Fifty Years of Silence

By Jan Ruff-O'Herne,

Book cover of Fifty Years of Silence: The Extraordinary Memoir of a War Rape Survivor

Book description

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…

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Born in Java of the former Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), Jan Ruff-O’Herne was the first European “comfort woman” to speak out. She was interned in Ambarawa prison camp with her mother and two sisters when Japanese troops invaded Java in 1942, and forcibly taken to the military comfort station at Semarang two years later. Jan’s depiction of her happy family life before the war and the atrocities she suffered at the prison camp and the military brothel form an unforgettable contrast. Equally unforgettable is her resilience in the face of extraordinary brutality and her courage in…

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