Since the 2005 celebrations, many of the URLs mentionned on the website for that date have been archived by their creators. That is to say that those particular pages are now -- no longer avilable. Sorry for that ...
Below, are listed the few pages that managed to survive ...
Aug 17, 2:30 PM EDT
WWII Prison Kids Revisit China War Camp
By ALEXA OLESEN
Associated Press Writer
WEIFANG, China (AP) -- Mary Previte, a New Jersey state legislator, was the 7-year-old daughter of missionaries living in China when she and her siblings were captured by Japanese forces in 1941.
Sixty years after she was freed by U.S. paratroopers, the harshness of life at the wartime internment camp where she and 1,500 other Westerners were held by Japan's Imperial Army is still vivid.
"Out that window is where one boy was electrocuted by the electric fence, one of the older boys, about 16," she said, standing in her old dormitory at the camp.
Previte was one of two dozen American and British former prisoners who returned Wednesday to this town on eastern China's Shandong peninsula to mark the 60th anniversary of their liberation from the camp on Aug. 17, 1945.
Chinese officials welcomed the former inmates with songs, speeches, the release of hundreds of pigeons and the opening of a new museum on the compound.
Some 3,000 children joined them, releasing tiny parachutes in memory of the American soldiers who parachuted into the town at the close of World War II. Fireworks exploded above.
The memorial was part of elaborate efforts by Beijing to commemorate the end of the war and remind China's people and the world of Japanese wartime atrocities. Elsewhere, the government has opened museum exhibits about Japanese massacres of civilians and state media are filled with stories of wartime suffering.
The government keeps alive anti-Japanese sentiment with frequent mentions of wartime atrocities in state media and textbooks.
Historic antipathy is especially strong lately as Beijing and Tokyo argue over Japan's campaign for a permanent U.N. Security Council seat and control of oil and gas resources in disputed waters.
Though some of the former internees were among the Westerners expelled from China after the 1949 revolution, they have been welcomed back by the communist government as fellow victims of Japanese aggression.
The stage at the ceremony was decorated with banners emblazoned with the slogan "Peace, Friendship and Joint Development."
"It's good to come back to such a big celebration," said Joyce Bradbury, 77, a British writer whose family had spent several generations as merchants in China. Bradbury, who now lives in Sydney, Australia, was 13 when she entered the camp.
Bradbury described seeing Japanese soldiers grab a Chinese child seemingly at random, chain him with a dog collar, beat him with sticks and force orange peel into his mouth.
The soldiers warned the Western children that the same would happen to them if they didn't behave, Bradbury said. "They were very cruel."
Previte was in boarding school in Shandong province when Japanese forces captured her and her siblings the day after the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor.
The camp in Weifang - a converted Presbyterian missionary - was composed of European-style brick buildings surrounded by fields and trees. The surrounding Chinese village was tiny half a century ago but has expanded to some 8.6 million people.
The local government has converted part of the facility into a museum to the internment camp, with books, photos, clothing and other items donated by its survivors.
A waterfall, several pagodas and a sculpture depicting the liberation of the camp surround buildings that once housed Japanese soldiers and their prisoners.
Mao Huatai, a Weifang resident visiting the newly opened park, said he saw a boyhood friend killed by Japanese soldiers.
"We can't forgive imperialism," he said. "We have nothing against Japanese now. We still hate the Japanese then. Not the Japanese of today, but the Japanese then."
Many former internees echoed China's view that Japan has failed to do enough to atone for wartime brutalities, saying they felt great sympathy for the Chinese.
"Japan never admitted doing any wrong. It was denial, denial," Bradbury said. "Japan never admitted doing any wrong.
Former inmate Douglas Sadler, a 77-year-old Briton, said the Western prisoners at the Weifang camp learned only later of the millions of Chinese killed by Japanese forces.
"We weren't mistreated," said Sadler, whose parents also were missionaries in China. "It might have been the safest place for us."
A female survivor of a Japanese World War II concentration camp has given testimony during an activity marking the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation in Weifang, East China's Shandong Province August 17, 2005.
More than 60 survivors took part in the event.
Some 2,008 foreigners were held prisoner in the camp during World War II.
Source: CCTV BEIJING
Broadcast on SBS TV in Mandarin Mon to Sat 6:20 - 6:50am
Chinese officials welcomed the former inmates with songs, speeches, the release of hundreds of pigeons and the opening of a new museum on the compound.