WOMEN SANG IN WAR PRISON TILL DEAD OR FREE : SURVIVOR'S BOOK INSPIRES FILM.

Byline: Jean H. Lee Associated Press 

For nearly two years, the women held in a World War II Japanese prison camp on Sumatra endured hunger and illness by serving afternoon ``tea,'' swapping language lessons and sewing ``liberation dresses'' from sarongs.

Then, one December afternoon in 1943, 30 women - Dutch, English and Australian - assembled beneath a bamboo-covered pavilion in the camp courtyard to give a Christmas concert.

Their music soared over the island humidity and monsoon mud as each woman sang an instrumental part in a vocal, orchestralike rendition of Dvorak's ``Largo.''

``Shivers ran up my spine,'' recalled Helen Colijn, 76, of Menlo Park.

``You can well imagine. You were used to the little ditties, and suddenly you get a symphony,'' she said. ``In those surroundings, it was so unexpected.''

That moment served as the inspiration for the Bruce Beresford film ``Paradise Road,'' set for nationwide release this month, starring Glenn Close, Pauline Collins and Frances McDormand.

Japanese invasion

Colijn was 21 in February 1942, when the Japanese landed in Indonesia, then the Dutch East Indies. Leaving behind their mother, a Red Cross nurse who had been taken prisoner, Colijn and two younger sisters set sail for Australia, along with their father.

After the Japanese sank the liner, Colijn and her father drifted with 23 others, squeezed into a lifeboat for six days and nights, before landing back on Sumatra.

They trudged for days through the jungle before they were reunited with Colijn's two sisters, 16-year-old Alette and 20-year-old Antoinette.

Then, they were captured.

The prisoners were transported by cattle cart to two camps: one for men, another for women and children. The Colijn sisters joined Eurasians, Dutch nuns, Australian Army nurses and the wives of British military men - about 400 women and children.

The Colijns squeezed into a windowless cubicle they called their ``Valhalla'' and began to make do with little food, no medicine and intermittent tap water. Later, they were moved twice to barracks where personal space amounted to a 20-inch-wide section of a cot.

``There was never any privacy,'' Colijn recalled.

``You could never sit alone and talk. And the isolation - that was the hardest. All those weeks and months and years not knowing what went on in the rest of the world.''

Making life bearable 

When it became clear the war would continue, the prisoners set about making camp life bearable. Some cooked. Others cleaned out the bath stalls.

They met for religious worship and held classes for the camp's 90 children. The British taught the Dutch English, and together they published a newsletter with an old typewriter found at the camp.

For fun, some met for afternoon tea parties. The table was a suitcase adorned with flowers plucked from bushes just beyond the barbed wire. The ``tea'' was brewed from roasted rice and sipped from coconut shells.

One group carved a mah-jongg set, chiseling wood from the rafters. Others exchanged elaborate recipes scribbled on scraps of paper, then shared an imaginary 10-course meal by recalling aloud each taste and tidbit of Yorkshire pudding, Dutch steak with gravy, roast beef and side dishes.

``We made something out of nothing,'' Colijn says. ``That was my camp motto.''

But there was illness, malnutrition, sadness. Finding little compassion from the Japanese, who forced them to bow daily to the emperor and beat those who showed disrespect, the women depended on the black market. A prized pocket watch went for a vial of quinine, a few coins for a sliver of soap. Messages went to their husbands with help from nuns, who hid the notes in the folds of their skirts and slipped them to male patients at a Christian hospital.

Between the first Christmas at camp and the approach of the second, illness overwhelmed the prisoners: malaria, dysentery, malnutrition, beriberi and fever.

Solace in singing

Two women, a British engineer's wife named Norah Chambers, who had studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and Margaret Dryburgh, a Presbyterian missionary, assembled a choir as much to pass the time as to rekindle the prisoners' spirits.

The singers gathered in a ramshackle shed behind the kitchen, illuminated by a lone light bulb. There, Chambers and Dryburgh taught them line by line, hum by hum, how to sing each instrument's part. The scores were copied on the backs of old plantation reports.

``I knew something secretive was happening because my sisters would disappear and say they were singing,'' says Colijn.

The prisoners readied themselves for the concert by putting on the dresses they saved for liberation, passing around a red tube of lipstick, slicking their hair with water. At the pavilion, someone had scratched the word ``orchestra'' into the dirt.

Colijn said she thought, ``Is it a joke? An orchestra - ridiculous. What can you do? They don't even have instruments?''

Dryburgh came to the podium.

``This evening we are asking you to listen to something quite new, we are sure: a choir of women's voices trying to reproduce some of the well-known music usually given by an orchestra or a pianist.

``So close your eyes, and try to imagine you are in a concert hall.''

And so it began: Dvorak, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky.

A Japanese guard, at first enraged, stopped to listen.

``He was so moved by it that he sat down,'' Colijn says.

The guards invited themselves to the next concert, sitting on rattan chairs while their prisoners gathered on the ground. As a gift, the officers presented the singers with five cans of Spam.

The concerts ended when more than half the orchestra's members, including Margaret Dryburgh, were dead.

In September 1944, packets of bread and butter came floating down over the camp. The prisoners knew then the war was over.

Reunited later in Singapore with their mother, the Colijn sisters broke the news to her that her husband had died in the Sumatra camp. Together, the sisters headed to California, where Alette and Antoinette had been born, to start anew.

Story lives on

Then, one day in 1980, Antoinette Mayer came across the scores she had carefully saved from the camps. Seeing they were fading, she donated them to Stanford University.

That led to a 1982 concert and an internationally televised documentary based on the women's ordeal. Colijn wrote a memoir, ``Song of Survival: Women Interned,'' published by White Cloud Press in 1995.

Beresford wrote his film, ``Paradise Road,'' based on Colijn's and other survivors' stories. The arrangements are sung by the Malle Babbe Women's Choir of Haarlem, Holland.

Colijn, portrayed in Beresford's film as a young Dutch girl named Helen, joined several other camp survivors in attending the Los Angeles premiere of ``Paradise Road.''

``When we think back about camp, we like to think about the music as something that was good,'' she says. ``Music heals.''

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

Photo: (1) Author Helen Colijn points out where she and her sisters were held among Japanese prisoners and where their father died in World War II.

(2--ran in BULLDOG edition only) A pre-World War II photo of author Helen Colijn, left, and her sisters appears on the jacket of a book that inspired the film ``Paradise Road.''

(3--ran in BULLDOG only) ``There was never any privacy.. . And the isolation - that was the hardest. All those weeks and months and years not knowing what went on in the rest of the world.''

- Helen Colijin

prison camp survivor

Associated Press