"IN THE EVENINGS , as we played bridge, we could look out from Tjandi, across Sompok, and see the lights of the harbour. Behind us, further up the mountainside, the beautiful holiday resort of Kopeng was situated."

In 1941, this was the glorious view from Gon Boissevain's new house in the city of Semarang in "the Dutch East Indies," as described in her book Concentration Camp for Women in Java. As the title suggests, the idyllic evenings didn't last long.

The book (published in Dutch, and now partly translated into English) consists of Gon's memories, intertwined with her friend Lennie van Empel's diary of that time. Its opening paragraph hints at the detail in the book, describing the severe deprivations faced by women and children interned under the Japanese occupation: "As I read Lennie's diary, the memories came back ... of hunger, illness, fear, and over-crowdedness. The sensation of being buried alive, without news from loved ones, utterly dependent on rumours for information ... and powerless to change anything."

Gon entered the camp with two young daughters. The older was Romeé. As we talked together, Romeé told me she feels that the love and prayers of her grandmother—a Christian Science practitioner in Amsterdam—protected her from any immediate trauma as a result of her ordeal. However, traumatic memories of being a toddler in Camp Lampersari flooded back to her when she read her mother's book, and, she recalls, "Tears flooded out of my eyes." More than that, something snapped inside. She went from being a normal young mother with toddlers of her own, now married to Englishman David Hindle, to being so severely disturbed mentally that she soon found herself committed to a mental institution, facing a course of electric shock treatment.

When Gon heard about this in her postwar home in the Netherlands, she prayed for her daughter and asked a Christian Science practitioner in England to meet her daughter just before she entered the institution. After talking to Romeé and David about God's healing love, the practitioner gave Romeé a Christian Science Hymnal to keep with her.

Romeé remembers feeling so frightened by her situation in the mental institution that she didn't open the hymnbook for several days. When she did, though, everything changed. She recalls reading hymns at random and feeling "as if a door opened, and warmth and love burst in." The Christ, the omnipresent communicator of God's love, reached Romeé right there, lifting her up.

That ended the nightmare situation. Romeé gestured to a nurse that she didn't want further treatment, and the nurse must have recognized the change. She respected her wishes. After interviews with psychiatrists, Romeé was released, never to return to the institution nor to any form of mental disturbance. The Christ had proved the assurance given in Science and Health that "Truth is always the victor" (p. 380).

While on a skiing holiday, many years after life in Camp Lampersari, Romeé won another important post-battle victory. A large group of Japanese skiers arrived and headed toward a very dangerous, icy slope that Romeé had been advised to avoid. She unexpectedly found herself elated that these Japanese skiers might come to harm. Just as quickly, though, she inwardly shouted, "No, God!" She explains, "Just reaching out to God, I said, 'No, no, they are Your children.'" As quickly as the vengeful glee had come to thought, she found release from it, through glimpsing the spiritual truth of everyone's value to their common Parent, God.

This led to practical change. Romeé bought Japanese consumer goods for the first time. More important, she became conscious of the need to stand guard over her thinking.

A hymn that helped, and continues to help, Romeé in spiritualizing her thinking, talks of the Christ breaking all dreams of error—destroying all that would deny God's reality and goodness. Applying this idea to her own experience, Romeé concludes, "We know that [it] is not true [that God causes war], and therefore war is a dream, a nightmare we have to get out of through prayer and by breaking through the mesmerism." As Romeé talked, it became clear that by mesmerism she meant the mesmerizing belief in life as mortal and material, with related discords, such as warfare and disease.

What happens when the Christ does break the dream of error? A stanza Romeé especially likes in that hymn says:

To spend an afternoon with Romeé is to see these promises validated. Despite her harsh start to life, she exudes joy and is clearly living a beautiful and confident life, which she attributes to Christian Science. "Freedom did not come when I got out of the camp. Freedom came when Science and Health came into my life and I started to use it with the Bible and the Christian Science Quarterly. I began to feel more confident, and started to see people as they are, made in God's image and likeness, pure and perfect."

Romeé's cherished home in the Wirral district of northwest England can be seen as a tangible symbol of the spiritual recompense God brings "for every tear." Before Romeé and David got married, they came to her dearly loved grandmother with a litany of reasons why they couldn't find a house. The response, spoken with the loving authority of one who understands, and has consistently experienced, God's impartial capacity to provide needed good, was simple: "Romeé, there is a house for you!"

Within days of her grandmother's words, and Romeés recognition of the deep, divine veracity behind the words, she and David found their home. It overlooks the mountains of Wales across the Dee Estuary, and at night they see "little sparkly lights like a string of pearls" across the water behind the house. When Romeé described this by phone to her grandmother, the reply was, "Dear Romeé, that is exactly the view your mother described to me when she was in Semarang, in the house you were born in, and now you've got back what you used to have. Start living, girl!"

Romeé clearly has done that. Her story gives encouragement to anyone still struggling with unresolved war wounds or nursing unhealed resentment toward a perceived "enemy." It shows how the Christ—the recognition of the God-sustained individuality of one and all—is a powerful ally in the fight to put the tragedy of war years behind, victory by victory. css