Sunday, August 26, 2007

The Sobering Truth

Yesterday we took a day trip to Kanchanaburi, which takes about two hours from Bangkok. The area is known for its tragic history during World War II when the Japanese Army forced 300,000 POWs to construct a railway from Siam to Burma. Allied POWs from Australia, UK, America and Holland, along with Asian forced laborers, were forced to work under grueling, sub-human conditions. What was estimated to take five to six years to finish was completed in a year--at the cost of many lives, 16,000 Allied prisoners who lost their lives in Kanchanaburi, an otherwise picturesque town nestled in the foothills of the Three Pagodas Pass.

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