“Lovely and very poignant” – Nicola Swords, Editor, Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour
Here is a piece I wrote about my grandmother’s courage in the war, for the Dangerous Women Project.
Domei News, then Japan’s only news agency, dispatched reporters to the frontline in Asia and the Pacific. They sent home almost daily the Domei Photo News, which was distributed by the thousands to schools, factories, shops and public places. The Domei News photographer’s task was simple: show the world how content our prisoners are. The […]
“I was very pleased to be able to publish the original article The Perspex Crucifix by Sarah Hilary in 8 magazine, a photography biannual published by Foto8. I was immediately struck by Sarah’s perceptive understanding of the many varied uses of photography: its ability to document, to conjure memory, and also to lie. I was […]
“Fascinating… So lucid and at the same time exposing the pitilessness that your family had to endure. The anguish and tension in the faces is palpable; no child ought to look like that” – Helen Dunmore, author, The Betrayal
“Sarah Hilary throws light on forgotten barbarity at the end of World War II. Sarah weighs the human cost of propoganda in wartime and offers hope that human spirit, and morality, can overcome tyranny” – Stephen Morris, Editor, Bristol Review of Books
To me, the Red Cross will always be linked to my mother’s memory of her first taste of bread and butter, as a little girl held prisoner by the Japanese. She remembers vividly the tiny square of bread and the tinned butter which was “the most delicious thing I’d ever tasted”. My mother was one […]
On January 19th 1942, Japanese troops sailed into Sandakan Harbour in Borneo, taking prisoner the men, women and children of ‘unfriendly nations’. Among those interned was my mother, aged two and a half, and my grandparents. My mother and grandmother were to remain prisoners until September 11th 1945, when the camp was liberated by Australian […]
In July 2008, I met up with four people who were in the Japanese internment camp with my grandparents and mother, near Kuching, 1942-1946. Two of these were brothers in their late sixties whom I’ve not met before, only seen as small blond boys in photos and film footage from the liberation of the camp. […]
Latrine duty was dirty work, two of us hauling a vat into which a dozen buckets had been slopped. We radiated stench. It was a pleasure though to visit Elkes, whose laundry was by the latrines. He was a remarkable man, able to quote passages on subjects from the Civil War to the Suez Canal. […]
Perspex Crucifix 