My stepmother, Wilhelmina Tempest, who has died aged 94, was one of the last survivors of wartime Japanese internment camps. She then retrained as a nurse, going to Britain to pursue an interest in burn injuries and plastic surgery.
Her grandfather was a Dutch protestant missionary in West Papua. When the second world war reached Sumatra (then a Dutch colony) in 1942, her father, Willem van Hasselt, was the headteacher of a bush school. Conscripted into the Dutch army, within three weeks he was captured by the Japanese and sent to work on the Burma railway. He survived because, being born and bred in Sumatra, he had better resistance to the local diseases.
