Weisz to play part of Lomax’s wife
OSCAR-winning actress Rachel Weisz will join Colin Firth in the tale of a Berwick-based former prisoner of war whose wife helps him confront and overcome a deep hatred for his Japanese captors.
Filming for ‘The Railway Man’ will begin in February in the UK, Australia and Thailand, with Firth playing the part of Eric Lomax – and Weisz as his wife, Patti.
Patti cooked lunch when she and Eric, now 92, had a visit to their Berwick home earlier this year from Firth, who was keen to meet the author of the best-selling book chronicling the horrors of the Japanese camps during the Second World War.
Patricia Wallace, better known as Patti, became Lomax’s second wife in 1983. She encouraged him to confront his fears and hatred, and to that end she wrote to the man her husband held responsible for his torture.
During World War II, Lomax, a second lieutenant in the Royal Corp of Signals, was captured by Japanese forces in Singapore and eventually packed off to a camp in Kanchanaburi, Thailand.
There, he joined tens of thousands of other PoWs working on the Burma-Siam death railway and the infamous bridge over the River Kwai.
Lomax was beaten to a pulp at the camp along with fellow prisoners discovered in possession of a radio. His friends, Captain Jack Hawley and Lieutenant Stanley Armitage, did not survive and their bodies were dumped in a camp latrine.
Decades later, Lomax couldn’t get over the torture and humiliation he had witnessed and suffered in the prisoners camp.
But thanks to Patti, Lomax found the moral support he needed to overcome the post-traumatic stress and to confront his fears and hatred.
Patti handed a letter to Nagase Takeshi, the Japanese officer who tortured Lomax, and asked him to meet her husband so he could be forgiven. After Nagase Takeshi and Lomax met beside the Kwai river, Lomax forgave the Japanese, and the two become blood brothers.
Just four years ago there was an amazing reconciliation between Lomax and the son of the murderer of two of his friends. The extraordinary event took place in Lomax’s home in Berwick 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.
After the war, it was Lomax’s evidence that helped condemn Komai, but although one of his great enemies was dead he continued to suffer.
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Weather for Berwick-Upon-Tweed
Thursday 24 May 2012
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