A Difficult Pardon: A Tortured POW and the Choice to Forgive

Tortured WWII veteran Eric Lomax spent much of his adult life imagining ways to kill his captors; he never dreamed forgiveness would be in the cards.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, Japanese veterans (headed by Nagase Takashi) march across the Burma Railway’s most famous section, the bridge over the River Kwai, to meet two Australian former POWs on Aug. 15, 1995 in Kanchanaburi, Thailand. KULTIDA PIRIYPHAN/Getty Images

“At the end of the war, I would have been happy to murder him,” Eric Lomax told The New York Times in 1995. Lomax was speaking of a Japanese interpreter who had tortured him when he was a prisoner of war during World War II. Lomax, a young British officer in the Royal Corps of Signals, had been captured during the invasion of Singapore in 1942 and forced to march to Changi Prison. 

From Changi, he was transferred to Kanchanaburi, Thailand to work on the infamous Burma Railway. Also called the “Death Railway,” this 300-mile line was constructed between Thailand and Burma (now Myanmar) to support the Japanese forces operating there. Nearly 100,000 men died while building the railway, ground down by the grueling work, malnutrition, and disease. Of those 100,000, 12,000 were British, Australian, Dutch and American POWs.