Ronny

Today, a guest from British Columbia, Canada, Ilse Erwig, is sharing her story. Three years older than I, she lived on the Island of Sumatra, and was incarcerated in even more camps than I. She wrote her story for her children at their urgent request, but decided to share it now on my Blog. Too long to print it all below – it is almost a book – I am providing the link for you to click on.

Japanese Internment Camps 1942 – 45

We welcome your comments!

Ronny

An Eye-witness Account of Life and Death in Japanese Concentration Camps for Women and Children: Ronny Herman de Jong, Survivor of  the Pacific Holocaust Tells her Story 

Rising from the Shadow of the Sun, A Story of Love, Survival and Joy
 tells the story of Ronny Herman, a little girl who survives almost four years in Japanese concentration camps on the Island of Java. In February 1942 the Japanese invade the island from the north. Ronny’s father, a Pilot with the Dutch Naval Air Force, gets the order to burn down the Naval Base and take his squadron to the south of the island. They escape only hours before Japanese submarines encircle it.

The Japanese confiscate possessions, separate families and force Ronny with her mother and little sister into a prison camp for women and children. In her diary, smuggled through the camps at the risk of being killed had it been detected, Ronny’s mother gives an accurate account of the Japanese invasion and the lives of women and children incarcerated under the barbaric regime of the Japanese. She describes the years of physical and psychological suffering, the lack of food and medications, but also the hope, faith, solidarity and resilience that remain alive among the imprisoned women, who are desperately trying to survive and protect the lives of their children.

In Part Two, Ronny Herman de Jong’s autobiographical account, we see a woman who savors every day of her freedom in contrast to her early years in brutal captivity.

The final chapters of the book include part of the NARA Files, the in 2000 declassified Japanese War Crimes Files Exhibit “O”: the Order to the Japanese Army to kill all prisoners on every island of the archipelago without verifiable evidence, commencing in September 1945. The bombs dropped in August were timely. Many lives were lost, even more were saved.

In an interview on December 27, 2014 CTTV (China TV in America) adds Ronny Herman de Jong’s experiences in Rising from the Shadow of the Sun to the experiences of Louis Zamperini in Unbroken for a total picture of the brutal treatment of innocent civilians by the Japanese during the Pacific Holocaust, 1941 – 1945.

Comments are welcome!

Ronny

On May 1, 2015, two days after the visit of the Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, to the United States, during which no official apology about Japan’s War time atrocities was forthcoming, China Central TV aired a five minute interview with WWII camp survivor Ronny Herman de Jong as the beginning of a series of programs on the topic of the Japanese Army’s torture of POWs during World War II.

Beginning and ending with her immediate reactions after watching the movie Unbroken which premiered in the U.S. on Christmas Day but is still banned in Japan, they showed Ronny’s mother’s secret camp diary, pictures from her book In the Shadow of the Sun and its striking front cover with the Japanese war flag. Another part of the interview was filmed at the Peregrine Book Company in Prescott, Arizona.

Although In the Shadow of the Sun has been out of print for many years, Ronny repeated the story about the cruel treatment in Japanese concentration camps for women and children in Part One of her second book Rising from the Shadow of the Sun: A Story of Love, Survival and Joy (Amazon Worldwide) which is also available in print and as e-book from many online distributors all over the world. This book includes two exhibits of the Japanese War Crimes Files, declassified in the year 2000. One of them, Exhibit “O”, was the order issued on August 1, 1944 for the disposition (murder) of all POWs, commencing in September 1945. The bombs were dropped just in time!

CCTV Chinese news reaches nearly one billion viewers in China. Their international channels reach more than 100 million people in more than 120 countries. Distribution of the CCTV News channel is being expanded month by month.

Following is the English Translation of the Chinese text: 

Welcoming your comments,

Ronny

Apr 29, 2015 — In case you missed it, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe addressed US Congress this morning on Hirohito’s birthday. Early in the speech, he reminisced about his time as a student in California, and his rise in politics in Japan—when he was first elected, a colleague said to him “You are so cheeky, Abe.” And well, cheeky he was.

