Anton Trouvat: A Dutch magician in the Far East
Continuing a short series of blogs about magicians who were prisoners-of-war in the Far East during World War Two, this blog looks at Anton Trouvat. A Dutch semi-professional magician, he got caught up in the war when Imperial Japan invaded the Dutch East Indies. A promisin g young magician Anton Hugo Trouvat was born in November 1913, a year before the end of World War One. He was born to Dutch parents in Padang, a city in western Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies (an area now known as Indonesia). In the late 1930s, Trouvat worked for Lindeteves-Stokvis, a large Dutch trading company. Part-time, Trouvat was a magician. A member of the Society of Indonesian Magicians, he was regarded by his peers as a promising performer and a leading light in a new younger generation of magicians. When war broke out in Europe, The Netherlands’ government bolstered the defence of the Dutch East Indies colony. It was concerned about Japanese interest in the colony's rich natural resource...