Dutch Child Survivor Of Japan’s WWII Camps Breaks Silence After 80 Years: ‘Now I Can Talk About It Without Crying’

It took 87-year-old Tineke Einthoven eighty years to speak openly about her childhood ordeal in brutal Japanese internment camps during World War II without breaking down.

“Now I can talk about it without crying,” said the Dutch woman, now 87, recalling how she was just four years old when she and her family were captured and imprisoned in “horrible” conditions on the Indonesian island of Java.

Her nightmare began in early 1942, only months after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. At the time, Indonesia was a Dutch colony coveted by Imperial Japan for its oil fields and rubber plantations. Einthoven recalled:

“There was a lot of bombing and the Japanese arrived. We had dug a big hole in the garden to shelter my parents, my brother, my two sisters, and the family of our servants.”

Her father, Willem Frederik Einthoven—the son of Nobel Prize-winning scientist Willem Einthoven, who invented the electrocardiogram—was an engineer in charge of Radio Malabar, the main communications link with the Netherlands.

When he refused to collaborate with the Japanese, he was separated from the family. They did not hear from him for a year.

Tineke, her mother, and siblings were sent to a camp in Tjibunut, near Bandung, along with thousands of Dutch, British, and Australian civilians. Of the 130,000 Allied civilians interned by Japan during the war, more than one in ten died in the camps. She continued:

“We often had nothing more than a bit of rice to eat. Since I was the smallest, I would slip under the fence to find food outside the camp, but I could only get weeds. Parents were punished if a child was caught. We risked the death penalty.”

The prisoners endured hunger, heat, lack of water, no hygiene, and hours under the sun for repeated headcounts.

Tineke still remembers the death of her friend Marianne from diphtheria, and the childlike question that followed:

“I wondered if the doll I gave her would also cross to the other side.”

In January 1944, the family was reunited but deported to Japan, where her father and his team were forced to work on developing a radar system.

Their convoy was bombed by American forces during the voyage, though their ship survived—many others did not. Thousands of Dutch POWs perished in similar attacks.

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Her father died of pneumonia at 51, weakened by malnutrition and the long marches to the laboratory where he worked. The surviving family members were sent to a temple 300 km west of Tokyo, living in isolation until Japan’s surrender in August 1945.

She vividly recalls the moment news of the war’s end reached them.

“Some Italians, also prisoners nearby, told us. One of them threw himself into my mother’s arms, and she was very embarrassed,”

she laughed softly.

Repatriated via Australia to the Netherlands, Tineke later built a career as a psychologist in Geneva, Nice, and Monaco, raising two children. For decades, she spoke of the war only to close family.

“I am speaking out today to show that even if you’ve lived through something horrible, you don’t have to suffer your entire life. You can move on if you choose to free yourself from the victim status,”

she said with a smile.