Dutch child survivor of Japan's WWII camps breaks silence

Monaco: It has taken Tineke Einthoven 80 years to be able to speak about what she lived through as a child in brutal Japanese internment camps during...

Monaco: It has taken Tineke Einthoven 80 years to be able to speak about what she lived through as a child in brutal Japanese internment camps during World War II without breaking down.

"Now I can talk about it without crying," said the Dutch woman who was four when she and her family were captured and held in "horrible" conditions in a camp on the Indonesian island of Java.

Her three-year nightmare began early in 1942, a few months after the Japanese attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.

"There was a lot of bombing and the Japanese arrived. We had dug a big hole in the garden to shelter my parents, my brother and my two sisters, as well as the family of our servants," the 87-year-old psychologist recalled, speaking publicly for the first time about the ordeal.

Indonesia was a Dutch colony at the time, and Imperial Japan was keen to get its hands on its oil fields and rubber plantations.