“To meet Anke was to remember her. Vivacious in youth, determined and resolute in her final years, she was a force of nature."Editor's Note:This quote comes from Anna Boon's obituary in the Charlotte Observer July 26-27, 2019.

“(My father) moved to Denmark. He was an engineer. My dad worked for Curtiss Wright for a government contract near Clearfield, Pennsylvania. (Their neighborhood) was just sidewalks…(a) Beaver Cleaver kind of neighborhood. We knew about (the POW…

“They were supposed to still stay in (the) contained area because of the revolutionary Indonesians. They survived 41 months of starving and then you faced the other danger of perhaps as your truck was going down to the ships, the rescue ships, that…

“Their mother died and so, when these children (Monica and Tonneke) were left motherless then someone fostered them, and they were sort of offered to my mother and my grandmother…So my grandmother said ‘well sure we’ll take them’ because that means…

“I had different duties as (a) ‘healthy’ prisoner. I had the kindergarten in the morning while the mothers were working in the fields. If the children were tired from sitting, we would make a walk, looking for pretty stones, count the leaves on the…

“The Japanese did invade Indonesia in 1942. They didn’t really know what to expect, but what they did see were the Japanese soldiers appearing on trucks and then all this…shouting and ordering people around and they would find the very nicest homes…

“She had a younger brother five years younger and his name was Hans. They were going back and forth between Indonesia and the Netherlands, she and her brother, because my grandmother and grandfather felt they needed what they called 'a proper…

“If you know a little about Indonesia, actually the Europeans exploited the Indonesians because they had rubber, oil, sugar, and generally they became a colony of some European nation and it was Holland at the time, the Netherlands. And so, the…