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, when World War II is raging in Europe, Boudewijn van Oort Sr., a Dutch national living with his wife and young son in South Africa, decides to move his family to the Dutch East Indies, the former Dutch colony today known as the Republic of Indonesia.Boudewijn Sr. was hopeful and made the move wanting to support and strengthen his mother country Holland against Japan, the threatening and belligerent aggressor. Two years after settling down comfortably on the island of Java, the Japanese invade and occupy the entire Dutch East Indies archipelago. The van Oort family and their close friends inadvertently get caught up in the brutal war in the Pacific.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 into a direction Boudewijn Sr. finds unacceptable. The political and military events that dramatically unfold around the family, change the course of their lives forever.