The Railway Man by Eric Lomax

PUBLISHER: BALLANTINE BOOKS
PRICE: RM48
SOME books leave readers with a feeling of exhilaration at its
conclusion. Other books inspire, encourage, motivate or even frighten
readers.
Then there are books that leave their readers in tears, and The Railway
Man is one such book. It is about a young Englishman who found himself in
Malaya just before the outbreak of the Second World War. His experiences
as a soldier and then as a prisoner of war in Malaya, Singapore and
Thailand left psychological scars so deep that it took almost half a
century to heal.
Eric Lomax's gut-wrenching story was written as a balm to heal his own
soul. Lomax was one of the tens of thousands of British and Australian
soldiers who found themselves living out the war years behind barbed wire.
In Lomax's case, his PoW experiences led him to work on the infamous
Burma-Siam Railway and then sent him straight to hell. The Death Railway
as it was called was responsible for the deaths of thousands of war
prisoners. The writer's survival from such an ordeal is in itself a
miracle. But the core of Lomax's horrifying wartime experiences is the
almost unbelievable torture by the Japanese Kempeitai. Beaten by the
Japanese military with pick-axe handles for hours until his arms and hips
were broken, Lomax miraculously survived, only to be later subjected to
several rounds of water torture. In the midst of all that unimaginable
pain, Lomax was denied the luxury of death.
He recounted that two of his army friends were also beaten in much the
same way. Their mangled bodies were left out in the hot sun for days.
Somehow they survived, much to the surprise of their torturers. However,
most of them eventually died but not Lomax, who returned to England, got
married shortly afterwards and settled down to a mundane career. But the
hell from which he escaped followed him. Decades later, he would wake up
in the middle of the night screaming. Each time, reliving the agonies of
prison torture and visions of friends dying horrible deaths.
Wondrously, this book is not about retribution but about forgiveness and
courage. Decades later when most of the world have forgotten about the
war, Lomax carried with him the image of one man who came to symbolise the
cruelty of the enemy. The enemy was Nagase Takashi, the interpreter who
was assigned to the Kanburi prison camp where Lomax was held. Lomax hated
his tormentor with a bitterness that turned him into a walking shadow of
fear and self-doubt.
Nagase was the enemy who was constantly in Lomax's presence when he was
questioned and tortured. Call it a miracle of fate, but the two men
emerged from the war, physically intact but victims of painful memories.
In his unbridled account of his PoW experiences, Eric Lomax has
unchained himself from a lifetime of pain, sorrow, misery and nightmares.
This book is as much about the healing power of forgiveness as it is about
the miracles of compassion and love. It is one of the most heart-rending
accounts of wartime experiences that I have ever read. It has blessed the
writer for finding the courage to bare his soul, thus making him whole and
it also blesses the reader who learns that forgiveness is the key to peace
of mind.