Since the 2005 celebrations, many of the URLs mentionned on the website for that date have been archived by their creators.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 ...
INTERNATIONAL
Thursday, August 18, 2005 -- AP.
Children of war return to Japanese prison camp in China
WEIFANG: Two dozen Britons and Americans who spent their childhood as prisoners of Japan's military in an internment camp in eastern China returned yesterday to mark the 60th anniversary of their liberation at the close of World War II.
Many cried as they entered the compound, a former Presbyterian missionary school that held some 1,500 people from December 1941 to their release on Aug. 17, 1945.
Sitting under a misty rain, surrounded by about 3,000 Chinese schoolchildren and local residents, they watched as firecrackers exploded over the stage, releasing small parachutes that float ed to the ground in memory of the American soldiers who rescued them. "I am overwhelmed," 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. The memorial comes amid massive official efforts to remind China's people, and the rest of the world, of Japanese wartime atrocities amid modern tensions between Beijing and Tokyo.
Many Chinese believe Japan has never truly shown remorse for offenses committed during its invasion of China, including germ warfare experiments and the sexual slavery of thousands of women.
Mary Previte, a state legislator in New Jersey, was the 7-year-old daughter of missionaries when she was taken from her boarding school in China and sent to the camp. "We found ourselves crammed into a world of gut-wrenching hunger, guard dogs, bayonet drills, prisoner numbers and badges, daily roll calls, bed bugs, flies and unspeakable sanitation," Previte said.
The camp in Weifang was made up of European-style brick buildings surrounded by fields and trees.
The surrounding Chinese vil lage 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 of the internment camp, with books, photos, clothing and other items donated by its survivors. The buildings are surrounded by a waterfall, several pagodas and a sculpture depicting the liberation of the camp. "Several months ago this was a deserted place with lots of garbage," said Hu Guizhu, a 50-year-old junior high school teacher in Weifang.
"We hope many foreign friends will come here to visit, to talk business. This is the aim,"
Hu said. Many former internees echoed Chinese sentiments that Japan has failed to do enough to atone for wartime brutalities, and said they felt great sympathy for the Chinese.
"The Japanese won't admit to the atrocities (they've) done to the Chinese people," said Bradbury. "Japan never admitted doing any wrong. It was denial, denial." Historical resentments between Japan and China are particularly raw now amid tensions over Japan's campaign for a permanent UN Security Council seat and a struggle for control of possible oil and gas resources in disputed seas.
"Chinese media give too much attention to
the horrors of World War II, including movies of the war, without giving enough attention to (the) Japanese trend toward peace after the war," said Ezra Vogel, an East Asian historian at Harvard University.
Former inmate Douglas Sadler, a 77-yearold Briton, said the Western prisoners at the Weifang camp were sheltered from the worst atrocities of the war and learned only later of the millions of Chinese killed by Japanese forces. "We weren't mistreated," said Sadler, whose parents were missionaries in China at the time of the invasion.
