TRANSCRIPT:
In the jungles of Thailand, Australian prisoners of war are remembered.
The Anzac Day ceremony at Hellfire Pass has become a time and a place to honour all Australian prisoners of war.
But for serving ADF sergeant Renae Pearce, it holds a personal connection.
Her great uncle, Ben Pearce, survived two and a half years in forced labour camps, after being captured by the Japanese.
“I can recall about the age of 15 or 16 when I really started to have an understanding of World War 2 and modern history and the part uncle Ben played in that. So much so at the age of 15 or 16, I ended up doing a project and that was the beginning of understanding what he experienced and went through.”
While Ben Pearce didn’t speak to his family about what he saw on the railway, he did record the ordeal once on tape.
“So that was from another family member who I believe perhaps a couple years earlier wanted to retain his story. On that tape, he spoke about how he was captured by the Japanese in Singapore and held in Changi. He shared that he was there for two and half years and that he was there right up until the end of the war when the Japanese up and left. He also spoke about his experiences on the railway. Specifically I remember him saying it was like being shoved into cattle carts and shipped up north on the railway. They lived on small portion of rice, a very small portion of water, and that it was just horrendous conditions.”
In 1943, Japan’s army brought 60,000 Allied prisoners of war and 200,000 labourers from across Asia, to Thailand and Myanmar, to build the Thai-Burma railway.
Hellfire Pass earned its name from the fires that burned while P-O-Ws laboured in the night, and the disease, starvation and brutality that plagued the work camps.
Those stories are remembered at the Hellfire Pass interpretive centre in Thailand and educational and memorial site to Australian prisoners of war.
A photo of an emaciated Uncle Ben photo hangs in the main gallery.
Sergeant Pearce laid a wreath today in honour of her great uncle and all veterans.
"It’s been an emotional experience leading up to this. Every time I would think about that I was coming here, even a couple of months ago, I would get quite emotional about that. And to be here I’ve had many a quiet moment of quiet contemplation along the rail bed. And just trying to put myself in the POW’s shoes, but especially Uncle Ben. And really It’s just unimaginable, it honestly is. And to be here, knowing that I’ve had a family member serve and survive and that I had the honour to have known, it’s unexplainable.”
Several hundred people attended the Anzac Day dawn service at Hellfire Pass this year, where thousands of Australian prisoners of war were once forced to excavate rock with their bare hands.
Renae Pearce’s great uncle Ben survived the Thai-Burma railway and died in Australia in 2003 aged 87.
"It was a really incredibly proud thing to know that I had a family member that served our nation. And I think it had a profound influence on me a few years later, then enlisting in the army. It’s an incredible honour to know that he endured that kind of - level of atrocity and survived. Such an incredible resilience and test of character that - to know him in person, you would never have know that he had gone through that. I think that’s what’s stuck with me the most. Behind closed doors, he must have had so many things that he was processing and dealing with many many decades later. But you would never have known that.”
Remembering prisoners of war that survived, and those that died, in horrendous conditions.
