Olga Henderson was interred in a POW camp in Singapore at the age of 9 after her family fled their home in Malaysia following the Japanese invasion during World War II
Ordinary, seemingly innate things suddenly trigger the memories â like pulling her shower curtain closed in the morning, or sitting in the hairdresser’s chair to have a haircut.
They are flashbacks to events that happened over eight decades ago, but for 91-year-old Olga Henderson, it is still as if they happened yesterday. Like others her age, Olga was a child when the Second World War broke out. But while others remember air raid shelters, rations and evacuations, her recollections are far more horrific â of squalid prison camps, terrifying executions and fleeing along rivers of blood.
Aged nine, Olga’s blissful childhood with her family growing up as expats in Malaya â now Malaysia â was blown apart when, two years after the start of the war, Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy and entered the Axis. At first confident that the British colonies in South East Asia were protected, her family watched in horror as the country Olga had lived in all her life quickly fell to the Japanese Imperial Army in December 1941.
When the naval fortress of Singapore was then captured just as easily, followed by the largest surrender in British history, they knew they were on their own and at the mercy of a pitiless invader. After hiding from Japanese soldiers as they indiscriminately butchered civilians on the streets, Olga and her family were labelled âenemy aliens’, and for the next three years were prisoners in brutal internment camps.