Today I’m in Kanchanaburi Thailand and visited the Bridge on the River Kwai – although the Thais changed the Oliver’s name to match the famous film and book and not confuse the tourists!

Plus the JEATH museum run by a monk and supported, after a change of heart but a little late, the commander of the local Pow camp near here.   I also saw the moving exhibits of the Death Railway Museum including personal effects, clothes and letters rem fine real soldiers – naval and air and infantry etc – who were caught And then sent to work on the rail line.

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 Completed in 16 months instead of the 5 years estimated, men worked 18 hours a day for up to three years, on two cups of salted rice often rotten too.  Disease, skin and bone, lacking vitamins they were forced to clear jungle, build mounds to lie the rails along and carry heavy wooden or metal beams and rails in tropical heat and rains!

Punished harshly if they couldn’t work or slacked off, thousands died between 1942-45 with British, Australian, Dutch, American and Asians in the main.  The personal stories, relics, keepsakes they kept and carried, and photos, Ames and numbers all recorded on paper, metal later, cigarette tins,or mess tins and even drawings by a dying man…

Well worth my time and energy and to walk on from the bridge into the jungle track a little, where I was photographed in exchange for photographing a young Asian boy, who may have been himself Japanese.  I had read somewhere on Facebook this week that we cannot hold current generations to blame for the actions of their people or families years ag …so true today then if he was…

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