Dutch Japanese Prisoner of War__world history and facts

Dutch Japanese Prisoner of War__world history and facts

Jan Bras was the son of a Dutch planter in Indonesia. He was the youngest child of eight children. In World War II he became a Japanese prisoner of war (POW).

 Elizabeth Day wrote in The Guardian: “From the formative ages of 18 to 21, Jan Bras was a Japanese prisoner of war.

 When the Japanese invaded the Dutch East Indies during the second world war, he was transported by “hell ship” and cattle wagon to work on the construction of the Burma railway. 

Later, he was interned in a camp and sent to work in the perilous coal mines at Fukuoka. After liberation in 1945, he was one of the first to walk through a decimated Nagasaki after the detonation of the atomic bomb.

 [Source: Elizabeth Day, The Guardian, July 26, 2015 ]

“He witnessed unimaginable terror, brutality and death. Throughout it all, Jan Bras survived.

 For years Bras did not talk about what had happened to him....But then, about 10 years ago, the memories started floating to the surface like driftwood. 

Scraps at first, then entire stories: the occasion he watched his best friend die; the day his older brother was threatened with execution in the camp, the time he and his fellow prisoners were forced to dig their own graves.

“Bras and his older brother joined the Dutch army three months before war broke out. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Japan was able to pursue its military objectives against the allies, including the conquest of the Dutch East Indies.

 By early 1942, the entire Bras family had been taken prisoner. Of the many acts Bras is unable to forgive, the death of his father is the most painful. 

His father was tortured by Japanese guards: they fed a tube into his mouth and poured water through it until his stomach burst and he died of his injuries. Remarkably, the rest of the family – Bras’s four sisters and his brother – all survived the war.

 After it ended, Bras and his mother emigrated to Amsterdam, where he pursued medical studies. For a while he and his brother worked in Kingston, Jamaica, where Bras later met his wife, a Scottish doctor. 

In 1958 they settled in Wrexham in Wales, where Bras worked as a GP for nearly 30 years.

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