Henri Hymans is six feet tall, a handsome strong faced man in his late forties with pepper-and-salt hair. His eyes are light green-brown and fill with pain as he recounts the details of his experience in a Japanese concentration camp in Indonesia. He answers questions directly and smiles readily. When remembrance becomes painful, the smile is alternately wistful, deprecating or even grim.

He was born in Indonesia to a Dutch-Jewish family, the youngest of three children. His father had an art shop and was arranging to have Indonesian art introduced into Europe. The Nazi invasion of Holland occurred when Henri was four or five years old, but he still remembers people talking about it. In March of 1942, the Japanese occupied Indonesia. Six months later the Hymans family were rounded up and put into a concentration camp as were other Dutch, Chinese and Jewish people. Henri was six years old.

"We tried to escape into the mountains. We managed for about six months; we lived in the mountains. They were picking up everybody, especially the Dutch men. My father was deaf. He couldn't hear very much. We were afraid he wouldn't salute them properly. With the Japanese, anyone who didn't obey orders was immediately taken away and put in jail. Some Chinese friends helped us to get into the mountains. We lived near a plantation. We were growing food ourselves. There was an empty house, people who had already been imprisoned. After six months the Japanese were having military exercises around there and they found us. They came from all over. The next day they took us away. By that time they had imprisoned most Dutch people. We were some of the last to be taken.

"My father was taken to another camp. We were taken to a transit camp; my mother, sister, brother and I. The men were in separate slave labour camps. Children up to ten years old were permitted to stay with their mothers. They moved us from one camp to another, wherever they needed more labour, or for all kinds of reasons. They kept marching us from one camp to another. This happened three, four times, each one worse than the previous one. My mother and sister worked fifteen hours a day, cutting trees outside the camps, cleaning up prisons, planting things for the Japanese army. My mother mostly was employed making ropes, a kind of jute rope. They were huge camps. In the beginning there were five, six thousand. Everybody had dysentery [prisoners]. Every day about fifteen, twenty people died. The young children, starting with six year olds, had to work from six to ten hours a day.

"We slept in long barracks. I was with my mother. I slept next to her, but I hardly saw her because she was working fifteen, sixteen hours a day. After the working day she was so exhausted. There were very few Japanese guards. I'm not sure, but generally eight or ten. Anyone who came within one-and-a-half metres of the fence, they were shot immediately. And we were so scared. So many people were tortured and killed, nobody dared to go near the fence. 'In the beginning, there were huge camps with a lot of Australian women and children from Java and Singapore, and there were Chinese. Then there were many Jews, Iraqi Jews. The Nazis told the Japanese to pick us up, but most Japanese didn't know what a Jew was, really, so some Jews were put together with Christian people and they got better treatment. Others were treated very badly. The Nazis used to visit from time to time. They tried to [indoctrinate the Japanese] and sometimes they succeeded and everybody was killed. We were young boys, seven or eight years old, and we ran in gangs, fighting, and we often fight with the Iraqi Jews. I had no idea. Most of the time we were weeding - very tall grass was growing there - and also all kinds of odd jobs. We had to keep the camp clean. At times we had to catch flies. The objective first of all was to humiliate us. They were very keen on humiliating anyone. Gradually they saw no use for us anymore. I don't know why they did the things they did.

"They punished us, in the end almost daily. It grew worse and worse. We were not allowed to keep anything. If people were found concealing books - once they found a children's Bible - they'd beat you to death. Anytime we offended any rule they had, not only did they beat these people to death very slowly, but we had to watch; everybody, children, women, everybody. In the sun, without water, without food. Without water you go crazy. Some of these lasted one day, some, two days. Mostly we had to bow to any Japanese who came near us, and if we didn't notice it, they got furious. They very seldom hit us children, but they hit our mothers. So we did something wrong, they found our mothers and they were beaten up. We were very scared of it. I heard my mother was beaten, but I didn't see it myself. Usually All the grownups tried to keep the children away from it when it happened.

"There were hundreds in each barracks. I'm not sure exactly how many. Nice people and awful people. In our barracks everybody was speaking Dutch. I think we were separated by nationality. In the beginning we usually got a little bowl of rice every day. That was it. Then we scavenged around all kinds of insects. But as the war went on, we got less and less. And then, they started giving us what they called tapioca. It's what you make glue of. There's just so much flour and the rest is water. That was it, and that we got two or three times a day. So for thirty minutes you felt quite full, and then you were just as hungry as before. A lot of women died, but I don't think that many children did. In the men's camps it was really terrible. My brother went to one camp, he had to collect all the dead bodies. Every day there were twenty, thirty people.