Critics of the Prime Minister (with China and South Korea taking the lead) were waiting for a broad wartime apology and, in particular, a gesture made to the comfort women, whose existence Mr. Abe has denied and whose presence in Japan’s textbooks were taken out altogether in recent government-sanctioned textbook reforms.

But let’s focus first on what he did say: of his visit to the Washington WWII Memorial, he expressed being moved by the “lost dreams” and “lost futures of young Americans”. He also said that history was “harsh” and that a lot that was done “cannot be undone”. He mentioned he felt “deep repentance in his heart” and offered, with “profound respect”, his “eternal condolences to the souls of all American people that were lost during WWII.” He typified the post-war feelings of Japan as one of “deep remorse” over the suffering of people in Asian countries during the war from which Japan “should not avert its eyes” (which echoed earlier sentiments expressed by the Japanese Imperial family). Plus, he added that he upheld previous Japanese apologies that were made, including a 1995 landmark statement by Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama.

And the comfort women?

Out of the blue, this comment came: “Armed conflicts have always made women suffer the most”, followed by a statement of how the world should be free of human rights abuses, especially when it comes to women. Generic statements are fine and dandy but if they are used to draw attention away from Japan’s responsibility in the recruiting and abuse of these women, a comment like this only reinforces the impression that Abe doesn’t want to take responsibility for this part of the suffering in WWII.

Abe essentially stopped short of an apology: offering condolences, repentance and remorse as well as upholding OTHER apologies rather than his own, makes one wonder why he has to use these veiled terms, especially in the context of the government’s recent textbook reforms and the conservatives’ continued whitewashing and pooh-poohing of the war. Also, if he believes, as he mentioned in the speech, that the spirit of the new Japan is a “spirit of reform” in which it wants to keep its “eye on the road ahead”, one has to question if this means that Japan is indeed tired of looking back, and just wants to move on and away from what hasn’t been fully acknowledged in the first place: 4 million war dead in Southeast Asia, concentration camps, forced labor, forced prostitution, starvation, medical experiments on internees, torture and executions.

When German Prime Minister Willy Brandt visited the Monument of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1970, he made a sudden knee fall to show his respect. Abe’s speech was far from a knee fall. It was a very concealed show of contrition at best.

Wars are indeed harsh and a lot cannot be undone, but what CAN be done was not shared by Mr. Abe on the floor of the US Congress. He still avoided full acknowledgment of the truth: No formal Apology, no Compensation, just a veiled “pooh-poohing” of Japan’s evil behavior in an attempt to win congressional support for a major Asia-Pacific trade deal.

I welcome your comments.

Until next time,

Ronny

PUBLICITY THROUGH CHINA CENTRAL TV AMERICA

On Sunday, December 21 an invitation from CCTV America was extended to Ronny Herman de Jong, author of the book Rising from the Shadow of the Sun:

“I am Emma Wu with China Central TV’s America bureau in Washington DC. I’m working on a story about Angelina Jolie’s new movie UNBROKEN, which will be released on Christmas Day. We are working on a special program about this movie and the topic of the Japanese Army’s torture of POWs during World War II. I read your story, Rising from the Shadow of the Sun, about Japanese concentration camps for women and children, which is very special. I would like to interview you and share your story with our audiences.

CCTV Chinese news reaches nearly one billion viewers in China. Our international channels reach more than 100 million people in more than 120 countries. Distribution of the CCTV News Channel and the content of CCTV America is being expanded month by month. Please feel free to contact me with any questions”.

On Thursday, December 25, the reporter and a film crew arrived in Prescott, Arizona.

On Saturday, December 27, from 8:30 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. the taping of the interview took place in the book store The Peregrine Book Company with gracious permission from the manager.

