The Railway Man

I feel a bit fortunate for a few reasons to have come across Eric Lomax’s WWII memoir “The Railway Man,” which was an education of sorts to me. In it he describes his experiences as one of thousands of prisoners-of-war who was forced to work on the ghastly Thailand to Burma railway, which was known as the Railway of Death because so many thousands perished working to build it.

Apparently some of “The Railway Man” was written after Lomax returned from the war and the rest was finished decades later. It was first published in 1995 and though it won a couple of awards in the U.K., I had not heard of it until this year when the movie of it starring Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman was scheduled to be released. The movie’s distribution was limited so I haven’t seen it yet, but from the trailer I’ve seen, it seems to take some poetic license and depart from the book in a few ways.

It’s interesting that Eric Lomax who was Scottish only recently died in October 2012 at age 93 while the film was still in production. His wife though came to its premiere at the Toronto film festival last September and apparently received a standing ovation.

In his book, Lomax describes joining the British army at age 19 in 1939 and eventually being sent to South East Asia where he’s captured by the Japanese army with thousands of others following the surrender of Singapore in 1942. Along with a handful, he’s sent to work in the railway’s workshop repairing machinery for the tracks. But later he and five of the men are swept up after their hidden self-made radio is found and Lomax’s drawn map. He’s interrogated for weeks by Japanese soldiers, beaten up, tortured and confined to imprisonment in squalid conditions.

The scenes of his prisoner-of-war experience are quite vivid, and you get a sense of his inner thoughts about the uncertain, scary situations he endures. I didn’t know about the forced labor on the Burma Railway so the memoir is an eye-opener to that and to the brutal prisoner-of-war camps under the Japanese military.

What’s quite remarkable is that not only does Lomax survive WWII, but many decades later at age 70 he decides to confront his demons about the war, as well as his post-traumatic stress, and his avoidance of seeing Japanese people who he hasn’t faced since 1945. The end of his memoir is a journey into his turnaround, as he seeks professional counseling and falls in love with a woman he meets who becomes his second wife. Eventually with her help, Lomax reaches out to meet one of his torturers during the war who’s still alive in Japan. At first Lomax seeks revenge but soon realizes the man has suffered as well and tried hard to make amends over the many decades. The reconciliation between the two that follows is quite extraordinary some 50+ years later.

It’s a story of humanism, healing and forgiveness in the face of utter brutality that’ll likely stay with me. I plan to follow it up later in the year with the nonfiction award-winning book “Unbroken” by Laura Hillenbrand, which is similar in its setting and topic. My husband has read it and I know it’s quite earth-shattering. The movie of which is coming out at Christmas.

For now, I’ll be glad knowing that Eric Lomax received some peace towards the end of his life. I’ll look for “The Railway Man” movie, though the trailer made me think the memoir would be much more of a love story than it actually turned out. Lomax talks about his wife and remarriage in the book but he doesn’t delve into it as fully perhaps as the Hollywood version. Also in real life, Lomax was considerably older (in his 70s) when he finally returns to Japan to meet his former enemy, who he’s no longer out to harm. Regardless of when it was, he was incredibly brave to do so.

What about you — have you read either of these books or any other prisoner-of-war accounts?