Fifty Years Of Silence The Extraordinary Memoir Of A Survivor Of Rape In A Time Of War Reissue Jan Ruff Oherne by Jan Ruff O'herne 9781742754260, 1742754260 instant download after payment.

The extraordinarily visceral and heartbreaking memoir of a wartime survivor of repeated and often extremely violent acts of sexual assault, while being held as a Japanese prisoner during the second world war, and its lifetime of effects on the Author and her family for years after the end of that war.
'How can you tell your daughters, you know? I mean, the shame, the shame was still so great. I knew I had to tell them but I couldn't tell them face to face . . . so I decided I had to write it all down.'
Jan Ruff O'Herne's idyllic childhood in the Netherlands East Indies, a long time colonial outpost of the Netherlands, ended with the Japanese occupation of Java in 1942. A civilian and a non-combatant, She was interned in Ambarawa Prison Camp along with her mother and both of her younger sisters.
In February 1944, when Jan was aged 21, she was taken from the camp and forced into sexual slavery inside a military brothel. Jan was repeatedly beaten and raped for a period of three months, after which she was returned to the prison camp with threats that her family would be killed if she revealed the truth about the atrocities inflicted upon her.
For fifty years, Jan told no-one what had happened to her, but in 1992, after seeing Korean war rape victims making appeals for justice on television, she decided to speak out in support of them.
However, before she could testify publicly, she had to find a way to tell her family and friends about all that she had suffered.
Jan's survival is a tribute to her own inner strength, and for the past fifteen years, she has worked tirelessly to protect the rights of women in war and armed conflict - and continues to do so to this day.