Eric Lomax was one who built the Burma Railway. After the war, he traveled to Thailand and met one of the men who interrogated him, and forgave him. This was the subject of Lomax’s book The Railway Man, and was made into a movie of the same title that came out last year.
That is a fascinating story. So may things had to go his way for Itzkovitz to wind up in the right place to kill the guard. Wow.
An opposite example: Louie Zamperini (you saw or read Unbroken, right?) became a Christian evangelist after recovering from his PTSD. At one point he went to Japan to look up “The Bird” for the purpose of forgiving him, but the guard who had made him his special project refused to see him.
Been years since I read the book, but I seem to recall that the message the reader was supposed to take away was one of differing perspectives, the German did infact do what he could do to save Primo, whether for altruistic or selfish motives or a combination is left up to the reader.
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Wow, if that’s not a movie already, someone should get on it.
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Opressed kills his former oppressor while both are busy oppressing a third party is not exactly a feel good movie is it?
Don’t know if it’s in the movie, but in the book thay had a plan to kiil “The Bird” while the war was still going. They didn’t think they could survive his tortures through to the end of the war – which for all they knew could be a long way away. But he was tranferred to another camp before they could kill him. Later, Zamperini is transferred to the same camp, and The Bird begins the daily tortures again.
That’s true - they planned I believe to tie him to a rock and drown him.
The issue, though, was revenge after the war was over.
“The Bird” was high on the list of Japanese war criminals the US Occupation forces tried to find, but he successfully went into hiding for a decade or so. He emerged only after a blanket amnesty.
On this page from the photo archive of the US Holocaust Museum there are numerous photos of corpses with captions saying they are SS guards killed in revenge killings. By and large, though, I don’t believe the former prisoners were soldiers, though it seems pretty clear that in some cases Allied soldiers either let it happen and assisted in the revenge killings.
That’s not how I remember it - but then, it’s also been years since I read it. I thought the point was that the German fellow had created this whole mythology in his mind where he was a “good guy” through the war, that had little basis in reality.
Just to make sure I’m not totally out to lunch, I looked it up - it’s pretty clear Levy thinks the German was basically, conciously or not, making shit up; though he did help Levy in one minor way - he gave him a pair of shoes - and may have helped him in other ways Levy didn’t know about or remember; but his claims, otherwise, simply could not be true - like the claim he was Levy’s close pal, or that Buna was designed to save people. Levy describes that as “insane” and remarks that it is remarkable that the fellow wrote this self-serving account to him - as he was the one person in the world who would know for sure that the account wasn’t true.
From the Periodic Table:
Andersonville
This was the Confederate main prisoner of war camp during the American Civil War. Thousands of men died there from starvation and disease and after the war the Union tried to enact some kind of payback by putting the commander on trial. He ended up being hanged although there is alot of discussion about how the trial was run and actions by Union authorities were coveed up.LINK
If we’re allowing non-strictly-POW examples, then there were apparently Jewish vigilante groups killing Nazis in Europe in the aftermath of WWII.
I’ve read a reminiscence from an Aus POW held in Japan, who said that on release “some other prisoners” went and found one of the guards and killed him.
It would have been a criminal act, so not something you’d talk about a lot. But some of the soldiers were, of course, criminals, and some of them did, of course, have experience killing people and experience having friends who were killed: I wouldn’t be surprised to find that some of them had a fairly relaxed morality about killing prison guards.
No cite.
I seem to recall from the Australian author Russell Braddon’s The Naked Island – account of his experiences as a POW of the Japanese, 1942 - 45 – that after liberation, he and his fellow-prisoners (who had suffered horribly at the hands of their Japanese captors and guards) were given by the liberating troops, a window of opportunity to take direct revenge on those people; they briefly deliberated on whether to do so, but basically concluded “the hell with it – they’re probably more messed-up than wicked – let it slide”, and left them alone. The author just presents this as “make of it what you will”.
Although Braddon stopped short of attempts to “hunt down and kill”; his book as above is full of understandable hatred and rancour against his captors, and by and large, against the entire Japanese people. Over the decades, he lost this hatred, and came to feel that for him, forgiveness and reconciliation were appropriate.
I saw that movie a few months ago and was surprised by how emotional it made me feel. So I read the book, which was even better. I highly recommend the book if you have the time, or the film if you don’t.
Someone I used to work with confided in me a completely unsubstantiated-but-no-reason-to-doubt-it story about this kind exact thing. You don’t have to believe it, but I did. He was not a classic POW (like in a camp), but an captured enemy combatant on a foreign soil during a conflict in the last 50 years.
Sorry, no cite and you are free to dismiss it as complete BS.
Dont forget that right after a war ends everything changes. Enemies suddenly can turn into allies. Like in the case after WW2 with the US and suddenly the West Germans and Japanese were our allies.