clothed in mystery and impossible to understand, while the other half is ordinary and familiar.

'My grandmother's story is not unique in the sense that she's not the only one that it happened to, but it's a way of talking about the experience of thousands of people whose story hasn't been told and whose secret suffering went unnoticed for 70 years.'"