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From Goodreads where it has a 4.17 rating with 964 ratings and 118 reviews:

Agnes Keith’s story of her imprisonment in a Borneo internment camp by the Japanese during WW II is awe inspiring and amazing in so many ways. She presents her three plus years of captivity in all its horrible details but she doesn’t ask the reader to feel sorry for her – more to gain strength from what she and her young son George went through and how they survived. Her civil-service British husband is kept in an adjacent camp and his situation and those of British and Australian POWs are heartbreakingly detailed as well.

In the last pages of this book she makes a very moving statement which greatly affected me, “I now know the value of freedom. In all of my life before I had existed as a free woman, and I didn’t know it. This is what freedom means to me. The right to live with, to touch and to love, my husband and my children. The right to look about me without fear of seeing people beaten. The capacity to work for ourselves and our children. The possession of a door, and a key with which to lock it. Moments of silence. A place in which to weep, with no one to see me doing so. The freedom of my eyes to scan the face of the earth . . . without barbed wire across my vision. The freedom of my body to walk . . . and no sentry to stop me. Opportunity to earn the food to keep me strong.”

This book was a page-turner and I highly recommend it.

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This is a beautifully written first-hand story of a mother’s account of the human will to survive…the struggle to go on for her child’s sake. The setting is a Japanese prisoners’ of war camp in Borneo during WW II. I wish this woman would to have had a spiritual relationship with God to depend on as her rock during this horrible period. The reader needs to have tissues handy.
I was given this first-edition book by my sister-in-law in 2002 as one two first-edition books she got for $1.00 each from Pike County, AL library “share” stack. The other book is Never Dies the Dream by Margaret Landon. Landon is better known for her first book Anna and the King of Siam which became known popularly through the musical The King and I, one of my favorites!

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…This book is far more interesting than depressing. What I especially like is Keith’s even handedness. She writes “The Japanese in this book are as war made them, not as God did, and the same is true for the rest of us. War is always the story of hate; it makes no difference with whom one fights. The hate destroys you spiritually as the fighting destroys you bodily. If there are tears shed here, they are for the death of good feeling. If there is horror, it is for those who speak indifferently of “the next war”. If there is hate, it is for hateful qualities, not nations. If there is love, it is because this alone kept me alive and sane.”

There was a film version made in 1950 with Claudette Colbert. I saw it years ago and was the reason I took this book off the bookstore shelf. It was actually on last night but now I don’t think I could watch Claudette in an internment camp in full make up. Ah, Hollywood.

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