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Three Came Home

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The captive narrative is a standby in American literature. Every war has produced a crop of such memoirs, and the most remarkable thing about them as a group is there essential sameness. Whether the teller is an woman abducted by Indians in colonial days or a aviator shot down over Vietnam, the experience of captivity is singular.

It is also a difficult genre to present well. Nothing much happens to the POW. A day-by day recitation of starvation and waiting does little to engage the reader. And since most POWs were not writers in their previous life, they lack the kind of literary skill necessary to make a the story live.

That is what makes Agnes Keith's 1947 "Three Came Home" so rich. Keith was a writer before her internment by the Japanese in 1942, and used her skill to present an heartbreaking but ultimately affirming narrative of life inside a jungle prison camp.

Agnes Newton Keith came to British Borneo in 1934 as a new bride. Harry Keith was Director of Agriculture for the colony, charged with making trees grow "where before there were none." They settled in Sandakan, North Borneo, where Agnes translated her love of writing into an award-winning book, "Land Below the Winds." In 1940, she gave birth to a son, named George.

George was not yet walking when war clouds began to gather over Borneo. By late 1941, the Japanese were threatening the invasion of the entire South Pacific. Talk in Sandakan revolved around the likelihood of the Government evacuating all European women and children. Agnes, like many other women, decided to stay with her husband.

Invasion came on January 19, 1942. For the next 4 1/2 months, the 80 European residents of Sandakan lived under virtual house arrest. Agnes suffered a miscarriage under the strain. On May 12, they received orders to be ready to move within the hour, They were permitted one suitcase each. Husbands were separated from their wives and children. By nightfall, Agnes and George were dumped into a leaky old Quarantine Station on Berhala Island. They would not be free again until September, 1945.

While there were countless examples of selflessness, captivity did not bring out the best in all people. Some hoarded food and medicine; others told guards about smuggling operations in exchange for favors. Tempers flared, and pre-war civility fell away. Keith recalled one women telling her: "I hate your guts Agnes, and I'm going to tell you so. Although I'd like to be nice to you, just to keep out of that damned book of yours."

And Agnes was writing a book, at great peril. For the next 4 years, she wrote in microscopic letters on any blank scrap of paper she could find. These notes were then hidden in old bottles, in George's toys, sewn into the linings of their clothes. "Land Below the Wind" had been widely read in Japan before the war, so the Camp Authority frequently searched her belongings for these notes. They never found them.

This running diary chronicled her stay at Berhala and their removal to the much larger Batu Lintang complex in Kuching, where she would spend the balance of the war. As with any prison narrative, food was the dominant theme. The standard ration for POWs was rice gruel, rolls, and tea. They did not always get this, and it was never enough. Eggs and bananas were rare treats. This meager diet was supplemented with pickings from the soldiers' garbage, wild greens, snails, snakes, and whatever else could be scrounged. In four years, they received one Red Cross shipment. Each of the 46 Americans was given one box. These had to be divided among 280 hungry prisoners.

Two groups within the prison kept Agnes going. First were Batu Lintang's 46 children. George and the others literally grew up within the compound. Hunger and exposure was the only life they remembered. They were tough because they had to be, but they were also generous, cheerful, and uncomplaining. At the beginning, Agnes and the other young mothers committed themselves to doing whatever it took to keep their children alive. In the end, Agnes mused, "perhaps they brought us through alive."

The children, and the nuns. More than half the 280 women at Batu Lintang were Dutch or English sisters. To Agnes, a non-Catholic, these women were awe-inspiring. "...I met nuns as women, and sisters, and mothers, and hard workers, and my friends. Here I met them as people who sang, and laughed, and made joke and had fun." Inside prison walls, the sisters held Mass and celebrated holy days. "They prayed for peace, believed it would come; set dates, and hours and deadlines for it--and when it didn't come they said "Thy will be done," and prayed again."

The Japanese did not treat the women as badly as male POWs. Men could be killed on a whim. With the women, the guards usually contented themselves with a slap across the face. Far more frightening was the idea of sexual assault. One night late in the war, Agnes was assaulted by a guard. When she reported this attempted rape, the commandant ordered her to withdraw the charge. Falsely accusing a Japanese soldier was a death-penalty offense. Agnes refused to recant. She was promptly and severely beaten. Ultimately, the commandant decided to drop the matter, but the female prisoners suffered several weeks of reprisals from angry guards in the weeks following the incident.

Completely isolated from the outside world, the POWs did not know when or if help was coming. On August 18, 1945, they received a leaflet drop saying that the British Army was on the way. It was three more weeks of agonized waiting, but the camps were eventually liberated on September 11, 1945. Agnes and George were reunited with Harry, and within a week they were on a transport ship to the United States.

