Shared Experience: British Women and Children Interned in a Japanese Prison Camp

Art and War

• Introduction
• Battle
• Work
• Leisure
• Service
• Casualties
• Captivity
• Home
• Artists

Skeletal figures carry out daily domestic activities inside a wooden hut. The British civilian population was interned in Syme Road when Singapore fell to the Japanese in 1942. After the camp was liberated, the inmates continued to live there, having nowhere else to go. However, the painting has an underlying theme of cleansing – the bath filled with water, the swathes of white sheets, and the draped washing suggest a quiet redemption from the dark days of imprisonment.

Paintings

• British Prisoners of War, Italy
  Paul Bullard
• Blind man in Belsen
  Alan Moore
• Roberts Hospital, Changi
  Murray Griffin
• Bodies in a Grave, Belsen
  Alex Colville
• Human Laundry, Belsen: April 1945
  Doris Zinkeisen
• Refugees in Udine, 1945
  Edward Bawden
• British Women and Children Interned in a Japanese Prison Camp, Syme Road, Singapore
  Leslie Cole
• Yes Sir
  Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack