'I took hold of the fence and pressed my face into the wire, asking myself what I had done to be made a prisoner?' On the Indonesian island of Java, eight-year-old Lise enjoys a happy childhood, thousands of miles away from the war raging in Europe. Then, one day in 1942, her friends and neighbours start to disappear. For two years, Lise and her family were imprisoned in POW camps, surviving starvation, illness and brutal treatment at the hands of their Japanese captors - but they never gave up hope. This is the remarkable true story of a little girl who, even in the darkest depths of war, was able to look beyond the barbed wire, to a time when she would be free. First published in hardback as The Blue Door.
Unflinching ... a devastating portrayal of a child's loss of innocence The Observer
Author
About Lise Kristensen
Lise Kristensen was born Lise Gronn-Nielsen in Java, Indonesia 1934, of Norwegian parents. During the Second World War, she and her family were held for over two years in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. After the war they moved to Norway. She was educated in Norway and Germany before qualifying and working as a secretary and then a gymnastics teacher. She went on to study art and became a painter, exhibiting and selling her work in Europe, the USA and Japan. She now lives in Spain with her husband.
