Stolen Years - Australian POW's

The local museum here in Perth has an current exhibit called "Stolen Years". It is an examination of Australian POW's from WW-I through Korea. Yesterday was a holiday here in Western Australia, plus the weather sucked. So I went to check it out. Robin, Loretta, and Robin's friend Roger decided to come along too.

I thought it was very interesting, but very sad and very depressing. The worst was the section on the WWII prisoners of Japan. They had it really, really bad. The conditions at the German and Italian POW camps were a vacation compared to those the Japanese ran in South East Asia.
The girls and Roger got bored about half way through and left me there by myself as they went off to gossip and catch up on news. That was fine with me. The exhibit was very sobering and there was a lot of material to read. They had on display many of the diaries and logs that were secretly recording by the POW's. One in particular was hard hitting. It was a log maintained by an Aussie doctor who worked on the Burma railroad. He kept track of the deaths of the fellow POW's, recording the date, rank, name, cause of death, grave number, and other details if possible. It was heartbreaking to read. Day after day, dozens of deaths from dysentery, and some executions.

Another interesting item was in the WWII Europe POW's section. There was a photo taken in one of the bunkhouses. On one wall of the bunkhouse was a gallery of photos of girlfriends. Standing in front of the wall was a handful of very glum looking Australian and British POW's. The wall was an American bashing "shrine". All of the girls in the photos had given up on their Aussie and British POW boyfriends and had either hooked up or married American servicemen. So it was a wall dedicate to the betrayal of the POW's by their girlfriends who could not longer wait for the war to end. The anti-American sentiment was very obvious in the section.