Tjideng was a quiet residential suburb west of central Batavia -- present-day Cideng, in the Gambir district of Jakarta. After the Japanese Empire invaded the Dutch East Indies in January 1942, European civilians were gradually rounded up and confined. The men and older boys were sent to prisoner-of-war camps. The women and children were fenced into a portion of Tjideng's streets, their own former neighborhood converted into an open-air prison. Dwellings ranged from brick bungalows with tiled roofs to huts built in traditional Javanese style from bamboo. Initially, the Japanese called it a "protected area" under civilian authority. The conditions, while restrictive, were bearable. Women could cook their own food and hold church services. About two thousand women and children lived within the perimeter. It was not yet the place Read-Collins would later describe as the worst he had ever seen.

Everything changed in April 1944, when the Japanese military took direct control and Captain Kenichi Sone assumed command. Sone systematically dismantled every remaining comfort. Cooking privileges were revoked. Food preparation was centralized, and the rations that came from the central kitchen dwindled in both quality and quantity. Church services were banned. Sewerage systems broke down. Medicine was withheld even as dysentery and malaria spread through the overcrowded quarters. Sone organized kumpulans -- roll calls -- where women, children, and the sick were forced to stand in the equatorial sun for hours. He ordered head shavings as punishment and approved beatings for minor infractions. Meanwhile, the camp kept shrinking. The Japanese reduced the perimeter repeatedly, even as they forced more prisoners inside. By war's end, the population had swelled to approximately 10,500 people crammed into a quarter of the camp's original area. Every unused kitchen, every waterless bathroom became sleeping space. Death from infection and malnutrition became a daily occurrence.

Japan surrendered on September 2, 1945. Two weeks later, the International Red Cross sent film crews into Tjideng. The footage -- gaunt women, hollow-eyed children -- was shown in Dutch cinemas that December on the Polygoon newsreel. They were the first moving images the Netherlands saw from its former colony after the war. But liberation brought its own dangers. In the power vacuum following Japan's defeat, Sukarno proclaimed Indonesian independence on August 17, and the violent Bersiap period erupted. Thousands of Europeans and Eurasians were killed. Estimates of Dutch civilian deaths range from 3,500 to 30,000. The camps that had been prisons became shelters -- the one place where the former internees were, paradoxically, safer than outside.

In December 1945, the SS New Amsterdam carried 3,800 camp survivors, including 1,200 children, toward the Netherlands. The children were weak after years of deprivation, and measles broke out aboard the ship. Many died at sea and were buried in the ocean. Those who survived the crossing arrived in a country that was not prepared to receive them. The Netherlands was struggling with its own postwar housing shortages and unemployment. Some of the arriving families -- many of whom had never set foot in the Netherlands -- were temporarily housed in former wartime labor camps, including Westerbork, which had served as a transit camp for Jews being deported to death camps. The Dutch government initially tried to restrict immigration from the East Indies. The traumatic experiences of the Japanese camps and the Bersiap were rarely discussed, rarely treated, rarely acknowledged for decades.

Captain Kenichi Sone was arrested after the war, tried, and sentenced to death on September 2, 1946. His request for pardon was rejected by Lieutenant Governor-General Hubertus van Mook -- whose own wife had been among Sone's prisoners. A Dutch firing squad carried out the sentence on December 7, 1946. Among the survivors and their children, Tjideng's memory persisted in quieter ways. Author Jeroen Brouwers, interned there as a child, wrote the autobiographical novel Sunken Red in 1986, excavating the long-term psychological damage. The French translation won the Prix Femina in 1995. Singer Boudewijn de Groot's mother died in Tjideng when he was one year old; he never knew her except through photographs. Petronella Rutte-Dilling, first wife of Izaak Rutte -- whose son Mark would become Prime Minister of the Netherlands -- died in Tjideng on July 20, 1945, just weeks before liberation. The camp left no physical monument at the site. Cideng is now an ordinary Jakarta neighborhood. The suffering happened in houses that still stand on streets that still carry traffic, which is perhaps the most unsettling memorial of all.