Historians & scholars overlook plight of Allied children and young people in WW2 Japanese internment camps (42min)

Host Sue MacGregor meets five survivors who, as children, were confined in Japanese internment camps during World War Two. This programme tells the story, largely overlooked by historians and scholars, of the children and young people who had their freedom snatched away from them for the duration of the war. Used to the splendours of colonial life, they had to adjust to an existence that was at best cramped and fearful, at worst a living hell of abuse and deprivation.

To mark the 60th anniversary of VJ day, we hear from five people who spent the Second World War in internment camps in the Far East.

Joyce Nelson, who was 19 and very newly married, recalls the exhausting worry as her husband succumbed to malaria 12 times, with no medicines available.

Jeremy Gotch was 11 when he left camp, but weighed only 3 stone [42 pounds]. He describes the constant hunger, the helpless terror he felt when the guards bayoneted his teddy bear -- and the glee when the blade set off the growl mechanism and gave them all a shock!

Anne Moxley tells the story of how they stopped the Japanese guards taking the milk from their Red Cross donated goats -- by peeing in it.

Rose Raymond, who was forced into hard labour and had to build her own coffin as those around her dropped dead, remembers the poignant experience of listening at night to a young internee singing Ave Maria through the window of her cell.

Barbara Sowerby was only 8 when she saw a man being tortured by being forced to drink water and beaten. She remembers how her family stuck together, keeping their spirits up in the grimmest circumstances.