Review from Library Journal:

COLIJN TELLS THE remarkable story of her family's internment by the Japanese in the Dutch East Indies during World War II. Her account grips the reader from the very first pages, relating the events leading up to the family's capture, the tragedy that internment brought, and ultimately their release at the end of the war. The family was separated in captivity, but Colijn and her two sisters were able to remain together with other Dutch, Australian, and English women.

Reflections on the hardships of prison life are sobering: Internees relied on a variety of rituals, such as lectures and language study, to carry them through the darkest days. A vocal orchestra was formed to help distract and comfort all involved from the horror they were living through. The "Captives Hymn," composed by one of the internees, is a testimonial to the faith the women had. Song of Survival will bring new dimension to the courage that was the hallmark of World War II. For public libraries.

-- Dorothy Lilly, Grosse Pointe North H.S. Lib., Mich.

From The San Francisco Chronicle:
Celebrating the Will to Survive
by Bill Workman

HELEN COLIJN OF Menlo Park is a survivor, and not just because she has reached 75 years on life's calendar.

It's the three years she defied death from the malnutrition and disease that took the lives of many women and children at a Japanese internment camp for civilians, in what is now Indonesia, during World War II.

A retired editor at Sunset Magazine, Colijn, a native of Holland, has now published a book about those grueling experiences. However, Song of Survival: Women Interned (White Cloud Press: Ashland, Oregon) is less a litany of mistreatment and the horrors of deprivation, and more a remarkable story of the courage of the women who endured, and of music's healing powers. Colijn, then 21, and her family were swept up in Sumatra by invading Japanese troops right after Pearl Harbor. They were captured after the boat they were trying to escape in was sunk by Japanese fighter planes.

Colijn and hers sisters Alette, 15, and Antoinette, 19, were separated from their father, an oil company lawyer, who later died a prisoner, and their mother, a Red Cross nurse. Eventually, they were crowded into a barracks camp with 600 other Dutch, British, and Australian women and children.

The prisoners included the wives of government officials, military personnel and businessmen, as well as teachers, nurses, missionaries and nuns. More than 200 died before the camp was liberated at war's end in 1945.

Colijn, a tall, thin, reserved woman who favors the long wool stockings and knitted print sweaters of her Dutch heritage, says that from the first days of captivity, many of the women sang or hummed songs together to keep up their spirits.

Before long, a choir of 30 prisoners had formed, and for two years they performed classical music a cappella, simulating the sounds of an orchestra, for the other prisoners. Vocal arrangements were scratched down from memory on smuggled copy books.

"It seemed a miracle that among the bedbugs, the cockroaches and the rats, among the smells of the latrines, among the fever, the boils and the hunger pangs, women's voices could recreate the surging glorious music of Debussy, Beethoven, and Chopin," recalls Colijn. The camp guards were furious when they stumbled onto a secret rehearsal. But soon, even some of the Japanese officers were sitting in on the makeshift concerts.

After the war, Colijn wound up in the Bay Area, married and divorced a diplomat, translated and tutored in German and French and led European student tours before she took on her magazine editing job.

In 1983, her sister, Antoinette Mayer, of Washington, DC, who had saved the arrangements of the captive choir, donated the frayed manuscript to Stanford University's music archives. That began a series of events that led to a reunion of nine of the surviving choir members in the Bay Area, largely arranged by Colijn; a recording of the original concert selections by the Peninsula Women's Chorus, and the filming of a 1986 TV documentary on the choir's internment in Indonesia, with Colijn as consultant.

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