Francoise Maricle was born two months prematurely in a Japanese internment camp in Indonesia during World War Two. She was in three different camps with her mother and older brother for the next three years. She survived in spite of the horrible physical and mental conditions. After the war she and her family had to leave the tropics they had loved so much to return to cold, damp, and overcrowded Netherlands. They were not welcomed by the European Dutch because of the severe housing shortage due to the war. She continued her struggle to overcome the physical and emotional challenges without any help from her family or any one else. She knew that she needed to find peace and tranquility somehow, somewhere. She met her husband in Germany and later immigrated to the United States. She is very happy and grateful to be living here. Francoise Maricle was counseling women who had been in very abusive situations. She found out that she needed to tell her story to be able to connect with them. They had only seen how she was living now. After hearing what she had endured they were much more willing to work on their own problems. She has been asked to give talks about her life story and has been interviewed on public radio as well as on public television. It has taken her fifteen years to write the book because of the deeply buried emotions that surfaced while writing. There were long periods of time where she couldn't think about the book or write at all. She now lives in Arizona, a place she loves because of the wonderful climate and the wide open spaces, with her husband of 44 years.