"The unrecorded life," wrote Iris Chang in her study of Japan's brutal occupation of Nanking, "disappears as if it never existed." For Lise Kristensen, who survived a two-year imprisonment in Java's PoW camps during the second world war, the act of writing is both an exercise in recording an event all but forgotten by the west and an attempt to find "closure". The Blue Door details the merciless treatment of her family at the hands of Japanese soldiers. Opening with the disappearances of Lise's friends, the memoir unflinchingly relates the camps' inhumane conditions and the ritual of tenko in which prisoners are forced to bow to their captors. The family's only respite is finding an abandoned blue door: raised off the ground away from rats, it is a platform from which to remember the world. Perhaps inevitably, Kristensen frequently struggles to find adequate language to describe her experiences. Yet, narrating in the voice of her childhood self, Kristensen's difficulty with words becomes a devastating portrayal of a child's loss of innocence to humiliating cruelty.