While in Sandakan, Malaysia recently, we visited the Prisoner of War camp that held at least 2,500 mostly Australian prisoners during WW2. (At the time Sandakan was part of British North Borneo).
Like other POW camps I have been to, it was a moving experience. But the camp at Sandakan was especially moving because of the extraordinary tragedy of it all.
While travelling through Southeast Asia recently I took with me a copy of the book by Lynette Silver called Sandakan: A Conspiracy of Silence. It told, in evocative and compelling tones, the story of these 2,500 prisoners and the tragedy that befell them.
I recommend you read the book for the full story, but the tragedy can be best expressed in the starkest of terms: only six came home.
Of those (the minority) that didn’t die of disease, torture or murder at the Sandakan camp, the rest died on the death marches that they were forced to travel on. Six men escaped from those marches and came out alive. Without their stories, we would never know the devastation of this war crime.
As Silver herself puts it in the conclusion of her book, Sandakan should sit alongside El Alamein and Gallipoli as defining moments of war-time tragedy. And it only compounds the tragedy that the story of Sandakan is so little known.
