Commemorating

Today is VJ Day, the day WWII ended in 1945 for the Pacific region as well when Japan capitulated after the horrors of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In the Netherlands today is the day the victims of WWII in the then Dutch Indies, now Indonesia are commemorated. My paternal grandparents were living on Java with my father when WWII struck there. All three were interned in Japanese prisoner of war camps, my father as an 8 year old initially with his mother in a women's camp on Java, my grandfather was deported to Sumatra, the ship got torpedoed and shipwrecked on the way, but he survived and was put to work on the construction of the Pekanbaru railway on Sumatra. When my father turned 10 years old as was the rule by the Japanese he was deemed an adult and sent to a men's camp, far away from either of his parents. Somehow they survived all three but the scars and memories of those years have never left them.

When will mankind learn that war solves nothing and only makes victims everywhere? Today is a day to commemorate all the victims, I'm certainly not forgetting all the Japanese victims of the atom bombs either.

The picture shows some possessions I inherited from my grandmother: the commemorative bronze coin was produced in 1947 to honour the women prisoners of the Japanese PoW camps, the text says "Fier en ongebroken" = Proud and unbroken, on the back are more commemorative lines and a depiction of the camp fences and palm trees. The simple painted wooden heartshaped leaf brooch with the initials PG is a keepsake from the camp my grandmother, Paula Grandia, was in. Somebody made that for her in the camp, on the back is written Tjideng Kamp (the name of the PoW camp) 1942 and it has a very simple glued on safety pin as a fastener.