The Way of a Boy: A Memoir of Java

J.L. Granatstein is a history professor at York University and co-author
of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Shadows of War, Faces
of Peace: Canada’s Peacekeepers.

There are scores of World War II prisoner-of-war memoirs and an almost
equally substantial literature by civilian internees. This book, written
years later in splendidly lucid prose, by a child internee in the Dutch
East Indies, however, may well be unique. Ernest Hillen was the child of
a Dutch father and a Canadian mother, and they fell into the hands of
the Japanese army after Java fell to the invaders early in 1942.
Separated from his father (and then from his older brother) by the
conquerors, for the next three and a half years Hillen and his mother
struggled to survive. The description of the internees’ world from a
young boy’s viewpoint is striking, not least for its comments on the
Japanese. Hillen, now an associate editor at Saturday Night magazine,
makes no attempt to hide the appalling cruelty of the prison guards, but
there is no bitterness left half a century later; clearly there was
plenty of it at the time, all of it more than justified.
Miraculously—and that is the right word—the Hillen family emerged in
September 1945 intact. This is a superb work, moving and gripping,
balanced and fair.