Forbidden Diary

"Written just five years after the end of World War II, Margaret Sams's memoir testifies in unforgettable detail to life in the internment camps...It is a moving portrait of a woman turning away from conventional morality and struggling with conscience, hunger, disease, and fear. Ultimately, it is a portrait of courage, survival, and love" -- Back of cover.

"Forbidden Notebook promises a new cohort of readers, appetites whetted by the works of Elena Ferrante, Elsa Morante and Natalia Ginzburg. Translator Ann Goldstein has reinvigorated the text.” —Joumana Khatib, The New York Times Book Review "A wrenching, sardonic depiction of a woman caught in a social trap." —Kirkus (starred review) "Reading Alba de Cespedes was, for me, like breaking into an unknown universe: social class, feelings, atmosphere." —Annie Ernaux, Nobel Prize laureate and author of The Years With a foreword by Jhumpa Lahiri, Quaderno Proibito is a classic domestic novel by the Italian-Cuban feminist writer Alba de Céspedes, whose work inspired contemporary writers like Elena Ferrante. In this modern translation by acclaimed Elena Ferrante translator Ann Goldstein, Forbidden Notebook centers the inner life of a dissatisfied housewife living in postwar Rome. Valeria Cossati never suspected how unhappy she had become with the shabby gentility of her bourgeois life—until she begins to jot down her thoughts and feelings in a little black book she keeps hidden in a closet. This new secret activity leads her to scrutinize herself and her life more closely, and she soon realizes that her individuality is being stifled by her devotion and sense of duty toward her husband, daughter, and son. As the conflicts between parents and children, husband and wife, and friends and lovers intensify, what goes on behind the Cossatis’ facade of middle-class respectability gradually comes to light, tearing the family’s fragile fabric apart. An exquisitely crafted portrayal of domestic life, Forbidden Notebook recognizes the universality of human aspirations.

A moving memoir of childhood in Dutch colonial Java, coming of age in wartime, and the trauma of life in WWII Labor Camps run by the Japanese. As a boy growing up the Dutch island colony of Java, John K. Stutterheim spent hours exploring his exotic surroundings, taking walks with his younger brother and dachshund along winding jungle roads. It was a fairly typical life for a colonial family in the Dutch East Indies, but their colonial idyll ended when the Japanese invaded in 1942, when John was fourteen. With the surrender of Java, John’s father was taken prisoner. Soon thereafter, John, his younger brother, and his mother were imprisoned. A year later he and his brother were moved to a forced labor camp for boys, where disease, starvation, and the constant threat of imminent death took their toll. Throughout all of these travails, John kept a secret diary hidden in his mattress. His memories now offer a unique perspective on an often-overlooked episode of World War II. What emerges is a compelling story of a young man caught up in the machinations of a global war—struggling to survive while caring for his gravely ill brother.

Draws on letters & diaries of American wives, missionaries, teachers, nurses, and spies to uncover their heroic tales while captives of the Japanese during World War II.

During World War II the Japanese imprisoned more American civilians at Manila's Santo Tomas prison camp than anywhere else, along with British and other nationalities. Placing the camp's story in the wider history of the Pacific war, this book tells how the camp went through a drastic change, from good conditions in the early days to impending mass starvation, before its dramatic rescue by U.S. Army "flying columns." Interned as a small boy with his mother and older sister, the author shows the many ways in which the camp's internees handled imprisonment--and their liberation afterwards. Using a wealth of Santo Tomas memoirs and diaries, plus interviews with other ex-internees and veteran army liberators, he reveals how children reinvented their own society, while adults coped with crowded dormitories, evaded sex restrictions, smuggled in food, and through a strong internee government, dealt with their Japanese overlords. The text explores the attitudes and behavior of Japanese officials, ranging from sadistic cruelty to humane cooperation, and asks philosophical questions about atrocity and moral responsibility.

More than five thousand American civilian men, women, and children living in the Philippines during World War II were confined to internment camps following Japan's late December 1941 victories in Manila. Captured tells the story of daily life in five different camps--the crowded housing, mounting familial and international tensions, heavy labor, and increasingly severe malnourishment that made the internees' rescue a race with starvation. Frances B. Cogan explores the events behind this nearly four-year captivity, explaining how and why this little-known internment occurred. A thorough historical account, the book addresses several controversial issues about the internment, including Japanese intentions toward their prisoners and the U.S. State Department's role in allowing the presence of American civilians in the Philippines during wartime. Supported by diaries, memoirs, war crimes transcripts, Japanese soldiers' accounts, medical data, and many other sources, Captured presents a detailed and moving chronicle of the internees' efforts to survive. Cogan compares living conditions within the internment camps with life in POW camps and with the living conditions of Japanese soldiers late in the war. An afterword discusses the experiences of internment survivors after the war, combining medical and legal statistics with personal anecdotes to create a testament to the thousands of Americans whose captivity haunted them long after the war ended.