The Railway Man

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The casual violence and easy cruelty meted out by his Japanese captors is quite repulsive but thankfully (without giving too much away) there is a sense of closure and redemption in the end, albeit 50 years later. Eric Lomax, sent to Malaya in World War II, was taken prisoner by the Japanese and put to punishing work on the notorious Burma-Siam railway.

The author starts at the beginning with fantastic detailed observations of the last of the steam trains which rang across the country before the electrics. The man is remarkable when you consider the huge suffering that being a prisoner of war would impose on anyone. Lomax and six others were found to be guilty of having constructed radios and listened to broadcasts from the Allied forces and potentially communicated with subversive forces in Malaya. Directed by Jonathan Teplitzky, the film stars Colin Firth and Jeremy Irvine as the older and younger Eric Lomax respectively, [15] [16] and Nicole Kidman as Patti, the woman who befriended and later married Lomax. The real Eric Lomax (right) confronts his former tormentor, Takashi Nagase (left), in Thailand on March 26, 1993.Following his reconciliation with Takashi Nagase, he revisited his detailed account and developed it into his autobiography, The Railway Man.

Rachel Weisz was originally to play Patricia, but had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts with re-shoots for other films.As can be expected the memories never go away and he develops an enduring hatred of his captors that continually haunts his dreams. One day, he chances upon an article describing one of his tormentors as a reformed man doing social work in Thailand. In all, of the more than 60,000 Allied troops captured by the Japanese, approximately 12,399 prisoners died ( VancouverSun.

The epilogue relates that Nagase and Eric remained friends until Nagase's death in 2011 and Eric's one year later. Thereon begins a saga of extreme torture and sustained interrogation by their captors aided by an interrogator. He also experienced loneliness and isolation, having troubles talking about his experience, as others did not understand what he was going through, never having been in his shoes: “many people could not accept the reality of our injuries…because they had not been there, because they could not make the leap of imagination out of their comfortable lives“.There were no prison walls and prisoners could travel about the island and collect fruit and fish and other food. Abbandonando, dunque, il ricordo delle scene più d’effetto, pagine alla mano ci si immerge in una realtà che è quotidianamente infernale e ci si confronta con un dolore e un disagio che lascerà ferite profonde, anche nella carne, ma soprattutto nella psiche. It packed such a powerful punch and rounded off all that had gone before with such aplomb and grace and wisdom that it made me cry. His meeting with one of his interrogators from the year 1943 might just have been an act of final closure for him as he knew he had to start making peace with his past if he were to carry on with his life. He was also a member of the Baptist sect (“the moral conviction of [having found God] helped me to survive what came later”), and was later drafted to serve as part of the Royal Signals when the WWII started: “I was pitchforked into work straight from school; from work into the army; from the army into hell”.