LoveReading Says
In February 1942, Olga Morris was a nine-year-old girl living with her family in Singapore when the city fell to Japan’s Imperial Army. Bombs were falling as they tried to evacuate the city by a British ship, only to be refused at the gangway. The next three years were spent living in captivity in the Changi Prison, and with it, went her childhood and innocence.
In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Surviving a Prisoner of War Childhood is Olga Henderson’s harrowing, but ultimately uplifting, account of her life as a prisoner of war during World War Two. Her unflinching memoir details the torture, hunger, punishments and inhumanity that she and her family endured while being held captive.
But the bleak memories are not without the occasional glimmer of goodness. The beautiful birthday card that one of her fellow prisoners made for her. The Japanese guard who would throw cans of evaporated milk over the fence to the prisoners so that babies could have some nourishment. Most touchingly, Henderson recounts the quilt the girls made in secret for their Girl Guides leader for a birthday present. The quilt is now part of the Imperial War Museum's collection.
War is hell, and this memoir gives a necessary and important account of what it was like for a very young girl to be caught in the middle of it through no fault of her own. But knowing that Henderson survived the ordeal and went on to have a rich life full of love, along with children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, offers some shred of hope for the future.
Maureen Stapleton
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In the Shadow of the Rising Sun Synopsis
"When they heard the allies were coming, we were given extra rice to have the strength and energy to dig our own graves."
In February 1942, ten-year old Olga Morris and her family were living in Singapore when the city fell to the Japanese Imperial Army in the biggest defeat in history of the British Forces. Turned back at an evacuation ship’s gangway as the bombs fell, Olga and her parents and siblings were forced to take their chances and hide out until, captured by Japanese soldiers, they were sent on a forced march to the notorious Changi Prison.
There’s a certain stereotype of the British in Singapore in the ‘30s and early ‘40s, which Olga Morris – Henderson as she is now – definitely did not fit. Her family was not part of the privileged Raffles Hotel set, with their big houses and servants. Her father worked in construction, building roads, the city’s hospital and a mosque. Olga and her siblings grew up in Johor Bahru, a diverse part of Malaya just across the causeway from Singapore, amongst children of all faiths and cultures, who played together without a thought to race or class. It was a very happy upbringing.
All that changed in 1942. Olga was playing with her guinea pigs when a British Army officer arrived to tell her mother that the family had just 20 minutes to pack what they could and get out. The Japanese were ten miles away. Olga’s mother grabbed the family photograph album and they ran...
Three years of captivity followed. Three years of disease, malnutrition, deprivation and oppression. Olga and her friends bravely raided the vegetable plot; “dodging the searchlights” and sometimes enduring severe punishments. She stood alongside the other women and children through the ordeal of Tenko in the blazing sun. They were used as slave labour. Halfway through their captivity, Olga’s ten-year-old brother William was put into the men’s camp, where he suffered terrible cruelty that scarred him for life.
February 2022 marked 80 years since the Fall of Singapore and at last Olga is ready to tell the story of her years as a child prisoner of war. It’s a story of great fear and deprivation; of a childhood utterly lost to conflict. It’s also a story of class prejudice and unkindness that didn’t end when Olga was freed from the camp and returned to England as an unwanted refugee.
Yet moments of humour and camaraderie also live on in Olga’s memory. The camp’s girl guide group held clandestine meetings, where they worked on sewing a quilt. The ‘Changi Quilt’ is now held at the Imperial War Museum in London, as an emblem of the guides’ courage and faith. As Olga says, “We always felt the end of the war would come, we lived for it, from month to month and tried never to lose hope.”
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