Firth visits Berwick man to research his new film
Lt Lomax
OSCAR-winning actor Colin Firth has made a secret visit from London to meet the Berwick man he is to play in his new film.
He went to lunch this week at the Berwick home of former prisoner-of-war Eric Lomax, now 92.
Colin was keen to meet the author of ‘The Railway Man’, the best-selling book chronicling the horrors of the Japanese camps during the Second World War.
It was announced last week that he is to play Eric in the film of the book, which tells of Eric’s torture during the building of the Death Railway between Thailand and Burma.
Colin has described the film, which is being directed by Jonathan Teplitzky and written by Frank Cottrell Boyce and Andy Paterson, as “an extraordinary story”.
Filming, which begins in February next year, will take place in the UK, Australia and Thailand.
All four men took the train from London on Monday to visit Berwick and walked round the historic walls before going to Eric’s home where his wife, Patti, cooked lunch.
Just four years ago there was an amazing reconciliation between Eric and the son of the murderer of two of his friends.
The extraordinary event also took place in Eric Lomax’s home when Osamu Komai, then 70, travelled from Japan to apologise for the enormous suffering caused by his father Captain Matsuo Komai, who was hanged as a war criminal after the Second World War.
Captain Komai, of the Imperial Japanese Army, was second in command at the camp where Eric was beaten to a pulp along with fellow prisoners discovered in possession of a radio.
Eric’s friends, Captain Jack Hawley and Lieutenant Stanley Armitage, did not survive and their bodies were dumped in a camp latrine.
After the war, it was Eric’s evidence that helped condemn Komai but although one of his great enemies was dead he continued to suffer, with terrible flashbacks and nightmares and an inability to relate to everyday life.
In his book he tells of how he was captured in Singapore in February 1942, while a second lieutenant with the Royal Signals. He, along with thousands of other allied POWs, was sent to the notorious Changi camp and from there to set to work on the infamous railway.
The inhuman treatment meted out by the Japanese caused the deaths of thousands of prisoners and civilian Asian labourers.
Despite the malnutrition, illness and regular beatings, Eric and fellow POWs managed to build a radio in a bid to find out how war was progressing, with the hope of keeping up morale.
He also created a detailed map of the surroundings which could be used in an escape attempt but this proved to be his downfall.
The radio was discovered on August 29, 1943, setting off a sequence of terrible repercussions that continue to this day. Almost immediately two members of the radio group were arrested, beaten nearly to death then transferred into the hands of the Kempetai, the Japanese military police.
On September 21, four further members of the group, including Eric, were arrested and again beaten to the point of death.
“We survived but only just,” remembers Eric. “I had both my arms broken.”
He was later told by a surviving POW that the rest of the camp had lain awake all night listening to the cries for mercy but could only pray they would survive.
Four days later, a further four officers were similarly arrested and of those, Capt Hawley and Lt Armitage were beaten to death with their bodies thrown into a camp latrine.
Because of the map, Eric was subjected to a week of excruciating torture which, astonishingly, he managed to survive.
Not surprisingly, however, he nursed an intense hatred for those involved in his ordeal, particularly the interpreter who interrogated him during the torture.
Unknown to Eric, this man, Nagase Takashi, suffered agonies of guilt after the war and dedicated his life to trying to make amends.
The incredible story of the pair’s eventual reconciliation is outlined in ‘The Railway Man’.
It was through Takashi that Eric recently found out that the son of Captain Komai wanted to meet him and apologise.
“Continuing to hate gets you nowhere,” says Eric. “It just damages you as an individual. At some point, the hating has to stop.”
Colin Firth, who won an Oscar for ‘The King’s Speech’, can now be seen on screen in Tomas Alfredson’s film adaptation of John Le Carre’s ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’.
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Weather for Berwick-Upon-Tweed
Thursday 24 May 2012
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