Japanese Internees

Available for over a year

This programme tells the story, largely overlooked by historians and scholars, of the children and young people who had their freedom snatched away from them for the duration of the war. Accustomed to the splendours of colonial life, they had to adjust to an existence that was at best cramped and fearful, at worst a living hell of abuse and deprivation. Joyce Nelson, who was 19 and newly married, recalls the exhausting worry as her husband succumbed to malaria twelve times, with no available medicine. Jeremy Gotch was 11 when he left camp, but weighed only 3 stone. He describes the constant hunger and the helpless terror he felt when the guards bayoneted his teddy bear – and the glee when the blade set off the growl mechanism. Barbara Sowerby was 8 when she saw a man being tortured by being forced to drink water and beaten. She remembers how her family stuck together, keeping their spirits up in the grimmest circumstances. Anne Moxley tells the story of how they stopped the Japanese guards taking the milk from their Red Cross donated goats – by peeing in it. Rose Raymond, who was forced into hard labour and had to build her own coffin as those around her dropped dead, remembers the poignant experience of listening at night to a young internee singing Ave Maria through the window of her cell. Produced by Kate Taylor and David Prest. Series Producer: David Prest The Reunion is a Whistledown Production fior BBC Radio 4