Welcome to my website!
Even though I very much live in the present and am focused on the future, I often dwell on the past. World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history, with 100 million participating troops and over 70 million casualties. I am a survivor of the war in the Pacific. My early years were spent in brutal captivity.
On August 15, 2012 the world will commemorate the 67th anniversary of the Japanese surrender and the end of World War II in the Pacific. Veterans of that conflict will have memories of their own, including the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Most who were born after that war will have heard about the war in Europe and the Pacific, the Holocaust, the atomic bombs and even the fate of the POWs in Asia. But what do you know about the fate of the hundreds of thousands of civilians ― men, women and children ― who were living in Southeast Asia when the war broke out? The Japanese army invaded one country after another, island after island, incarcerating and eliminating the white population in their quest to get the monopoly in Asia, which is rich in oil. Some Japanese War Crimes Files only became declassified ten years ago. I want to share with you what happened to the innocent civilian prisoners of war in Southeast Asia, and also the joyous years after World War II in the Pacific, when I grew up to become who I am today.
My first book, In the Shadow of the Sun, published in 1992, based on the detailed journal my mother kept during our time in the Japanese death camps, was the first English language account in North America of World War Two women and children’s camps in Southeast Asia; it has become a collector’s item. I still have a few copies available. On March 15, 2011, I released my second book, Rising from the Shadow of the Sun: A Story of Love, Survival and Joy. Also based in part on my mother’s war journal, it will introduce the reader not only to that part of the world and history, but also to the many places I called home after the war.
Ronny Herman de Jong
