Fifty Years of Silence by Jan Ruff O'Herne

Author:Jan Ruff O'Herne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2008-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

As the months passed all of us girls lost weight. We barely touched our food, even though Satinah tried to tempt us with her cooking. I don’t know what we would have done without Hassan and Satinah and their love and support. They were always there with a smile, or ready to help us to hide. Countless times did Satinah hide us in her room, countless times did Hassan point the wrong way when the Japanese were looking for us. All of us were exhausted, our nerves stretched to the limit. Continually, we put in protests to any high-ranking officer who visited the house, but they always fell on deaf ears.

Each of us had to find her own way of dealing with the situation, trying to keep up strength and hope at the same time. My inner strength came from my faith, from prayer and from God. I never said to God, ‘Why did this happen to me? Why me, Lord?’ I knew that it must all be in God’s plan and everything that happened only strengthened my faith. When I had nothing left, when everything had been taken from me, there was only God and me, and so I needed God more than ever before. I totally depended on God alone and this knowledge brought me very close to Him, a thing that doesn’t easily happen in life. But it did happen for me under these circumstances.

What made it so hard to face each new day was the fact that I knew what lay ahead. I knew what was going to happen to me again and again and that there was nothing I could do about it. I had used all the hiding places, I had played all the games and all the tricks and had pleaded for compassion without success. I could no longer remember the many faces of the Japanese that raped me, I just saw the appalling bodies that I had to fight off each time.

During the time in the brothel, the Japanese had abused and humiliated me. I was left with a body that was torn and fragmented everywhere. There was not one inch of my body that did not hurt.

I missed my mother and my two young sisters terribly. My mother had been in poor health and very weak when I had to leave her. I worried in case she died. How would Fien and Céleste manage without her? But my trust in God was great and somehow I knew that I would see them again. Countless times, in my imagination, I pictured my mother and father being reunited and our family being whole again. It was this dream of family love and the goodness I had known that kept me going. My happy family life and secure childhood gave me the base on which to survive all this suffering.

More despair came my way when I thought I was pregnant. I had missed my period. There was always the fear of falling pregnant, just as there was the fear of catching a venereal disease.

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