Jeroen Brouwers, a well-known Dutch journalist, writer and essayist, was born in 1940 in Jakarta, Indonesia, then a Dutch colony, as the son of a colonial administration official. During the Japanese occupation of Indonesia, he was taken to a Japanese women's camp with his mother, sister and grandmother. The grandparents, who, like the father, were in a men's camp, did not survive the camp. The surviving family members were repatriated in 1947 to the Netherlands. Brouwers had a hard time adapting to the Dutch way of life. He lived and worked in the Netherlands and Belgium. He has been living in Belgium since 1993.