I have been to some of darkest places on earth, not dark in the literal sense, but from the killing fields of Cambodia, to the gas Chambers of Auswich, I have witnessed the depravity of mankind. I have walked over the crushed bones of the dead and heard the stories of those who survived. But here in the sweaty heat of Thailand I learned of the treatment of thousands of men from Britain, Australia and the Netherlands, Thai and Burmese . Men barely surviving on 3 eggcups a day of rice infested with maggots. While all the time being forced to work on the Thai/Burma railway.
In a narrow cutting deep in the jungle, pestered by flies, the ghosts of men no more than skin and bone toiled at the behest of their captors. How they survived I will never know, and I hope, I, or my children never experience the horrors of war.
The stories of crippling disease, of abdominal operations and amputation with little more than a scalpel fashioned from discarded tins.
With hammer, pick and shovel they dug the deep and narrow cutting of Hellfire Pass. The sun so intense that their hands burned to the metal trucks they filled day and night, with the only relief being death. Their lives inconsequential to their captors. A few photos line the route through hell, and it was hell. Photos of the men who survived, surrounded by their families, forever grateful for their lives, forever saddened by the loss of their comrades.
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