Fifty Years of Silence

The extraordinary memoir of a war rape survivor. 'How can you tell your daughters, you know? 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 Ruff O'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 twenty-one years old,