Jan Ruff O'Herne, war-rape victim of the Imperial Japanese Army, died on August 19th, aged 96

All sorts of objects lay in Jan Ruff O'Herne's dressing tabledrawer. A necklace of dark amber beads. Silver work from Java where she had been brought up, the daughter of Dutch colonialists. A belt embroidered with tulips from the country she had never seen until after the war. Costume jewellery, gloves, lotions and potions. Her daughters Eileen and Carol loved to riffle through the drawer as children, and she gladly let them.

On her birthday she would beg friends and family not to give her any. They were such a waste of money, so soon over. But this was not the reason. Flowers reminded her of the day in 1944, in a rambling house in Semarang, when she and six other Dutch-Indonesian girls realised that the place they had been abducted to was a Japanese military brothel. The Japanese had invaded Indonesia two years before, driving all the Dutch settlers into labour camps where they were kept in squalor, close to starvation.

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