Song of Survival (Paradise Road) Pb: Women Interned [Paperback] Colijn, Helen

Sumatra, 1942. When the Japanese invade the Dutch East Indies, hundreds of women and children are captured and thrown into internment camps. No Red Cross parcels. No medicine. Starvation rations. Helen Colijn was one of them — a Dutch teenager who survived three and a half years of brutality by doing something unexpected: forming a vocal orchestra. With no instruments, no sheet music, and barely enough strength to stand, these women created symphonies from memory, singing four-part harmonies in the mud. This is the true story behind the film *Paradise Road*, written by someone who lived it. Colijn's memoir is unflinching about the horror — disease, beatings, watching friends die — but also about the stubborn, irrational power of music to keep people human when everything else has been stripped away. For readers of *Unbroken* and *The Nightingale*.