Teenage prisoner of Japanese revealed months of rape as a ‘comfort woman’
Jan Ruff O’herne, who has died aged 96, was a 19-year-old Dutch girl living with her family on a sugar plantation in Java, then in the Dutch East Indies, when the Japanese invaded in 1942; two years later she was taken from the labour camp in which she had been interned, and forced to work as a ‘‘comfort woman’’, one among tens of thousands of young women made to prostitute themselves for Japanese soldiers.
For almost half a century, like most victims, she suffered in silence. But in 1992, after seeing a television interview with three elderly Korean women who had decided to speak out, she became the first European to recall in public how she, too, had been raped and degraded.
‘‘Japan would not listen to the
Korean women,’’ she recalled later. ‘‘But when
European women come forward and say, ‘You did that to European women, to Dutch girls, too’, I knew they would sit up and listen – and this is what happened.’’
Jeanne Alida ‘‘Jan’’ O’herne was born at Bandung, west Java, into a devout Catholic family, and as she grew up she wanted to become a nun. When Java fell to the Japanese in March 1942, Jan, her mother and two younger sisters were interned as enemy noncombatants in a work camp.
In February 1944, Japanese officers entered the camp and ordered all single girls aged 17 to 21 to line up for inspection. ‘‘One of them lifted my chin with a stick to see my face,’’ she recalled in a memoir, Fifty Years of Silence (1994). ‘‘They stood there grinning, looking at my legs, at my face, at my body . . . Oh, my God, I prayed; don’t let them take me away.’’
Ten young women were taken away in an army truck, including Jan. Seven were taken to a Dutch colonial house in Semarang converted into a brothel for army officers. ‘‘We were all virgins. So innocent,’’ she recalled. ‘‘We tried to find out from each other what was going to happen to us. To this day I have never forgotten that fear.’’
As Japanese officers arrived on their first night, she led the frightened girls in a recitation of Psalm 27: ‘‘The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom should I fear?’’
Shortly afterwards one Japanese officer, with a ‘‘big, fat, repulsive, horrible face’’, approached her and unsheathed his sword: ‘‘He stood right over me now, pointing the sword at my body. I pleaded with him through my gestures to allow me to say some prayers before I died. With his sword touching my flesh, I fell on my knees to pray . . . The Japanese officer was getting impatient now. He threw me on the bed and tore at my clothes, ripping them off. I lay there naked on the bed as he ran his sword slowly up and down over my body . . . I can find no words to describe this most inhumane and brutal rape.
‘‘At the end of that first horrific night . . .
we huddled together to cry over lost virginity, to give each other comfort and strength. How many times was each one raped that night? What could we do?’’
For the next three months the girls were repeatedly raped. Even the doctor who examined her regularly, to whom she pleaded for help, raped her before every examination, which was carried out in front of any soldier who cared to watch.
After three months, the women were returned to their families in the internment camps with the warning that if they ever revealed what had happened to them, they and their families would be killed. ‘‘The silence began then and there, the silence that was forced upon us,’’ Jan recalled.
She told her mother, and a priest. However, when she said that she still wanted to become a nun ‘‘there was a deadly silence’’. Finally the priest responded: ‘‘My dear child, under the circumstances I think it is better that you
They were warned that if they ever revealed what had happened to them, they and their families would be killed. ‘‘The silence began then and there, the silence that was forced upon us.’’
do not become a nun.’’ She was, she recalled, ‘‘shattered’’ by his response.
After the war ended she met Tom Ruff, a soldier in the British military occupation of Indonesia. They married in 1946 and, after living in Britain, emigrated in 1960 to Australia, where, settled in Adelaide, she became a teacher in Catholic primary schools.
Before their marriage, she told her husband what had happened to her during the war and asked for his patience. For years the couple tried to have children, but she suffered several miscarriages due to internal damage she had sustained from the Japanese. She had surgery and afterwards had two daughters.
For 50 years she carried an ‘‘enormous burden of shame’’, she said. ‘‘I couldn’t help that it had happened, but I was too ashamed. There was no counselling; we were expected to live as if nothing happened.’’
In 1992, when she finally decided to speak out, she told her daughters her secret before travelling to Tokyo to a hearing organised by the Japanese Federation of Bar Associations.
Though her story was less harrowing than those of some of the Korean women, her controlled demeanour while relating graphic details of her ordeal was thought to have made the greater impact in Japan. Where others had spoken of revenge and hatred, she merely sought a frank admission of the truth.
For the next two decades she travelled around the world campaigning against rape in war, and to support all former ‘‘comfort women’’ in their demands for a full apology and compensation.
She refused to take part in a US$2.5 million Japanese Government compensation programme for Dutch victims in 1998, which she criticised as a half-hearted attempt at silencing victims. When, in December 2015, Shinzo Abe – who had previously referred to comfort women as ‘‘a made-up story’’ – offered a weakly worded apology, along with millions of dollars of compensation, it was limited to victims in South Korea.
In 2001, she was awarded the Order of Orange-nassau by the Government of the Netherlands. She was appointed an Officer in the Order of Australia in 2002.
Her husband Tom died in 1995. Her daughters survive her. –