Aubrey Lichman at the AJEX parade[Missing Credit]
It earned its grim moniker owing to the heavy death toll among prisoners involved in its construction and the extreme brutality directed towards them by their Japanese masters.
They are among those being remembered this week, as Friday is the 80th anniversary of VJ Day, which is being marked in the UK by ceremonies and flypasts.
Their story is told in the 2016 book Under the Heel of Bushido: Last Voices of the Jewish POWs of the Japanese in the Second World War by Martin Sugarman.
Hearing disturbing comments about Jews from fellow prisoners was one of many torments for Lichman as a FEPOW (Far East Prisoner of War).
Aubrey Lichman (right) and a comrade[Missing Credit]
Lichman spent 12 hours a day labouring in the tropical heat clearing dense jungle and laying track.
He had to protect his tiny number of personal belongings from the rampant thieving that was prevalent in POW camps; fell ill with malaria, dengue fever, dysentery, pellagra and a “huge” tropical ulcer on his leg; was forced to dive into ditches to avoid airplane gunfire; was transported in uncomfortable windowless metal cattle trucks between POW camps; and was badly beaten by Indian army officers – who were used as camp guards by the Japanese.
His incarceration 80 years ago was also marked by glimmers of hope and home, such as when he ran into fellow shul members fighting on the front lines.
They huddled to share homemade kosher biscuits smuggled into the camp all the way from Stepney in east London, and on one occasion were asked by a commanding officer – who also happened to be Jewish – to make preparations for a traditional Jewish burial.
Before his capture, Lichman was sworn to secrecy in his role as a teleprinter operator, which involved receiving messages about how the Japanese invasion was progressing from Thailand towards Kuala Lumpur in British Malaya, where he was stationed for a time, and Singapore.
For decades after the war, Lichman, who married a successful businesswoman in London after the war with whom he had three daughters, kept in touch with fellow FEPOWs and every year joined Ajex’s (Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women) annual march in the UK. He passed away in 2013.
Aubrey and Sylvia Lichman on their wedding day[Missing Credit]
Lichman’s granddaughter, Katie, who is the JC’s events manager, read Under the Heel of Bushido only after her grandfather’s passing as she “dreaded” what she might find in its pages while he was still alive.
“As we grew up, we were always aware of Papa’s role in the army and that he was a Japanese POW,” she said.
“But it wasn’t until he was in his seventies that he was willing to relive the events and speak about them.
“He visited Thailand several times in his later years, taking my Israeli aunt and cousins to Kanchanaburi, where the Allied POW’s built the Burma Railway and where the Allies’ cemetery is.
“Papa was a very kind, gentle, patient man, always there for his family and friends and missed greatly every day – VJ day or any day.” When he was not fetching boiling water and meals for his captors, Katie’s grandfather was assigned myriad tasks in the camps but always made every effort to navigate the “schizophrenic behaviour” of the Japanese officers, which “could never be accounted for” and veered “between brutality and kindness”, Sugarman wrote.
More than 60 personal interviews were conducted with Jewish POW survivors to compile his book, alongside photographs, maps, appendices, and archival documents, and the brutal, sad, inspiring and sometimes humorous stories told cover territories from Burma, Thailand, Java, Singapore and Japan itself.
The book tells of the extraordinary lengths Jewish POWs went to preserve religious life while in captivity, from the construction of a synagogue inside a camp and hand-carving menorahs from wood and using coconut oil for lighting to making matzah with sago flour, and even – while under the unsettling gaze of intimidating Japanese officers – organising a “proxy” bar mitzvah for a POW’s son on the banks of the River Kwai.
Across all Allied nations, it is estimated that 1.5 million Jews served in uniform between 1939 and 1945, most of whom were Russian, and tens of thousands of Jewish soldiers spent time as POWs.
The precise total of how many Jewish POWs there were is difficult to quantify, particularly because many wartime records did not always note religion and because Jewish soldiers often used aliases to conceal their identity if captured. Sugarman estimates that there were between 550 and 600 Jewish soldiers in Japanese captivity, and around 22,000 Jewish civilians were interned in camps by the Japanese across the Pacific and South East Asia.
The approximately 100 Jewish former prisoners of war featured or mentioned in Sugarman’s book have all since passed away.
Speaking to the JC this week ahead of the 80th anniversary of VJ Day, Sugarman said it was “so important for us to remember even now that well over 600 Jewish fighting men became prisoners of the Japanese, and they suffered all of the same appalling conditions and atrocities we see in films and read about in books that their non-Jewish comrades did.
“They also won the same awards for their bravery and their sacrifice. That’s the reason I wrote the book; to show that we were there too.”
Under the Heel of Bushido: Last Voices of the Jewish POWs of the Japanese in the Second World War by Martin Sugarman is published by Vallentine Mitchell
