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

Velmans, Loet

ISBN 10: 1559707062 / ISBN 13: 9781559707060

Published by Arcade Publishing (edition 1), 2003

About this Item

With dust jacket. It's a well-cared-for item that has seen limited use. The item may show minor signs of wear. All the text is legible, with all pages included. It may have slight markings and/or highlighting.

Seller Inventory # 1559707062-11-1-29

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Long Way Back to the River Kwai: Memories Of World War II
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing (edition 1)
• Publication Date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1559707062
• ISBN 13: 9781559707060
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

About this title

Synopsis

Loet Velmans was 17 when the Germans invaded his native Holland in 1940. Almost immediately, he and his family decided to escape to London, which they did on board the Dutch Coast Guard cutter, Seaman's Hope. Deciding theyt would be safer in the Far East, the family sailed to the Dutch East Indies-now Indonesia-where Loet joined the Dutch army. In March 1942, the Japanese invaded the archipelago, conquered it in a week, and made prisoners of the local Dutch soldiers. For the next three and a half years Loet and his fellow POW's were sent to slave labor camps to build a railroad through the dense jungle on the Burmese-Thailand border, to invade and conquer India. Some 200,000 POW's and slave laborers died in building this Railroad of Death. Loet, though suffering from malaria, dysentery, malnutrition, and unspeakable maltreatment, never gave up hope...and survived. Fifty-seven years later he returned to revisit the place where he should have died and where he had buried his closest friend. From that emotional visit came this stunning memoir.

Reviews

Velmans' compact, exceedingly readable autobiography focuses on his World War II experiences. A Dutch Jew in his late teens when the war broke out, he escaped with his family in a small boat to England. The Velmans then traveled to the Dutch East Indies, where Loet was drafted just in time for the Japanese invasion. His subsequent POW experiences ran him through the entire range of what the Japanese could deal out, from the comparatively survivable conditions of Changi prison in Singapore to voyages on stifling prisoner ships to the slow mass murder that was the labor camps on the Thailand-Burma railway. He is an extraordinarily vivid and sensitive writer, whose sharp memory and acute eye for detail help him render the varying characteristics of the different nationalities represented among the POWs. (His own group of Dutch and Dutch Eurasians hasn't been covered well in English.) To this day, he feels more than slightly ambivalent about Japan and its continuing refusal to come to terms with its behavior in the war. Roland Green
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