The reporter and crew left for Phoenix and Washing DC after the shoot and the tapes will be edited by CCTV in Beijing before broadcasting the story in Mandarin and English in China and more than 120 other countries.

As soon as the links are in you will be the first to know!

The Survivors

Well, there you have it. While working on my anthology Survivors of WWII in the Pacific, I became privy to intimate details of the lives of some of the veterans I interviewed; the young men who, barely adults, enlisted to go to war to defend their country, strong, proud and idealistic, not realizing the danger, the pain, the horrors and anguish they would experience.

Those young men are now aged Veterans of World War Two, whose experiences are indelibly engraved on their minds. They remember the war they fought as if it was yesterday. Now in their very old age, without nearby relatives or any relatives at all, they are living alone, in a hospital or in a nursing home, with one disability or another. And although no longer strong, they are still proud, proud of their achievements and the fact that they fought for their country and the war was won.

Those aged Veterans all contributed jointly to the defeat of the Japanese, the end of the War in the Pacific and saving my life when I was a little girl who had barely lived.

Aside from my mission to share my mother’s story through my book Rising from the Shadow of the Sun, I now have another mission: visiting those WWII Veterans I have come to know, sharing some love and laughter, giving them hope for another good day, trying to make their lives a little happier. It takes time, but I feel I owe it to them and besides, I enjoy my visits. There you have it. You can read their and other Survivors’ stories in my Anthology Survivors of WWII in the Pacific.

Lagging behind in my weekly blog posts, I hope I can send you new ones again on a regular basis. And, as always, I would really appreciate your comments at the bottom of the post.

Thanks for checking in.

Ronny

Guy C. Willis, QM2 USN

If you watched The Morning Scramble on AZTV last week on August 15, when two WWII veterans were being honored and thanked for their service to our country, you will have noticed that each one of them only had about seven minutes to answer questions and tell their stories. In hindsight, Guy Willis wished that he had said things differently and had talked about other, more important things.

Guy Willis, who served in the US Navy at the end of WWII and in Korea, is now an active volunteer with the Volunteer Services of the Veterans Administration in Prescott, Arizona. This is what he would have wanted to add during the interview if he would have had more time.

“For over sixty years I have frequently visited the Punchbowl, the National Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawai’i on the island of Oahu. Those visits gave me an opportunity to think about all who suffered through the trials of World War Two in the Pacific and especially to remember those I knew personally, the ones who didn’t come home. All of their names are engraved on the Punchbowl walls.

Two childhood friends did not come home. Joe Bagley went down with his A-26 bomber  in the Solomon Islands. He was twenty-two. Johnny Parsons was killed by a kamikaze while aboard USS Drexler at Okinawa; he was only eighteen.  George Davis, the captain of USS Walke (my ship in the Korean War) was also killed by a kamikaze at Leyte Gulf. He was thirty-three and a post-humous recipient of the Medal Of Honor.

Then, during the Korean War, 26 of my USS Walke  shipmates did not come home and 46 were wounded. We, the crew of the Walke, will always be shipmates. We especially honor those who were wounded or gave their lives for our beloved country.”

Until next time,

Ronny

Celebrating V-J Day

On Friday, August 15, in commemoration of the 69th anniversary of V-J Day, the day that the Japanese surrendered and WWII came to an end, Sandy Moss on her morning show The Morning Scramble on  AZTV Channel 7 interviewed two WWII survivors,  Edward Sowman, a Pearl Harbor survivor, and Guy Willis, who served in the Pacific at the end of the war to bring home the troops, and then re-enlisted to serve during the Korean War. I talked about my new Anthology Survivors of WWII in the Pacific with stories by both Ed and Guy and other veterans as well as stories by camp survivors of the Pacific War.

If you were not able to watch the show you may be able to see it in a week or so on the Publicity Page of this website. I will keep you posted!

Until next time,

Ronny

The Morning Scramble with Sandy Moss