PRISONERS OF JAPAN

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26781, 26 May 1948, Page 2

PRISONERS OF JAPAN

A MOVING DESCRIPTION Thres Came Home. By Agnes Keith. Michael Joseph. 14s 6d. This account of the life of a woman prisoner in the hands of the Japanese in Borneo is one of the most successful of its kind which has yet appeared. The author's unfailing courage, the intimacy of her descriptions, her tolerance, and her ability to see both sides of a case give her book an unusual value. In “ Land Below the Wind,” Mbs Keith, an American married to an Englishman, told a delightful story of her home in Borneo. In this book she describes how that happy life was swept away by the Japanese, how she, her child and her husband were imprisoned with many other residents, and how they survived illtreatment. semi-starvation 'and life under the most degrading conditions until they were released after the Japanese surrender. One passage gives an insight into the quality of the author's mind: Those years of captivity convinced me of two things—that there is no war without captivity, both of the victor and the vanquished. I know now the full value of freedom. In all my life before J had existed as a free woman and did not know it. This is what freedom means to me—the right to live with, to touch, and to love my husband and my children; the possession of *a door and a key with which to lock it; moments of silence; a place to weep with no one to see me doing so; the freedom of my eyes to scan the earth and sea without barbed wire i across my vision. I will never give up these rights again. There may be mofe to life than these things. But there is no life without them. There is no self-pity in this book, but a dreadful honesty. The authoi sees how other women in the camp collapsed under the pressure of circumstances, but she is aware of how she also departed from her own standards. She writes of the strain of being separated by barbed wire from her husband, of being able to see him, but not to talk to him. The fact that she had a young child with her at once added to her distresses and saved her —here was the real reason for her strength to endure. Her descriptions of the Japanese are of especial interest. She sees them at times simple and friendly, again needlessly brutal and cruel. She senses the feeling of inferiority which tortured them even in the hour of victory and sees their helplessness in defeat. The book is a real achievement, and should have no difficulty in attracting the wide public it deserves. D. G. B.