Pass memories on to the Youth

At noon I attended the commemoration at the Indonesian War Monument in The Hague that is annually held on August 15th .
It marks the End of World War II in Asia by the surrender of the Japanese emperor Hirohito, after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear bombs.

Then in WW II Indonesians and Dutch and English just any European, American or Aussie who worked and lived with wife and children, or not, in Indonesia were sent as a POW to one of the Japanese concentration camps on the Indonesian isles that were realised since 1943 by the Japanese. My aunt was a survivor of such camps and in remembrance of her I was there today.

At today's memorial service some hundreds of survivors of the camps were at present - their number diminishes by the year now, but their children and their grandchildren come. Their offspring underlines what one conveyed today: that is => that all of the offspring will learn about what their ancestors faced and endured in their young lives and how they survived with sheer luck. It is not to forget.
For the survivors it took time to take faith again in mankind and time to learn to forgive.

Many of the survivors of the Japanese camps in Asia seldom found the power in their voice to speak out the words that told of their fears and hungers and their horrendous situations. The words and stories never seemed to express their feelings lived in those mean and painful times - many silenced their trauma's for the sake of not sensing them again when talking of them, writing about them. They could not give words to their pain, not in a song, not in a poem, not in a story altho' perhaps once in a moment of complete confidence they would tell something, or even a little more