They fled Belgium to escape Nazi persecution. They reached the Dutch East Indies, considered the "promised land" for the Dutch, only to be thrown into Japanese concentration camps.
"We escaped one war to enter another one," recalls Lydia Chagoll, a Dutch-born writer based in Brussels. "In 1940, we left Brussels to escape the Germans. In 1942, we were prisoners of the Japanese in Batavia (Jakarta)."
Chagoll describes her family's ordeal during World War II in a book titled "Une Enfance dans les Camps Japonais" ("A Childhood in the Japanese Camps"). Originally written in Dutch in 1981, the book's fourth edition came out in late March in French.
"We were Jews," Chagoll said in an interview. "My father, who owned a weekly in Brussels, was a well-known antifascist. On May 10, 1940, the government called and said we should go away immediately. It was getting too dangerous."