Long Way Back to the River Kwai: Memories of World War II

A searing memoir of World War II, this is the story of one man's survival of the brutal slave-labor conditions that inspired the classic book and film Bridge over the River Kwai. Loet Velmans was seventeen in 1940 when the Germans invaded his native Holland. He and his family immediately made a daring escape to London, just barely managing to board the only refugee boat to leave from their local harbor. Once in London, however, they decided to relocate to the Far East, further from Hitler's reach. Only dimly aware of the aggressive Japanese Pacific campaign, they sailed to the Dutch East Indies -- now Indonesia -- where Loet joined the army. In March 1942 the Japanese invaded the archipelago and conquered it in a week. Along with all local Dutch soldiers, Loet was sent to Changi, a prison in Singapore built for 600, but now housing 10,000. Despite dire shortages and overcrowding, Loet discovered a resourcefulness he hardly knew he possessed, acclimating to the harsh conditions and forming bonds of cooperation with British, American, Dutch, and Australian POWs, all trying to endure the increasingly cruel and inhuman behavior of their Japanese captors.

Over the next three and a half years Loet and his fellow POWs were shipped "up country" to a series of slave labor camps, where they were forced to build a railroad through the dense jungle on the Burmese-Thailand border. The Japanese planned to use the railroad to invade and conquer India. Completely ignoring the Geneva Convention regulations for the treatment of POWs, the guards forced Loet and his fellow captives to build this "Railroad of Death," as it came to be called, in an unreasonable eighteen months, stretching some three hundred miles through impossible jungle. More than 200,000 POWs and slave laborers died over the course of the backbreaking work. Loet, though suffering from malaria, dysentery, malnutrition, and unspeakable mistreatment, never gave up hope, and ultimately survived to tell his tale. Almost sixty years later he returned to Thailand, to revisit the place where he should have died, and to walk across the ground where he had personally buried his closest friend. Out of that emotional visit came this gripping account of survival under appalling conditions, a book that will take its place as a classic beside The Diary of Anne Frank, Bridge over the River Kwai, and Edith's Story.