Ilse Sharing Her Life and Stories of Being in a POW Internment Camp in WW2

Ilse is a friend of mine. She lived near a friend of mine and when I was serving in a leadership role in my congregation, I visited her a few times. 

Later, as her sight failed, she had a hard time seeing if her home was clean. She would do what she could but several women in the church got together and deep cleaned her home and I gave her my number telling her to call me if she needed anything. 

She had dogs and two of the three passed away soon after that and she asked me to help her take her remaining dog to the groomer so I loaded them up and took them to get groomed. With her eyesight getting worse and living alone, her family decided to have her live with family so they moved her to another city to live with a nephew but he had small children so it was hard for her being so far from her son and living with babies so she moved back into town.

I didn't know about her moving back into town and was SO happy this morning to get a call from a friend asking if I would be able to take Ilse home after our main church meeting. I was so happy to know she was back. 

Years ago when helping her, I would ask her questions about her life and found out that she was held in interment camps and her father and brothers were in prisoner of war camps / prison. She lived in the camp for four years from age 12 to 16. 


I asked her if I could video tape her story as I found it so interesting and I tried to ask her questions to get her talking. I was so interested in how the war affected her life and that of her family. One of her brothers was killed when a torpedo hit his ship while he was in the Navy and her brother-in-law died due to lack of food and stress. 

She shared that they would be fed red rice with vegetables twice a day and she couldn't digest it so they planted sweet potatoes as things grew well in the climate there and she ate sweet potatoes for four years straight and ended up getting Beriberi due to lack of vitamins in her diet and swelled up. 

 After the war she was shipped as a refuge to Holland and they lived with her aunt because Holland had been flattened due to bombings. After a month they found and moved into a one bedroom apartment for the entire family. They lost everything during the war.  

I thought it was amazing that she has lived such a long and prosperous life having had such trauma in the middle of her teen years. 

Hearing her story makes me so grateful to live in the United States and during a time when we haven't had war on our soil and that we have all been able to attend school and I have never had to go without food. I pray that my children will never know the suffering and struggles that so many had to endure due to the wars. 

I am grateful to have the opportunity to know Ilse and learn about her life and see how she was able to overcome that and immigrate to the US. She is such a sweet and loving woman and at nearly 90 she is so alert and her memory is better than mine. I think there is so much we can learn from those who have gone before. 

I am blessed to have the chance to video her as I was so sad I missed that opportunity before. I suggest you take the time to interview your family members asking them the questions that you may want to know after they have passed on. I was grateful to be able to do that with my father recently this past Valentines Day. Here is a link to that post. 

Have a Blessed Day!