"Once a year we got a postcard from my father. It started, 'Long live the Emperor. I am well, thanks to the Emperor. Don't worry about me.' And everybody got the same card, so, we knew there was nothing. Sometimes people had died long before the card was received. So we didn't really know what was happening to my father. My brother, we did find out [about] because sometimes there came teams of young boys for very hard work. One of the boys was my brother's friend. We shouted to each other [information].

"The war lasted three years. I was in camps for two and a half years. We were told a month after Japan had capitulated because the British didn't have enough troops to send to Indonesia and we were right in the middle of central Java. By then the Indonesians had begun to rebel against the Japanese too. The Indonesians hated the Dutch, but in the end hated the Japanese more. They were hunting Japanese everywhere. So the British told the Japanese to stay where they were and they were responsible for law and order. We noticed immediately we got plenty of food from the Red Cross, parcels that had been sent for us by Australians and Americans all along. The Japanese began to release them to us finally. We began to guess very soon, because they didn't beat us up anymore or work us like crazy. We were totally obsessed by food. But the Japanese were still in command.

"We were liberated by British troops from Singapore. We were able to go out of the camps. It was fantastic. We had eaten up all the grass and leaves from the trees. We hardly knew what trees were anymore, except those we saw far away. We played with kids outside of camp.

"A month later some of the Indonesians began to shoot at us, and that's because the first Dutch troops arrived. The Indonesians were very afraid of the Dutch making them into a colony again. They cut off the water supply. Japanese were protecting us. They brought in more Japanese troops to protect us.

"The Sikhs didn't want to fight for the British anymore, so we didn't know which side they were on. Then more Dutch troops came and the more Dutch troops came the worse it was - the fighting became worse.

"The Indonesians were shooting at us with mortars into the prison camp. One day they came down from the mountains and overran the whole camp. A lot of women and children were killed. We escaped killing just by luck. The Gurka soldiers who were serving the British came in and chased them away.

"My father had died two months before in the camp. My older brother was with us again. In the men's camp the mortality rate was about seventy percent. The British evacuated us to another location where we stayed a few weeks, and then we were shipped out to the coast to a big city, Samara, where it was fairly safe and under British control. From there we were shipped to Sri Lanka. We were there for six months and then to Holland. "It was miraculous. My mother had nine brothers and sisters and only one was taken, and her mother and father were taken to Bergen-Belsen. My father's family, also a big family, only one brother was left. For two years we went all over the place, moving from one vacant house to another as the former occupants returned from wherever.

"I think I didn't know until after the war that I was Jewish, because my family was afraid the Germans might take over Indonesia as they did Indochina. So from the age of four, they kept the fact that we were Jewish secret.

"By the time I was in high school we finally settled down in one place. I kept going back to the Far East, but I studied in Canada and Europe. I went to Japan in '62. I react strongly to the militaristic, or fascistic, in Japan; I hate them. There are very nationalistic, very anti-Semitic [individuals] in the new Japan. The good thing I got out of Japan was my wife. There are many things I like about Japan, but many things I don't trust.

"The young Japanese, this generation in Japan know nothing about what the Japanese did in the Second World War. They deny that anything like that could have been done by the Japanese. When I told some young law students about this, they never came back to school again in protest over my 'anti-Japanese propaganda.' The leadership keep drumming that Japan is top in economics but that they won't be respected until Japan is also top in military. I think they want to be a big military power.

"All of this [experience] messed up my life, especially in the last ten years. I had the first what they call, concentration camp syndrome [Post Traumatic Stress Disorder] treatment, when I was just forty. In Holland there's a special treatment centre, and there are many, same thing happened. They often began to show signs of stress, difficulty in sleeping, or they began to work like crazy and they became very irritable. Then they recover. It goes well again for a short time. It's happened to me twice since I was forty. And I can't sleep. I dream all the time I'm either being beaten or I'm beating - fighting. I thought coming here to Victoria, it would be the end of it, but I can't get away from it. Sometimes it's really bad.

"I have very bad memory, short term memory. It's becoming more and more difficult for me to study new things. It's caused my wife a lot of trouble. It's a shame.

"Some people are extremely tough. My brother was in the worse situation, but he's doing very well. My sister has some terrible things she doesn't like to talk about. She never married. She's in very bad health, physically and mentally. She worked in places where the Japanese Gestapo tortured people. She was just a teenage girl at that time. Very tough. My fifteen year old son also suffered quite a bit from my situation. He hasn't had much stability in his life. He was born in Norway. When he was six we were in Holland for a year and a half. Then back to Japan. He said the Japanese should pay for my pension.

"He doesn't know much about what happened to me. I don't think our children should suffer or be affected anymore. With our generation, it should stop. If he would turn anti-Japanese it would make the situation for my wife extremely difficult. Someday when he gets rid of a lot of the garbage, I'll want him to know the real historical facts, but I want him to feel really Canadian first."