Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2225717 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 392 pages

From Booklist
With the Japanese set to invade Sumatra, Rita's Dutch Indonesian parents, fearing that their 12-year-old daughter will become a comfort girl, disguise her as a boy. Throughout WWII, her true identity is kept secret; no one guesses that the boy, "Rick," is a girl. Initially, Rita does clerical work and is sent to school to learn Japanese. Her mother soon dies, however, and she, her aunt Suus, and two younger brothers are separated from her father and sent to various camps. "Rick" becomes the official camp interpreter and works closely with the commandants. This work sustains Rita and allows her to make things better for her family, other prisoners, and even the Japanese. Despite being the victim of an attempted homosexual rape by a Japanese soldier, Rita remains optimistic. She is too naive to comprehend the ugly realities of war. Simply told and successfully incorporating cultural and historical facts, this a unique and moving memoir. Karen Simonetti
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

A Teenage Girl's Survival
The life of a teenager remembered by herself as a much older woman puts an interesting perspective on this story. As if being captured and held by the Japanese for 3 and a half years at the age of 13 or so is not interesting enough, this girl lived the experience by working in close quarters with the Japanese disguised as a boy for the whole time.

Rita's memories of her early life in this environment were written as a much older woman, but none of the detail of those days has been lost, even though they may at times be overlaid with the sentiments of a much older and wiser person attributed to her younger self.

Living a privileged life as a Japanese interpreter and office worker in the camps, she was not subjected to much of the poor treatment meted out to her fellow prisoners, and seems stunned at times that they should have resented her better treatment. Nevertheless, her achievements at such a young age of learning Japanese from scratch to become an interpreter, holding down a job, helping out her family, negotiating the adult male Japanese world, surviving the difficult world of the internees and staying safe throughout it all are to be respected.

Rita writes about her experience before, during and after the war, with a focus of course on the Japanese run camps, the effect it had on the rest of her life and her resulting belief that that she could do anything with hard work and application.

Recommended for those with an interest in the history of this time and for those who would just like an interesting read.

Better than the newer version
This book was trimmed and re-released - Disguised: A Wartime Memoir

This has more detail, including the final two chapters explaining what happened to the family during the Dutch war for independence, and briding the gap between the end of World War II and when the author moved to the US.

BTW - the review of this by BOOKLIST has some glaring inaccurcies. For example, the author was NOT "sent to school to learn Japanese". She had a job as a clerk working with Japanese government, and saw the announcement and signed up on her own - she told her supervisor afterward (she was the first to register). She worked very hard at the course - and that effort is why she became translator and camp clerk.

And her mother was seriously ill from two years before the author was born, i.e., had been ill for 16 years before passing away during a time the family was allowed to live out of the POW camp for over a year.

And about that Japanese soldier's attempted rape - she escaped. You can read the book for the details.