Chapter One- The beginning of the end.

On the 18^th of July 1932, in Bandung Indonesia, a new baby boy was named. This boy was named Hans Jurgen Vanderwel and little did he know that in around ten years time we would be split up from his two brothers, his mother and his father and be taken to a Japanese POW (prisoner of war) camp, were he would be burnt with cigarettes, tortured and live on little, if any rice a day.

Hans grew up with two brothers, a German mother and an Dutch father.

Hans up until the age of ten was a normal everyday Indonesian boy. He slept on the Bataan wood floor with his brothers, ate rice and traditional Indonesian meals cooked over a small fire, went to a small school and was very grateful of the very few things he got. Sadly however this normality stopped, when one afternoon in the year of 1942, the Japanese raided their house of the family and possessions with his mother and two brothers being taken off to a women’s POW camp, his father went to a men’s POW camp on the outskirts of Indonesia and himself taken as a young boy, also to a men’s camp, although neither of which were his parents camp. Once there he was placed in a cell where not only the officers did but also fellow cellmates torture him. Life was hell as far as my Opa was concerned, and who wouldn’t, with cigarettes being put out on your cold, tender skin and getting little, if any food daily. He called this the beginning of the end. The beginning of his death, the end of everything he had ever hoped for; children, a wife, a house and a new beginning. He lost hope of ever reuniting with his family and friends again, until that special day in 1945 that he would never forget. The day that the world war was declared over and he finally got freed from that hellhole.