The brutal conditions saw the prisoners of war working in 100-degree heat by day, overseen by soldiers who saw them as less than human because they had allowed themselves to surrender.īarely fed, Eric and his comrades suffered from malnutrition and disease – 60,000 of his comrades starved while 12,399 disease-ridden Allied prisoners of war put to work on the line died. When the country fell to the Japanese in February 1942 he was forced to work as a slave labourer on the 260-mile railway line into Burma. Patti was asked to sit in on the counselling sessions – and for the first time she heard the horrifying truth.Įric volunteered for the Royal Corps of Signals and was posted to Singapore as a lieutenant. Well-versed in the treatment of African and Iraqi victims, Eric was the first Second World War victim they had treated. Finally, after three years of his dark moods and nightmares, Patti persuaded him to seek help from the charity the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. Something as simple as being asked for his name and address to open a bank account brought debilitating flashbacks of his time in the Japanese camp in Thailand. The legacy of his experiences as a prisoner of war manifested themselves during the day as well. He knew he had nightmares but could never tell me why.” We talked about it in general terms the day after but I thought then it was a one-off occurrence, people do that. “On our honeymoon the first night we slept together he had a nightmare.
“He said ‘I will tell you one day’ but one day never came. “I knew he had been in Singapore when it fell to the Japanese in the Second World War but he wouldn’t tell me any more than that. She returned to Britain and in 1983 they were married.īut it was on her wedding night that she realised that her new husband had a secret. Patti returned to Canada but the couple kept in touch, writing and calling every week, and the friendship quickly developed into something deeper. He had very thick hair and a grace about him which was very attractive.” I was in my early 40s and he was 62 but you could have taken 10 years off him, everyone was amazed he was that age. “I met him on a train, of course,” she laughs. It was on a trip back to Britain in 1980 to visit her mother that she met Eric, a father-of-two whose own marriage was failing. She had emigrated to Canada with her airman husband in the 1950s but as their three children had grown up the couple drifted apart. The relationship between Eric and Patti is at the core of the film but it was pure chance the couple found each other. But it was only in meeting the man that he realised that it is possible to forgive and it is possible to move on and let the past go.”
“He approached the meeting in a very calm way because he wanted to harm Mr Nagase and have his revenge. He was going to garrotte him if he could,” she recalls. He had got it all planned, he admitted it to me later. Eric did have some thoughts of meeting him and killing him. “I knew Eric wasn’t wanting to meet this man in a friendly way. Patti, 76, admits it took years before her husband finally opened up about his experiences – but meeting his tormentor had an enormous impact on their lives.
THE RAILWAY MAN MOVIE MOVIE
Right up until the moment he met former guard Takashi Nagase again, at the bridge over the River Kwai, Eric was intent on getting revenge.īut as he poured out his hatred at how the inhuman treatment he suffered at Nagase’s hands had blighted his life, his anger had disappeared.Įric’s astonishing story is told in new movie The Railway Man, starring Colin Firth as the quiet university lecturer, who died in 2012 after a long illness, and Nicole Kidman as his wife. The simple statement defined the incredible forgiveness that, just hours earlier, Eric had managed to find for the man who brutally tortured him during the Second World War. The couple were standing amid the gravestones of his wartime comrades who had died at the hands of the Japanese as they built the Burma railroad. “Sometimes the hating has to stop”, he told his wife Patti. They are six words which came to sum up everything about Eric Lomax.
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