Obituary: Jan Ruff O’Herne died on August 19th

objects lay in Jan Ruff O’Herne’s dressing table drawer. A necklace of dark amber beads. Silver work from Java where she had been brought up, the daughter of Dutch colonialists. A belt embroidered with tulips from the country she had never seen until after the war. Costume jewellery, gloves, lotions and potions. Her daughters Eileen and Carol loved to riffle through the drawer as children, and she gladly let them.

As night fell, the first officer came to her room. He was bald, fat and repulsively ugly. When she wept, screamed and kicked him, crying “Don’t!” in all the languages she knew, he simply laughed. Then he unsheathed his sword. As she huddled and prayed, expecting to be killed at any moment, he let the sword-tip wander over her body, up and down, up and down, before ripping off what was left of her clothes and raping her.

Yet she also feared the light. It was too hard to reveal this. She buried it deep in shame, and so did those closest to her. When she was reunited with her mother in the labour camp, lying tearful with relief in the hollow of her arms, and her mother stroked her bald head, bald because she had cut off her hair in a bid to make the officers avoid her, she briefly told her. Her mother could not cope with it, and they said nothing more.

Then in 1992, when she was almost 70, God suddenly set her life-task before her. Three elderly Korean war-rape victims spoke out on television and inspired her to do the same. If she backed them up, adding her European voice to theirs, they might together get Japan’s attention. The only hard part of her decision was that she had to tell her daughters the secret first. She could not do so face to face.

God bless her

So painful

Pay.. can’t read

Who's got connection with Vietnam?

What a powerful, sad, victorious story of some very courageous girls/women and their will to live. May this kind of atrocities even happen again.

justice for all comfort women the japs must acknowledge the jap ww2 crimes, apologize to the victims, and pay reparations

Yes, few people like their suffer for they can be repaid aftermaths.

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