Anneke Mason was born Johanna Vermeulen (1930) to Dutch parents on Java, where her father was a high school principal. When the Japanese invaded Indonesia, she and her family spent the war years in captivity, most of the time in a concentration camp deep in the jungle. In two interviews, Anneke narrates her memories of the deportations and forced marches (the subject of her poem, "lima, lima"), of the heat and the hunger, the death of prisoners, and the way the prisoners still managed to organize themselves and get some fragile communication between the men's and women's camps. Even at the end of the war, the prisoners remained in the camp for some months, now protected by Gurkha troops from the Independence activists in the kampungs. Because her mother suffered from beriberi, the family was one of the first to get passage home to the Netherlands, though her parents were later sent back to Indonesia, where her father helped to teach Bahasa Indonesia as the new language of the country. Anneke traces her schooling in Holland after the war, her emigration to the U.S. in 1957, her first job at Harvard Business School, and eventually her arrival in Tacoma. Anneke was a longtime staff member of the University of Puget Sound from the time she took a position as Administrative Assistant to Bob Albertson, head of the Humanities Division. She helped run many programs, including the Dutch Exchange Program and Pac Rim, and she earned university degrees in Comparative Literature, Education, and Teaching.