"Three Came Home" is a powerful narrative. Keith did not shy away from sensitive issues; she did not try to hide her anger at having a section of her life stolen from her. One caution: some modern readers may find her use of racial slurs offensive. Put in the context of the easygoing racism of the era and the indignities suffered in captivity, her derogatory comments on the Japanese become understandable, if not excusable. In any case, "Three Came Home" is a moving look at a dark chapter in the Pacific War.

Settled in the States, Agnes finally told Harry about her experiences. "One anticipates a some emotion from a man when telling home that his wife has been attacked, kicked and beaten," she wrote. "Subconsciously, I think I expected a little melodrama." Instead, Harry was quiet and sad, but showed little other reaction. That was a prisoners' life, gender notwithstanding. "I saw," she concluded, "that we had come far from our old concepts of honor and disgrace. In war, we women must fight with all ourselves."

This book contains the wartime memoirs of Agnes Keith. In 1939, Keith published a book "Land Beneath the Wind," describing her life as the wife of a British colonial official in Northern Borneo. She and her husband Harry were on home leave in North America in 1939 when she finished writing the book. However, Harry was called back early to Borneo from his leave because of the war clouds on the horizon. Agnes, who was pregnant, soon followed, and several months later, gave birth to their son George in Sandakan. Although there had been talk of evacuating women and children from colonial outposts in the Pacific, no orders came through for evacuation before the Japanese invasion, and Agnes refused to leave Harry behind voluntarily. Thus, when the Japanese arrived, all three Keiths were still in Sandakan, and were soon interned in prisoners' camps for the duration of the war. In this book, Keith recounts the stories of how she, George, and Harry survived life in the camps. Her tale was so remarkable that it was made into a movie shortly after the war.

Readers of Keith's earlier book will be stunned at the change in tone of her writing. In Land Beneath the Wind, Keith writes with an airy, scattered-brained style, almost as if she were afraid that otherwise, she would be taken too seriously. Indeed, it was perhaps her humor itself that made her first book popular. But the light tone is gone completely from this book. The nightmare of the prison camps, where random beatings were a certainty, but food was often unattainable, and hygiene nonexistent, took away her carefree nature and matured her overnight beyond her years. For more than three years, she struggled daily to find any kind of food for George, from wormy rice to just plain worms. This woman of colonial privilege traded family heirloom jewelry for a chicken, and learned to hoard night soil for use as fertilizer.

From the start, the Japanese camp leader recognized her as a special prisoner, because he had read Land Beneath the Wind. He required her to keep a journal of her camp adventures for future publication to show how "humane" the Japanese treatment of prisoners had been. So every day, after she completed her required prison work, she had to write for this commander about how wonderful camp life was. When that was finished, she secretly wrote up notes describing what life was really like, and hid them in cans buried under their huts or in the latrines. The most amazing part of her experience is not only that she and George and Harry survived at all, but that through it all, she managed to come away from the camps without blind hatred for the Japanese. She recognized that some of the prison guards were evil, but that many couldn't help but obey their superiors. The years of captivity for the Keiths robbed them of their youth, their health, and the better part of George's childhood, but Agnes finds fault not with Japanese people, but rather with the idea of war itself.

As much as "Three Came Home" is a story of war, it is a story of love. Mrs. Keith's love for her husband and son are paralleled with her hatred of internment. She balances the good in people, even the enemy, with the bad. The clear message is that war is what makes people bad. I enjoyed this book. It is beautifully written, with every sentence eliciting some kind of emotion in the reader. Mrs. Keith is an admirable woman for her literary accomplishments and her ability to share her experiences on a very personal level.

I read this book because I saw the movie by the same title with Claudette Coberette (spelling?) from 1950. It was a great movie that made me want to find out more about Agnes N. Keith and her family. Upon researching her, I found out she had written several books before her war experience and several books after the war.

Agnes was on the island of Borneo with her husband, Harry, and toddler, George. Harry Keith was there as part of the English government's efforts. The Keiths knew the war was breaking out, but chose to stay in spite of the dangers. Agnes chose to stay with her husband. In the book she said she never regretted her choice to stay, but did wonder later on if George should have been sent out to stay with relatives.

The Japanese took control of the island when WWII started. All English and Americans were rounded up and placed in prisoner of war camps. The men and the women were separated. Agnes and Harry did occasionally catch glimpses and stolen moments, but for the most part they were kept totally separated during the years.

The book details the daily life of a prisoner. A lot of the book describes the harsh conditions, the lack of food and hygiene. There were a lot of children in the camp. The mothers banded together to take the best care of the children they possibly could. A group of nuns was also in the camp and helped with the children.

What I found most interesting in the book was the amount of underhanded trading, bartering and smuggling which went on in the camp. The prisoners put themselves in great danger to get extra food, clothes, to send mail in and out and to meet with their spouses. They were afraid, but apparently not totally afraid. The book also details their other daily efforts to keep body and soul together. They kept gardens, picked wild berries and weeds, kept chickens under their bunk houses and other very original ways to make things better.

