AUSTRALIAN MILITARY / General Military – World War II – Autobiography –

First published in the US in 1995. This is an account of the author’s three years imprisonment in a Japanese camp on Sumatra during WWII, her childhood before the war on the island of Tarakan and her escape from Tarakan with her fathers and sisters. It tells of the uplifting influence of a singing group in the camp comprised of Dutch, Australian and English women prisoners. A television documentary entitled ‘Song of Survival’ was based on events recorded in this book.

Song of Survival is an account of the true story which inspired the motion picture Paradise Road.

Thrown into the whirlwind of dark forces unleashed with the onset of World War II, a young woman, Helen Colijn, her sisters, and father flee the oncoming Japanese army. Helen Colijn’s account of her wartime experiences is a window into a largely overlooked dimension of World War II — the imprisonment of women and children in Southeast Asia by the Japanese and how these prisoners of war responded to their dire circumstances. The conditions were terrible. Food was scarce; medicine unavailable. Held in captivity for three and a half years, more that a third of the women in Helen’s camp died of disease or starvation. Yet their courage, faith, resiliency, ingenuity, and camaraderie provide us with enduring lessons on living. Though the prisoners had no musical instruments, they had their voices, and from memory scored classical works for symphony and piano. The music that helped sustain them while in captivity is a lasting and precious gift of these women to a world that has witnessed far too much war.

• 216 p. : ill., ports. ; 23 cm. #090325
• Colijn, Helen
• World War, 1939-1945 — Prisoners and prisons, Japanese
• World War, 1939-1945 — Personal narratives, Dutch
• Women prisoners — Indonesia — Sumatra — Biography
• Prisoners of war — Indonesia — Sumatra — Biography
• World War, 1939-1945 — Music and the war
• Sumatra (Indonesia) — History