My own father was seven, living in the Dutch East Indies, when he too, lost his father and was forced into a similar concentration camp. Like Jeremiah, he talks little about his boyhood and what he endured during the war. I wanted to understand the events that formed him, and my research of this relatively little known part of World War II inspired me to write a fictional memoir from the view point of a man my father’s age. I want to help others who want to preserve family memories, not necessarily for an audience beyond the family. My approach is that by focusing on learning how to write one chapter of a life story, a person will be equipped to write an entire memoir.
What are the main historical events that take place in Thief of Glory? Could you explain more about the jappenkamps?The Pacific War theatre serves as backdrop to the novel, and the bulk of the story takes place over the years that the main character is a boy, in one of the hundreds of concentration camps where the Japanese army held the Dutch prisoners. The conditions, as I discovered from reading accounts of survivors, were horrible and life threatening.
Can you share some of your father’s story? Is your mother’s story in anyway part of the novel? How did she experience WWII?My father’s story is very similar to most of the other survivors. As the war continued, more and more families were crowded into the camps, and the Japanese commanders had a policy of starvation that some believe was deliberate. He was liberated into danger, for rebels seeking independence engaged in terrorist acts against the women and children; it wasn’t until Allied forces arrived on the island that he was finally safe. (My father, for example, remembers waking up to grenades tossed into his camp by rebels. ) My mother grew up in the Netherlands. Her most distinct memory is of the black boots of the German soldiers who took away her father for hiding a Jew in their home. She was five years old at the time.
How do you see the need for people to record family history or write a memoir play out today?I viewed Thief of Glory as a fictionalized memoir, and it was inspired by the stories of both my parents, stories that I didn’t want to disappear. Because of this, I want to help others who want to preserve family memories, not necessarily for an audience beyond the family. My approach is that by focusing on learning how to write one chapter of a life story, a person will be equipped to write an entire memoir.