Prisoner of Japan: A Personal War Diary - Singapore, Siam and Burma 1941-1945 [Good Friday 1944]

GoogleBooks.com ^ | April 19, 2013 | Sir Harold Atcherley

[Colofornian]

7 April 1944 Good Friday; at least I suppose it must be somewhere. I remember the 'Karfreitag' I spent in Heidelberg seven years ago. A party of us had an early supper and then went into Mannheim to the opera house to hear 'Parsifal,' which on this day would be playing in every opera house in Germany. I remember returning to Heidelberg, tired and slightly stunned by 5 hours of concentrated Wagner, the first time I had ever heard of 'Parsifal' in its entirety. The next time I heard it was about a year later at the Colon Opera House in Buenos Aires. Last Good Friday we had just heard of our impending departure up-country. Now here we are still in very much the same surroundings, except that there are considerably fewer of us. It is now nearly 9:00 p.m. and it is almost dark, except for a full moon, which shines out intermittently from behind heavy rain clouds scudding across the sky. There is the eternal, uninterrupted chirping of thousands of crickets, and there is a quiet heaviness in the air as if we are all pausing, tired out, to try to work up enough strength to carry us over the next period of our imprisonment. From one of the huts at the far end of the camp comes the sound of an old piano, hammering out 'When the lights of London shine again,' with a few indifferent voices joining in. Every few minutes we can hear the Korean guards stamping in and out of the guard hut, 50 yards from where we are sitting on the doorstep of our hut.

Our evening meal we finished over two hours ago, and we are all feeling horribly empty...

[Colofornian]

From a different Internet link:

In the latter part of WW2, more than a ... million European and American soldiers were taken prisoner by the Japanese in Malaysia. They went on to suffer deprivation and brutality, most of them failing to survive. I was fortunate enough to be one of the survivors. During my time as a prisoner I kept a diary, which I was able to bring home with me.
Source: Prisoner of Japan: A Personal War Diary - Singapore, Siam and Burma 1941-1945: Front Cover Sir Harold Atcherley Memoirs Publishing, Apr 19, 2013 - Biography & Autobiography - 404 pages

[Guenevere]

Bttt

[ABN 505]

I think that more people should learn what the Japanese were doing in WWII, they were as bad or worse than the Germans. My brother who has lived in Japan for the past ten years is always rattling on about the wonderful Japanese culture, I finally told him it was American culture that civilized Japanese culture and it took two Atomic BOMBS to convince them of the superiority of ours.that

[luvbach1]

The first bomb was just to get their attention.

[Menehune56]

Unit 731