
And not long thereafter we also ended up in a camp, a camp for women and children. And after we’d been there a year, the Japanese started sending everyone who was Jewish to a different camp. They were simply mimicking Nazi Germany with which Japan was allied with.
My mother was not Jewish but my father was, so that meant me and my brother and sister were all half Jewish. That meant we were forced to move to that Jewish camp and leave behind our non-Jewish friends. It remained unclear for a long time whether my mother was also going stay behind. That was until she decided to lie and claim she was Jewish too. Ultimately they let her accompany us and so I had my second secret to keep. I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone that my mother was not actually Jewish and that we were only half-Jewish.