The Japanese took a greater interest in Agnes than in her fellow prisoners because of her fame as a writer. They tried to get her to write progoganda for them. They also were concerned she was doing her own hidden writing. Agnes put herself in great danger to write a continuing journal and keep it hidden. Her effects were searched more often because of her writing.

This book will be of interest to anybody who is a history or biography buff. She tells some details of the war effort. But most of the book is her own personal story.

Some of the other reviews touched on the fact that her attitudes reflect the common attitudes of the 1940s and 1950s. If bigotry and racial prejudice are a big issue with you, you may not like this book at all. For the times, Agnes thinks of herself as very liberal and open minded. In a time when there was a great deal of stereotyping, she is trying to be a great human. However, when cast in our time period, she comes off as having a great deal of prejudice. She talks about race A LOT. And she says things which are very condescending and narrow minded. When she see little Black children who are adopted by White missionaries she says something like, it's clear they and their forefathers are not used to using their mental capacities and it's clear they will never be able to keep up with the other children. At the time, she was probably criticized for having Chinese, Philapino and Black friends. But now it all sounds very antiquated. Which is not bad, it makes us realize how far we have come in our attitudes.

Aside from the racial things, her writing is very descriptive and flowery. She gets deep and philosophical about very odd everyday things and goes on and on like she is writing an essay for junior high. That said, she is an interesting writer able to make what was no doubt a drab ugly existence very interesting.

Agnes Newton Keith also wrote a followup book "The White Man Returns" which details the Keiths life after the war when they returned to the same island. That book doesn't have as much interesting drama, but it is still a good read.

In Three Came Home, Keith tells the story of her survival in a WW11 Japanese prison camp. The book is full of insight, fairness, humor, and wisdom. She does not wear the reader out with moralizing. She leaves out the unwanted detail, but answers the questions that we might want to ask if we'd been there at the time. We are with her in the book: the day to day living with filth and disease, the tyranny, the hopes deferred, th inspiration that comes to her in numerous ways. Then, of course, the release to freedom in Sept. l945

Three Came Home is a well-written, true story of a woman and her son's internment in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Borneo during WWII. Agnes Newton Keith creates a vivid portrait of the conditions under which the prisoners lived and of their day to day lives. She also makes it clear that people are not inherently good or bad; they are often victims of circumstances. Her love for her son and hope that they will be reunited with her husband keep her going and morally-centred. An absolutely excellent book!

Keith, UC Berkeley grad in 1930s, writes of the world of Java, Bali, Borneo as a witty, charming American mother of a new baby -- suddenly out of her $100 1938 evening gowns and lifestyle as successful author of prewar bestseller "Land Below the Wind" and into POW camp. Sketches in my 1946 batik-bound original published book are adorable; spiritual message for world without war or race-hatred vivid and memorable.

After seeing the 1950 Claudette Colbert film version of this book, I was interested in reading the memoir on which the film was based. Agnes Keith was married to a British government officer when the Japanese took Indonesia during the early days of World War II. Keith and her toddler son were taken to a POW camp; her husband spent the rest of the war in a men's camp under even worse conditions. Keith's memoir describes the starvation, the cruelty, the inhumane conditions, disease, torture, hard labor and the women's superhuman struggles to keep their children alive and relatively healthy. The story is not only about survival, but about the power of love. In the book an occasional racist remark, typical of the times, creeps in, but she also occasionally inserts insights into the humanity found even in some of her captors, and certainly in the Indonesian people. The book ends with little bitterness, and primarily a plea for peace. The film was remarkably faithful to the book, sanitizing and softening some details because film audiences weren't expected to see Claudette Colbert fighting rats, living in abject filth, or dropping down to 80 pounds. The film is still very powerful; the book even more so. This is a well-bound trade paperback edition.

I found this book in my mother's collection of old books she has read years ago and shelved to be read again sometime in the future. As a 47 year old, I cannot relate to world war II, let alone being in a prison camp. Agnes writes with tongue-in-cheek humor and very real human emotions. I was inspired by her accounts of the depth of human suffering, and the heights of human kindness. I am such a fan that I have contined to search for and find her other books and have read the next two that were written in chronological order. These books are such that I want my 19 year old daughter to read them so she can learn from real history the lessons of perseverence, faith and hope. For me, this book was more than just an account of a horrendous experience, it gave me hope in the indomitable spirit of decency in mankind. It actually changed me.

I have this original book my father in law had in his library. It has a beautiful cover design. I was also surprised to read this was made into a movie that I have not seen. It offers another glimpse into prisoners of war in other locations, this time Borneo and the Japanese are holding them. It is also about, as are most POW histories, fear, survival, bravery, sickness, torture, bribery, hunger, starvation, death, murder, and freedom for some. I would recommend reading this book. Amazingly,they returned to Borneo a few years later after the war ended, as her husband was re-assigned to that location.