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Title details for The Flamboya Tree by Clara Kelly - Available

The Flamboya Tree

Memories of a Mother's Wartime Courage

by Clara Kelly
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“The Flamboya Tree is a fascinating story that will leave the reader informed about a missing piece of the World War II experience, and in awe of one family’s survival.”
—Elizabeth M. Norman, author of We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan by the Japanese
“It is a well-known fact that war, any war, is senseless and degrading. When innocent people are brought into that war because they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, it becomes incomprehensible. Java, 1942, was such a place and time, and we were those innocent people.”
Fifty years after the end of World War II, Clara Olink Kelly sat down to write a memoir that is both a fierce and enduring testament to a mother’s courage and a poignant record of an often overlooked chapter of the war.
As the fighting in the Pacific spread, four-year-old Clara Olink and her family found their tranquil, pampered lives on the beautiful island of Java torn apart by the invasion of Japanese troops. Clara’s father was taken away, forced to work on the Burma railroad. For Clara, her mother, and her two brothers, the younger one only six weeks old, an insistent knock on the door ended all hope of escaping internment in a concentration camp. For nearly four years, they endured starvation, filth-ridden living conditions, sickness, and the danger of violence from their prison guards. Clara credits her mother with their survival: Even in the most perilous of situations, Clara’s mother never compromised her beliefs, never admitted defeat, and never lost her courage. Her resilience sustained her three children through their frightening years in the camp.
Told through the eyes of a young Clara, who was eight at the end of her family’s ordeal, The Flamboya Tree portrays her mother’s tenacity, the power of hope and humor, and the buoyancy of a child’s spirit. A painting of a flamboya tree—a treasured possession of the family’s former life—miraculously survived the surprise searches by the often brutal Japanese soldiers and every last-minute flight. Just as her mother carried this painting through the years of imprisonment and the life that followed, so Clara carries her mother’s unvanquished spirit through all of her experiences and into the reader’s heart.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    October 19, 2011

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781588361509

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781588361509
      • File size: 3585 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      December 1, 2001
      How little Kelly and her family survived internment by the Japanese during World War II with the help of her redoubtable mother. A big publisher favorite.

      Copyright 2001 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Booklist

      February 15, 2002
      As a small child, Kelly spent nearly four years in a brutal Japanese concentration camp in Indonesia during WWII. She survived because of her mother, who cared for her three children (including a newborn baby), found them food and shelter, nurtured them with unwavering love under appalling conditions, and insisted on honesty, decency, even good manners, as they coped with filth, hunger, and disease. The child's-eye view of her brave parent makes this memoir a moving, immediate account of a relatively unknown wartime drama. From a pampered Dutch colonial life on the "exotic" island of Java, complete with a household of sweet, faithful, "native" servants, the young mother suddenly found herself assigned the job of cleaning out the camp sewers as well as keeping her children safe. The portrait is idealized, but the facts of family survival are undeniable. The most unforgettable moment frames the story: at the end of the war, as they stagger off the crowded boat in Holland, sick and starving, Kelly's grandmother demands of them, "Why didn't you escape?"(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)

    • Library Journal

      February 1, 2002
      During World War II, the Japanese army trapped the Dutch who lived on Java. Men and older boys were forced into hard labor, and women and younger children were kept in squalid concentration camps under horrible conditions. Kelly was four years old in 1942 when she, her mother, and her two brothers (one only several weeks old) were taken to Kamp Tjideng. In a matter-of-fact voice, Kelly recounts four hellish years under increasingly worsening conditions as the family survived, chiefly by the sheer determination of her mother; she maintains the viewpoint of a child throughout. The title comes from a painting, the one possession that they managed to keep. Other than several books by Laurens van der Post and Ernest Hillen's The Way of a Boy: A Memoir of Java (Penguin, 1995), few books on the Dutch experience in the South Pacific exist in English. For public and academic libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/01.] Katharine L. Kan, Allen Cty. P.L., Fort Wayne, IN

      Copyright 2001 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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