Willem van Eelen was born in 1923 in Indonesia to a Dutch doctor who had opened a leprosy colony in what was at the time a Dutch colony. At 17, he enlisted to fight in World War II, during which he was captured by the Japanese and sent to multiple prisoner-of-war encampments across Indonesia. There he was forced to work, often building airstrips, without much food, slowly deprived of calories and inching toward the edge of death. The lessons he learned, his daughter explained to Quartz, would go on to influence how he perceived the world after the Japanese surrendered and he moved to the Netherlands. Quartz