Ronny Herman de Jong
A Legacy of Survival, Storytelling, and Remembrance
Ronny Herman de Jong’s life has been shaped by a remarkable act of inheritance: the discovery, preservation, and telling of a story that might otherwise have disappeared. Her work as an author and oral historian grew from her own childhood during World War II and, decades later, from the unexpected discovery of the secret diary her mother had kept while imprisoned with her children in Japanese civilian concentration camps in the former Dutch East Indies.
Ronny was born into a young Dutch family whose ordinary life was overtaken by war. Her father, Fokko, served as a pilot with the Dutch Naval Air Force and had been stationed in the Dutch East Indies. That is where he and Ronny’s mother, Jeannette – known to the family as Netty -, married in the Netherlands, began their family. Their daughters, Ronny and later Paula, were born into a world that would soon be transformed by the Japanese occupation.
During the occupation, Netty and her daughters endured the hardships of a concentration camp: severe punishments, hunger, tropical diseases, no medications. Paper and pencil were forbidden, yet Netty secretly continued writing what were essentially letters to her parents in the Netherlands. Those pages became a diary: an intimate record of a young mother trying to protect her children and preserve her humanity while separated from her husband and from the family she had left in Europe.
Ronny herself did not know the diary existed. In 1985, while Ronny and her family were living in Pasadena, California, her parents came to visit and Netty brought it with her. For Ronny, reading those pages was transformative. She suddenly encountered the war not only through the fragmented memories of a child, but through the adult voice of her mother: This is my lifetime story. I have to do something with it.
With a degree in English literature, Ronny began translating the Dutch diary into English. She worked at the computer her son Dennis had received for school, gradually turning the handwritten record into a substantial English manuscript. She had it professionally edited and found a literary agent in Beverly Hills, who submitted it to major publishers on the East Coast.
The response was both encouraging and revealing. Publishers recognized the story as poignant, but suggested that it needed more sex and violence to become commercially saleable. Ronny could not turn her mother’s testimony into something it was not.
The Encounter That Changed the Book’s Future
After the family moved to Hawaii, an extraordinary connection changed the manuscript’s future. Ronny met Eric Hazelhoff Roelfzema, the celebrated Dutch resistance figure and war hero. She asked him, partly in frustration, how she could possibly add the sensational elements publishers had requested. After reading the manuscript, his answer affirmed the principle that would guide Ronny’s work: this was a historical document. Its truth should not be altered for effect.
Hazelhoff Roelfzema connected Ronny with his friend Albert van der Heide in Canada. Although publishing a book was a new undertaking for him, he believed strongly enough in the manuscript to bring it into print. Working with an editor, Ronny shaped the final text of the book while protecting the integrity of Netty’s voice. In 1992, In the Shadow of the Sun was published. Ronny’s husband, Mike, gave the project its identity, including the title and the design of its original cover.
That spring, Mike and Ronny traveled to the Netherlands for the 55th anniversary of Ronny’s parents with a suitcase containing the first 100 copies. Her parents were moved to tears. The book was, after all, their story as much as hers, and so they became enthusiastic distributors of it in the Netherlands.
From Family Memory to Historical Record
Publication did not end Ronny’s work. It expanded it. She learned of Japanese war-crimes records, the NARA files, declassified in the year 2000, and recognized another part of the history that she believed deserved a wider audience. She researched the records and began another book. Once again, Netty’s diary formed the emotional and historical foundation. Ronny then carried the family story beyond liberation, describing their return to Surabaya, the attempt to resume school and family life, and the complicated aftermath of war. She incorporated documentary material from the Japanese war-crimes files to place the family’s experience within the larger historical record.
That work became Rising from the Shadow of the Sun, A Story of Love, Survival and Joy. Ronny’s writing increasingly became more than memoir. It was an effort to connect personal testimony with documented history—to show what war looked like not only in official records, but through the eyes of mothers, children, servicemen, survivors, and families rebuilding their lives.
Later, while living in Arizona, Ronny continued listening. She met veterans and survivors whose experiences were in danger of disappearing with them. She interviewed them, recorded their memories, and assembled their stories into another book: Survivors of WWII in the Pacific. In doing so, the responsibility she had first felt toward her mother’s diary widened into a responsibility toward the memories of others.
A Life of Stewardship
The central theme of Ronny Herman de Jong’s life is therefore not simply survival. It is stewardship. She survived history as a child, discovered its meaning as an adult, and then spent decades ensuring that firsthand experience would not be reduced to a footnote.
The diary also changed the way Ronny understood her parents. Through years of translation, research, writing, speaking, and remembering, she came to see Jeannette and Fokko not only as her mother and father, but as two young people caught in an enormous historical catastrophe who somehow carried their family through it. That understanding became one reason Ronny continued telling their story for as long as she could.
Her commitment to listening and preserving human experience extended beyond authorship. In different chapters of her life, including her service as a hospice volunteer, the same instinct can be seen: to sit with another person’s experience, recognize its dignity, and refuse to let an individual life become anonymous.
The Crown on the Work
In September 2026, Ronny made a decision that brought the journey full circle. With her attention increasingly devoted to her husband and family, she concluded that the original diary should no longer depend upon her alone for its preservation. Both the National WWII Museum in New Orleans and the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas, expressed interest. Ronny chose the National Museum of the Pacific War.
On September 12, 2026, she sent the museum the original diary, copies of her books, her collection of veterans’ and survivors’ stories, and a particularly intimate artifact: embroidery she had made as a five year old child in the camp.
For Ronny, this was the crown on her life’s work. The materials had traveled an extraordinary distance—not simply geographically, but across generations. A diary written secretly when possession of pencil and paper was forbidden had survived war, migration, decades of family life, translation, rejection, publication, research, and public storytelling. It was now being entrusted to an institution dedicated to preserving the history of the Pacific War.
There is a fitting symmetry in that journey. Jeannette wrote because she needed to preserve a connection with people from whom war had separated her. Ronny translated and published because she needed to preserve a connection between that experience and generations who came afterward.
From a forbidden pencil in a Japanese concentration camp on the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies to a place in a national museum in the United States, the thread running through Ronny Herman de Jong’s life is the conviction that individual stories matter. Her legacy lies not only in the books she wrote, but in the voices she carried forward—her mother’s first, and then the voices of others who had lived through history and deserved to be heard.
She inherited a story. She gave it a voice.
And, ultimately, she gave it a place where it can endure.