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Welcome to Nihil Alienum: books and blogs by David Gormley-O'Brien

Bangka Island

Sister Vivian Bullwinkel

Vivian Bullwinkel was the sole survivor of the massacre of 21 nurses on Bangka Island in World War II. She spent the following 3 years in Japanese internment camps in Sumatra. She appears in An Attractive Naivety, and in reading her diaries, notebooks, and her testimony at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials in December 1946, I was struck by her extraordinary courage and leadership.