They wouldn’t let me compare Gaza to the Japanese internment camps

On Wednesday 16 July 2025 I was due to be interviewed by one of the Dutch daily newspapers about 15 August – the anniversary of the day on which we inmates of the Japanese camps in the former colony the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) were liberated by the Allies. I had gladly agreed to the interview, for I had vivid personal memories of that time.

From the age of eight to eleven I lived in such camps with my mother, sister and younger brother, while my father was interned in a male camp a long way away from us. Halfway through that period we were transferred from the Kramat female camp to the Tangerang female camp for Jews, because we were children of a Jewish father. Our mother had only been allowed to come with us because she had said she was also Jewish, which was not true.

I had apple pie and tea all ready when the reporter came to start the interview. I began by saying I wanted to make something clear, namely that I would be unable to talk about my time in the camps without comparing it to what was now going on in Gaza.

The reporter was visibly shocked – whatever did I mean by that? I said that the people in Gaza were in a concentration camp, just as we had been in the Dutch East Indies. The reporter indignantly replied that concentration camps were places where people sent to be gassed, and that no such thing had happened in the Japanese camps or in Gaza. I protested that I knew all about the gas chambers, and that most of my Jewish relatives who had been living in the Netherlands at the time had been killed there, but that by no means all the Nazi camps in Europe had had gas chambers – for instance Neuengamme and Ravensbrück, where a lot of people died, but from forced labour and starvation, just like in the Japanese camp on the Burma railway. And in Gaza people were also being shot at from watchtowers when trying to escape, just as we had been in the Japanese camp, the difference being that we had bamboo fences strung with barbed wire, whereas Gaza is surrounded by electrified fences. And we were also being starved and denied medicines, so that people were dying every day, including children of my own age. And there were other similarities, and unlike being imprisoned you were guilty of nothing but having views the authorities did not like or belonging to a particular ethnic group, in my case being white-skinned. You didn’t know how long your captivity would last – in my case it was years. And there was the threat of violence all round us, which we were forced to watch in order to keep us under control. But there were also other differences – bombes weren’t being dropped on us.

The reporter waved all this aside, and said that the newspaper was only trying to commemorate the 15 August anniversary. I replied that I felt you could only commemorate it if you didn’t want what had happened back then to be repeated, and that this was now happening in a terrible way. I was then told that the reporter had read and liked my booklet “The goose snatches the bread from the ducks: my childhood in a Japanese internment camp on the isle of Java”, as well as my website. I replied that this was nice to hear – and that it would have made it clear that I had turned the psychological damage I had sustained in the camps into a lifelong struggle to prevent such things from ever happening to anyone again.

But no – if my condition for an interview was being allowed to make such comparisons to Gaza, it would have to be discussed with the boss first. And so the reporter left without having touched the apple pie or drunk the tea. The next day I received a short message:

‘[17/7, 17:36] Dear Anne-Ruth, I have submitted your conditions to the chief of reporting. After discussing them, we have decided not to interview you about the 15 August commemoration. Best wishes, the reporter’

To which I replied: ‘Dear reporter, thank you – I understand, and it was what I had expected. But I cannot do otherwise, as you will also understand. These are troubled times. Best wishes, Anne-Ruth Wertheim’

I felt strongly supported when a few days later, on 21 July 2025, even the Belgian king Philippe mentioned his views on what was now happening in Gaza in his speech marking the Belgian national holiday: I join all those who denounce the serious humanitarian violations in Gaza, where innocent people are starving and being killed by bombs while trapped in their enclaves.

https://www.bnnvara.nl/joop/artikelen/ik-mocht-geen-verband-leggen-tussen-de-jappenkampen-en-gaza

( I have deliberately omitted the names of the newspaper and the reporter, for I feel I should focus on the essential question of whether people should be able to compare their own experiences in public forums. But that is not the same thing as equating them – there are similarities as well as differences!)