Tjideng Reunion - A Memoir of World War II on Java
Tjideng Reunion is set against the backdrop of World War II in the Pacific theater. In 1940, as World War II is raging in Europe, Boudewijn van Oort Sr., a Dutch immigrant living with his wife, Wilhelmina, and young son, Boudewijn Jr. (the author), in South Africa, decides to move his family to the Dutch colony of the Dutch East Indies, today known as the Republic of Indonesia. Van Oort Sr. made the move wanting to support and strengthen his mother country Holland against Japan, the threatening and belligerent aggressor. Two years after having settled down comfortably on the island of Java, Japan invades the entire Dutch East Indies archipelago. The van Oort family and their friends get caught up in the brutal war of the Pacific.
This story follows the fate of the van Oort family and their friends. They miraculously survive the Japanese prison camps, only to find that after they return to South Africa as refugees, the political landscape has shifted in their absence in a direction van Oort Sr. finds unacceptable. The political and military events that dramatically unfold around the family change the course of their lives forever.