Prisoners of Kota Cane (Cornell Modern Indonesia Project) (Translation Series, No 66)

A memoir about the events of the final days in Sumatra. Leon Salim, an activist hoping to accelerate the end of colonial rule in West Sumatra by organizing mass demonstrations there, was arrested along with other nationalist leaders by the Dutch. He was taken on the army's retreat from central Sumatra even as these captors were attempting to fend off an imminent attack by invading Japanese forces. In a day-by-day account of twenty days in March-April 1942, the author is alternately terse, detailed, and impassioned. Told with a reporter's eye (he deals as well with the more general aspects of Dutch administration in the Indies) but also intensely subjective and eminently fascinating.