Jan Ruff O 'Herne, a Dutch human rights activist and a former victim of the "comfort women" system by the Japanese army, died on Monday morning at her home in Adelaide, Australia, the Adelaide-based Advertiser reported. She was 96.　　 　　

　Jan Ruff O'Herne

Jan Ruff was born in 1923 in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). In the Second World War, after the Dutch East Indies was occupied by the Japanese army, she and her parents were taken to a Japanese internment camp. Later, along with a number of girls she was taken to the port city of Semarang by the Japanese army, where they were forced to provide sexual services. They were raped and trampled by the Japanese army.

Liberated after the war, she married her husband in 1946 and lived in the UK. The couple moved to Australia in 1960 and settled ever since.

For decades, the pain she had suffered was indelible in her heart, and she refused to speak of it. Until 1992, when she watched a television program in which Korean victims of the "comfort women" system demanded an apology and compensation from the Japanese government, she was moved and encouraged.

In December 1992, Jan Ruff attended the "International Hearing on Women Wartime Victims" held in Tokyo, revealing her experience of victimization to the public for the first time, and called for justice for victims of the "comfort women" system by the Japanese army. In the following decades, she remained a staunch advocate for victims the system, speaking out against wartime sexual violence around the world. Her 1994 autobiography "Fifty Years of Silence" published in six languages, chronicling her experience and struggle.

Jan Ruff at her home in Adelaide on 6 July 1996 (source: The Advertiser)

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Jan Ruff worked with the Commission on Human Rights, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Amnesty International to deliver speeches, sharing her story in many countries including Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the United States, Britain and the Netherlands. In 2007, she testified as a witness at a hearing on the human rights protection of Japanese "comfort women” held by the US House of Representatives."

Jan Ruff (photo: NRC Handelsblad)

Jan Ruff was awarded a Knight of the Orange-Aassau by the Dutch government in 2001; she was awarded the Order of Australia by the Australian government in 2002 and was awarded the Centennial Medal by Australian Prime Minister John Howard in 2004 for her contribution to the Australian society.

The article is contributed by the Research Center for Chinese Comfort Women of Shanghai Normal University