Jan ruff oherne biography
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Jan Ruff-O'Herne, 93-year-old Australian former 'comfort woman', still waiting for ursäkt from Japan
Jan Ruff-O'Herne, 93, stands in the front garden of her beautiful stone house in Adelaide.
Key points:
- Adelaide woman Jan Ruff-O'Herne was a WWII bekvämlighet woman
- She wants the Japanese Government to apologise and offer ersättning to victims
- She hopes Julie Bishop will bring the issue up with Japanese Foreign Minister
A great grandmother, she has many reasons to look back on her life with immense satisfaction. Sustained by her talented, artistic family, närd by her deep Christian faith, she describes herself as "lucky".
But there were dark days that have shaped her life too.
As a young woman, she was imprisoned bygd the Japanese during World War II, along with her family and many other Dutch civilians in what was then the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia.
But worse was to come. One day Japanese troops came to man a urval, dragg
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Jan Ruff-O'Herne was born on January 18, 1923 in the Dutch East Indies, a former colony of the Dutch Empire. O’Herne had a happy childhood with her family, until 1942, when Japanese forces occupied Java. During the Japanese occupation, O'Herne and thousands of Dutch women were forced to perform hard physical labor. O’Herne, her mother, and sister, were interned as an enemy noncombatant in a prison. In February 1944, O'Herne was one of the girls chosen and taken by Japanese officials to a colonial house in Semarang that was converted into a brothel called "The House of the Seven Seas.” In 2007, O’Herne recounted this selection process: “The officers … paced up and down the line, eying us up and down, looking at our figures and our legs, lifting our chins. They selected ten pretty girls. I was one of the ten. We were told to come forward and pack a small bag. The first things I put in my bag was my prayer book, my rosary bead
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Remembering Jan Ruff O‘Herne and her fight for the recognition of “comfort women”
Content warning: violence, sexual assault
Sitting in the Australian War Memorial, a small white handkerchief signed by seven women and dated 26 February 1944, silently holds testament to a crime which for decades remained omitted from the public memory of WWII. It belonged to Australian, Jan Ruff-O’Herne; 21 years old when she signed her own name, who had dreamed of becoming a nun once the war was over.
Jan passed away on 19 August last year at 96. She was a great-grandmother who after the war, made a life for herself in Australia, with a loving husband who knew what she had survived. But despite the happiness she later found, Jan lived carrying the physical and mental trauma of an unfathomable human rights abuse which she – and as many as 200,000 other women across Asia between 1932–1945, had been victim to at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA).
Jan Ruff O’Herne