Three came home

In this docudrama, American author Agnes Newton Keith recounts her time spent in Japanese internment in Borneo during WWII. In 1941, she and her husband, Harry Keith, a colonial British official, had already been living in Sandakan, the capital of British North Borneo, for several years, with their then four year old son Georgie, when they knew the invasion by the Japanese was imminent, that invasion, made all the more clear with the attack on Pearl Harbor, which occurred on December 7, 1941. She, the lone American in a small community of Brits, and the other westerners were at first allowed to live as they had before the invasion, until the Japanese interred them in POW camps, the men separated from the women and children, the two camps separated by only a few hundred meters, thus there being general knowledge between the two camps what was happening as a collective. Things went from bad to worse when the women and children were moved, the ultimate location unknown to their husbands, to another camp on Kuching, a several day sail away. The women had to deal not only with disease, primarily malaria, in the squalid conditions, but brutality by the Japanese guards. The double edge sword for Agnes was being in the good books of Colonel Michio Suga, the head of the camps in Borneo, he a western educated man who appreciated her kind account of East and Southeast Asians in the book she had written and published on life in Borneo. What was arguably worse for her was not knowing anything about Harry, most specifically if he was dead or alive.