About the Author: Boudewyn van Oort

Boudewijn van Oort was born to Dutch immigrant parents in 1938 in the Transvaal province of South Africa, near Johannesburg. The family spent five years in Indonesia ( 1940-1945) and returned to South Africa as refugees.

In 1951 the family settled in Canada. After High School training at Lisgar Collegiate Institute in Ottawa, Canada, he took a degree in Geology and Physics at Carleton University, Ottawa. On a  Rhodes scholarship he studied  “modern Greats” in Oxford, where his interest in philosophy was aroused by Professor Peter Strawson, and his interest in modern history was stimulated by Sir Martin Gilbert, then newly appointed official biographer of Sir Winston Churchill. In his spare time he rowed in the College Eight. Oxford granted him a BA and MA degree.

Upon graduation he was employed in the oil and gas industry as a Petroleum Engineer, serving for short periods in Nigeria and Venezuela. He was engaged in North Sea Development between 1966 and 1984, from its very beginning to its peak as an oil and gas province. He assisted with the establishment of a Post Graduate school for Petroleum Engineering at Heriot Watt University. For family reasons he moved to Victoria, Canada in 1985, where he was employed by the Provincial government until his retirement in 2002.

The impulse for writing Tjideng Reunion was aroused by his father ‘s 1990 funeral on the Sunshine Coast, near Vancouver, British Columbia. “The Pacific war ended officially on August 15, 1945,” writes Boudewijn, “but we who became trapped in it had to register our own ending, to slay personal dragons.”

As the author notes with typical restraint, “The writing of this book presented a peculiar challenge: for a three-year period, March 1942–May 1945, covering our internment in Bandoeng (now Bandung) on Java, there is almost no contemporary surviving written material describing the lives of some fourteen thousand fellow citizens.”

Boudewyn van Oort was in 2017 formally recognized under Dutch legislation as a long time sufferer of a form of PTSD.  The main effect was a thirty year period of professional success marred by social distress.  He is currently  writing a book  in which he attempts to describe hi s immediate post war years from this perspective.

PUBLICATIONS

2020: Series of articles about the Internment experience in general in the Dutch language paper, de Krant, published in Toronto,  The Author focused on the surviving lists of names from the various POW camps in the former Netherlands East Indies, and the tragic light these cast on the events. In his last article of the series he focuses attention on the after effects of the POW experience  for children.

2017 : Het verhaal van Hartley, in de Krant ( January); A story about the remarkable book “Myn Kamp maar niet door Hitler

2010: Presentation to CAANS ( Victoria): Mundus Vult Decipi, ergo Decipiatur: an expose on teh reason for writing Tjideng Reunion

2009 : Het verhaal van Kees Harm , in de Krant May: the remarkable story of  a fellow POW child prisoner and his post war struggle to find his feet