Jakarta: "Guess you will be thinking I've gone up in smoke. There is plenty of it about," Australian Army nurse Kath Neuss quipped in a letter dated February 6, 1942.

It was characteristic Kath: a fun-loving, outgoing woman with a wicked sense of humour, whose letters home from Malaya and Singapore, where she served with the Australian Army Nursing Service as part of the 8th Division Australian Imperial Force, help bring her back to life.

Australian Sister Kath Neuss ws gunned down in the Bangka Island Massacre.

Ten days after she wrote the letter Sister Neuss was dead; executed on Bangka, an island east of Sumatra, in a massacre that ranks among the bloodiest and most infamous war crimes carried out by the Japanese during World War II.

Sixty-five years later Michael Noyce discovered a little round leather box in his mother's study. Both of his parents had died and Mr Noyce, from Sydney, was clearing up their belongings. The contents of the box still gives him shivers. His mother had kept letters Kath Neuss - her best friend and her husband's sister - had sent during the war.