A POW's Searing Account of War, Brutality and Forgiveness
W. W. Norton
October 1995
On Sale: September 30, 1995
292 pages ISBN: 0393334988 EAN: 9780393334982 Kindle: B0074V33MK Paperback / e-Book (reprint) Add to Wish List
Here is a remarkable true story of forgiveness--a
tremendous testament to the courage that propels one toward
remembrance, and finally, peace with the past. A classic war
autobiography, The Railway Man is a powerful tale of
survival and of the human capacity to understand even those
who have done us unthinkable harm.
From The
Railway Man:
The passion for trains and
railroads is, I have been told, incurable. I have also
learned that there is no cure for torture. These two
afflictions have been intimately linked in the course of my
life, and yet through some chance combination of luck and
grace I have survived them both.
I was born in
Edinburgh, in the lowlands of Scotland, in 1919. My father
was an official in the General Post Office there, a career
which he had started as a boy of 16 and which he intended me
to imitate to the letter. He was fascinated by telephony and
telegraphy, and I grew up in a world in which tinkering and
inventing and making were honoured past-times. I vividly
remember the first time that my father placed a giant set of
headphones around my ears and I heard, through the hiss and
buzz of far-off-energies, a disembodied human voice.
In the worst times, much later, when I thought I
was about to die in pain and shock at the hands of men who
could not imagine anything of my life, who had no respect
for who I was or my history, I might have wished that my
father had had a different passion. But in the 1920s,
technology was still powerful and beautiful without being
menacing. Who would have thought that a radio, for example,
could cause terrible harm? It seemed to be a wonderful
instrument by which people could speak to each other; and
yet I heard Hitler ranting over airwaves, and saw two men
beaten to death for their part in making such an instrument,
and suffered for my own part in it for a half a century.
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