Song of Survival: Women Interned

Helen Colijn was a 20-year-old Dutch woman living with her parents on a small island near Borneo when the Japanese invaded in 1941. Shipwrecked, she and her two younger sisters were captured by Japanese soldiers and shuffled from concentration camp to concentration camp for the duration of World War II. This book chronicles their personal travails and the horrible sufferings of the British and Dutch women with whom they were interned. Perhaps more significantly, it tells the remarkable story of Margaret Dryburgh, a Presbyterian missionary who gave her fellow prisoners a means to survive spiritually: the vocal orchestra. Working from memory, she reconstructed the "Largo" from Dvorak's Symphony No. 9 in E minor, and works by Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Ravel, and Grainger--and taught them to a chorus of prisoners. Even the often-brutal Japanese guards were moved by the concerts, Colijn reports. Although this book often glosses over the horrors, it is a moving account of some remarkable women and the music that sustained them.