Review ‘When I close my eyes’: inescapable testimonies from the Japanese women’s camps about hunger, humiliation and sexual violence

“All the things I wanted to ask my mother.” This is what Pieter van Huystee explains When I close my eyes his motivations for making that documentary. His mother was in a Japanese women’s camp from 1942 to 1945. She survived, but she remained silent. Or perhaps it was mainly, as sister Karen van Huystee suggests in the film, that she and her brother did not ask about it.

Silence was the manhole cover that covered up the past. But silence was also something that was imposed on these women. In the Netherlands, which was licking its own wounds, in which they ended up after the war, there was little or no room for their stories. Every attempt to talk about it was dismissed with a ‘yes, but it was much worse here.’

The fact that the history of the Japanese women’s camps has remained underexposed for so long is also because there is virtually no archival image of it. And without images, testimonials remain something abstract.

Yet Van Huystee has found images: hundreds of drawings made by women in the camps. Drawings that illustrate life in these camps in a compelling, often lively and sometimes even humorous way. The everyday scenes in the camps, but also the big events, such as the heartbreaking moment when all boys under the age of twelve are taken away.

Van Huystee structures the film in such a way that the testimonies form a chronological picture. Starting with the childhood in the former Dutch East Indies, which the women often experienced as idyllic. During the Japanese occupation, they are held in camps under the guise of protection.

The thirteen women interviewed talk about daily life in the camps and how the situation continues to deteriorate. About the hunger, the humiliation, the sexual violence. The way Van Huystee films them, sitting directly opposite the camera, makes their testimonies inescapable.