he book The Forgotten Ones: Women and Children Under Nippon has long been a reminder of the suffering endured by women and children in Japanese internment camps across the Netherlands East Indies. Although the cover image is not of him and his mother, one of those “forgotten ones” was Roeland Martin.
Roeland was born in Magelang, a town in Central Java not far from Ambarawa. His early life was overshadowed by war. His father was imprisoned in a Japanese POW camp, while his mother struggled to raise him under the harsh realities of the occupation. Roeland spent his formative years inside one of the Japanese internment camps at Ambarawa, about 45 kilometres south of Semarang.
The Japanese had turned Ambarawa into a complex of camps by converting old KNIL (Royal Netherlands East Indies Army) barracks and the surroundings of Fort Willem I. Civilians—mainly Dutch, Eurasian, and other Allied women and children—were forced into these camps between 1942 and 1945. Conditions were severe: overcrowding, inadequate food, rampant disease, and daily uncertainty shaped life behind the fences.
For children, the effects were devastating. Many were malnourished and delayed in their development. Roeland himself did not begin to walk until the age of five, his body weakened by years of deprivation. When the war ended, he tried to attend school, but he could not keep pace with the lessons. By the age of eleven he left school altogether, and turned to farm work to support himself.
At sixteen, still carrying the physical and emotional scars of his wartime childhood, Roeland made a decisive choice: to seek a fresh start in a new country. Two years later, at eighteen, he migrated to Australia. There he joined the Army, where friendship and discipline helped him learn English and begin to build a new life.
Roeland Martin’s story reflects both the brutality of the Ambarawa camps and the resilience of those who endured them. From a childhood marked by hunger and illness in Central Java, he went on to remake his life in Australia, determined to move beyond the shadows of war while carrying its memory forward.
