There are many people with amazing stories to tell here in Singapore, especially from during the Japanese Occupation in the Second World War, but there are also some fascinating ones from across the Causeway.

Take 90-year-old Yap Chwee Lan, for instance, who sheltered young girls among the clothes in the basement of her husband's laundry shop, and also rescued many of her neighbours facing the line of Japanese fire.

Her amazing story of heroism was expertly told by R.AGE, an online magazine run by young Malaysian journalists, and tells the story of how a 15-year-old Yap put grown Japanese soldiers seeking young girls as "comfort women" in their place, while calling out friends, family and neighbours from line-ups of people suspected of aiding the anti-Japanese resistance.

Learned Japanese from hairdressing boss

Yap picked up Japanese from her employer, who hired her as a 13-year-old whose family faced great poverty at the time. She started working for him, she said, as he paid her a salary of $6 a month instead of $3, the going rate.

After the Japanese started bombing Singapore, she, her husband and her family rode bicycles up to the town of Tampoi, also in Johor — at the time, there was an influx of people escaping from Singapore to Johor amid the shelling.

Her knowledge of the language proved to be her most powerful weapon, protecting her bicycle from being taken by a soldier who wanted it, and ensuring safe passage for her and her family to an abandoned temple, where the Japanese even provided her and the refugees staying with her flour, rice, sugar and even cut-and-cleaned pork.

The Japanese respected her because of her fluency, and offered her a job as a liaison officer in Singapore. She took it, but quit after a week when she realised every Singaporean she spoke to was eventually killed by the Japanese.

Saved people on death row; sheltered young girls at night

Yap described how she saw people on their knees, with their hands tied behind their backs with wires.

“A lot of them called out my name, begging me to save them. Then the Japanese asked if I knew these people. I said, ‘Yes, I do’. A lot of them lived in my neighbourhood. When I identified them, they were freed.”

Unfortunately, she couldn't rescue everyone, and one of the people she knew was her mother's friend's son, whom she inadvertently missed out. Yap recounted a very painful memory of the boy's mother crying in the street after he was killed.

Additionally, she said she would shelter seven or eight girls in the basement of her husband's laundry shop each night during the Occupation, and daringly question the Japanese soldiers who came round looking for young girls in Japanese, "Why do you need women? You need housekeepers?"

Impressively, they never attacked her because of her fluency in the language, even giving her family a special permit for safe passage wherever they went.

Still recognised on the streets

Yap shares, with great embarrassment, that the descendants of people whose lives she saved continue to acknowledge her as "the Saviour Grandma", or simply address her as "Ah Ma", whenever they see her, wherever she goes.

"I was walking around town and someone would call out 'Ah Ma'. It was overwhelming. They would say, 'This is the Saviour Grandma'.

Your own family calling you 'Ah Ma' is fine, but if other people call me that it makes me speechless."

Such humility, and yet such an amazing story. Read the whole thing here, and watch the video below: