I remember V-J Day. Do you?

It was Aug. 14, 1945, when the Japanese Army surrendered. It was the official ending of the protracted conflict known as World War II.

Today you can read about it in the history books or watch it on TV.  The official celebration will be on Sept. 2.

On that day, I remember standing on our front porch with my mother beating on pots and pans with a wooden spoon. Our neighbors were doing the same thing. We were celebrating the end of a period of worrying about loved ones in faraway places, of ration books, food shortages and the beginning of hope for the future.

My old Marine pal, John Druce, was in the South Pacific and wanted to go home and begin his civilian life, but Uncle Sam had other ideas and sent him to China where he and the Marines were supposed to referee the fight between the Communists, the Nationalists, and the Japanese Army. But, that is another story.

For one of Boothbay Harbor’s favorite citizens, Annemarie vanDeventer Apollonio, V-J Day began as just another day in a Japanese prison camp ringed with wire, where starvation and death lived a few yards from the fetid sewage trench, and brutality was the norm for the thousands of women and children whose only crime was staying alive. The day ended in joy.

Today, the smiling woman, and ever willing community volunteer has vivid memories of holding on to the hem of her mother’s dress as her mother was beaten by a camp guard. Her crime? Failing to hear a guard’s command to cease washing her clothes.

Her story took place on the other side of the world in the island nation we now call Indonesia. In the late 1930s, one of the islands, then known as Java, was part of the Netherlands colonial empire called the Dutch East Indies.

Annemarie was born in 1938 to a well-off family headed by her father, Frans, a tea merchant. It included her mother, Sofia, and a brother, Gijs.

In March 1942, after the Japanese Army invaded their island, her father, a military reservist, and other men were called up for Army duty.

The women and children, left by themselves, organized themselves into groups, and communicated by banging on gongs. Her mother sewed coins into the seams of dresses in the few days before they were rounded up, forced to climb into pick up trucks and taken to a prison camp.

“It was an abandoned stable, there was not much privacy,” she said. Captivity  would be their lot for the next 3 1/2 years.

The daily menu (if you could call it that) was usually old corn, some women grew vegetables and made soup with grass. Once in a while, they were given an egg and tapioca. Other times, they acquired food on the sly.

“Sometimes my mother would trade with the natives through the fence. Once she got me a treat by trading her underpants for a banana,” she said.

The women worked together washing clothes, cooking meals and trying to care for the sick and dying. “We had no schooling. Mother used to try to teach my brother to read and write by making lines in the sand with a stick. We learned to make do with what we had,” she said.

After nearly four years of fear, she noticed some planes flying low over their camp. This time, they did not bear the red “Rising Sun” markings of the Japanese military.

“One day, we no longer saw the Japanese. It was in August 1945, and we were all called together, as they hoisted the Dutch flag over the camp.

The crowd included some Dutch soldiers and her mother recognized one of them. She asked if he knew Frans (her husband).”

“Yes,” he said. “He is right over there.”And, he was.

Somehow, her family and her father, had survived. For them, V-J Day became a celebration.

In a few days, a British Army unit of Gurkhas came and took charge. That was the beginning of the end of her captivity. Within a few months, the family sailed to Holland where they rebuilt their lives.  Annemarie later moved to Canada, and visited Camden where she met her husband, Spencer Apollonio, a marine biologist who served as commissioner of Maine’s Department of Marine Resources.

It has been 73 years since she spent V-J Day in a prison camp, but her memories of that place and time still hide just under the surface of her brain.

Not long ago, photos of crying immigrant children triggered them again.

“I remembered holding on to my mother’s dress while she was beaten and being afraid of being separated from her.”

“For some reason, I started crying.”