Changi Museum and Chapel - Singapore

I've been honoured to meet WWII soldiers who fought the Japanese in Asia.  I have even been honoured to have personally met those who were interred in this infamous Changi Prison. In my work with Veterans Affairs Canada I heard the stories of several vets, one who  had been tortured horribly tortured in Changi.   King Rat, the James Clavell novel, was written about Changi Prison.
The British garrison at Singapore was made up of Australians, English, East Indians and local Malay.  Some Canadians were there too.  The Japanese were particularly brutal to the Chinese.  The museum was well organized and set up.  Both disturbing and uplifting I couldn't help but remember the man who I'd seen who said he'd found Jesus as a prisoner of the Japanese.  There were pictures of the camps and the POWs, with notes and even the makings of an illegal radio used to hear the BBC.  Women were incarcerated there too and quilted. The quilts were a way for them to get their names out so someone knew they were still alive.  Only a few of the quilts remain today.  
I had the audio tour machine which was keyed by number to different exhibits. Listening, I heard the actual recordings of those who'd survived, as I looked at evidence of the horros they'd lived through.  These were amazing men and women told their own story in their own words.  Tears flowed down my cheeks as I looked and listened.  All manner of things were made in the prison, tin boxes, crosses, shoes, etc.  People just got by.  All were starving.
The chapels was especially inspiring. A man dying of malaria had painted the story of Christ's birth and resurrection.  One painting done for the chapel wall by this fellow, who miraculously survived, showed Jesus on the cross with the words , Forgive them for they know not what they do.

I prayed alone there for all the men and women who survived and died.
I was particularly disturbed though by a Japanese exhibit of paper foldings for a girl with leukaemia there in the chapel.  It had supposedly been donated to the Changi Prison exhibit for 'peace'.   These gaudy loud paper strings were all over the altar and the chapel.  I couldn't help but think it was evidence of the  Japanese becoming again violent and intrusive with no respect for others.
I thought of the Japanese shrine at Suicide Cliff in Saipan. The Japanese had killed themselves rather than be captured, believing that allies would treat their prisoners as they'd treated theirs.  I wondered how they'd feel if put up a Daffy Duck there, so   one could rub his belly  for luck.  I wonder what the Jews would think if the Germans put up signs in Auschwitz celebrating German superstitions.  I'd just read Tom Clancy's, Debt of Honor ,about the Japanese again attacking their neighbours, while claiming they were victims.  Well here they were in Changi Chapel bullying their way into the limelight just as Clancy had feared.
I couldn't think any of the survivors, no matter how tolerant they are, the Chinese especially, or the gentle East Indians, the Christian Brits and the camaraderie Aussies,  would be if they recognized the political arrogance made in this supposedly innocent 'gesture'.  The rewriting of history is diabolical and insidious.  I understand seeing this Japanese affront to the memories of the dead, the message of Remembrance Day "lest we forget".  It won't be long before the Nazis and Japanese Imperialists have everyone believing that they were the victims. No surprise nations do as humans do.  We like to whitewash those places in history where we misbehaved badly.   I just  wish people would someday learn not to shit where they eat.
I love that the world is getting along and we're all forgiving each other. Peace is wonderful. I was part of an organization of doctors who got the Nobel Prize for our work on peace and against nuclear war.  I just think that Heavy Metal bands don't belong in the Library and that silly Japanese sentimentalism has no place in the chapel of soldiers who died or survived the most brutal of torture.
I loved most the picture of "Two Malarias and a Cholera". It's Australian POW Ray Parker that painted this after begging the Japanese to let him help the worst men back from the work camp. Finally the commandant agreed to allow the sick to help the sick.  2 men with malaria tried carrying their worse off mate with cholera back to the camp. The three of them fell over until eventually a stretcher party brought back the cholera victim.
The Japanese policy was to let the soldiers have 2 weeks of "fun" when they took over a town.  The killings, rape, and bedlam terrorized the survivors. Then they'd restore strict order. The women were violated repeatedly. One exhibit was of the girls who, all virgins, had been put to work as prostitutes for the Japanese army.
The happiest saddest picture was of a British soldier and his wife who had been interred in separate camps but survived and were reunited.  So many people died of the cruelty.
The paintings done in the chapel had been painted over and found when someone noticed the colour when this overlay of paint chipped away. A search then began for the painter who was eventually found. He was involved in the restoration though died during this process.
Even now I have tears thinking of those people who rise above the terrors and sorrow. Victor Frankl, psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz, spoke to this.  I struggle some days with my own little burdens but these men and women have raised the bar and show us what is possible. I want to love and endure as they have, with faith and perseverance.
I"m so thankful for the opportunity to have known some of those.  I'm so  grateful to have been able to come to this wonderful chapel and museum.
The staff were so helpful. I loved the gift shop to with books there of the history of Changi.  There was  artwork too of those who turned to art to deal with the pain and suffering.  It was amazing to see what those who survived had  accomplished after this horror.  All things are possible in God's world.
(They didn't allow photographing in the museum. I took a picture of the cross that was made

Morgentaler Ode

I heard of your death and was thankful it was over.
The pagans thought they could achieve immortality
By the sacrifice and slaughter of the young.
But like the pagan kings, you did not kill your own I learned!
Your children are living.
A rich life as you did,
Filled with fame and fortune and arrogance.
There is so much profit in killing.

I am always suspicious of doctors who do not take their own medicine.
You are not a physician.
Any more than those men who also played with scalpals
In the prison where they scarred your heart.
Such similar circumstance as  Victor Frankl  but such different outcome.
One man  freed in a search for meaning
While another  forever imprisoned in meaninglessness
Doomed to inflict the horror of his past
Again and again on the present.

If you had killed your own
I would not have found such fault ,
But your mother and your wife did not take the advice
You brought from Auschwitz to Canadian women.
You taught that the only hope is the killing of another
For survival of the fittest.
(Such a Hitlerian idea to infect a Christian Canadian nation with?)

Canadian women were stronger and tougher
More loving and kind
Before you came.
They raised their sons and daughters
To fight the impossible war, to beat the unbeatable  Nazi
And  to save the Jews from the abortion chambers of Auschwitz.
Canadians, especially the French,  loved babies before you came.

Though Canadians had fought for your life
You could not find it in you to fight for the lives of Canadians
To take the really hard and high road,
To offer women the choice
The real choice;
The economics and solace
Of hope and joy.
Could you not argue with Hitler ?
And fight for a better alternative than expedience and  extermination?

Whatever it was that kept you alive,
That spark of life that Victor Frankl spoke so clearly about,
Could you not share that with your patients and their families
As you did with your wife, for everyone has doubts.

A real physician gives hope and find the means
To end the suffering without sacrificing the Jews and Poles
And homosexuals and pregnant unwed women,
And unborn children in death camps.

What of your  oath , 'to do no harm' ?
You denied the very life of a child
And deprived a generation of the laughter
And tears of little ones
Who Canadians had always before celebrated and protected.
Instead of bringing gratitude to this land
You brought the venom instilled in you
By the pagan drug addicted fascist Hitler.
And for that we can all be sorry.

Your Freudian  "identification with the aggressor"
Is a subject that survivors will expound on for decades
As Canadians rebuild the Temple you tried to destroy.


How much harder it is  to join the real fight,
Like the  poet Leonard Cohen, who sings
"First we take Manhatten, then we take Berlin!"
Like those who gave a lost despairing people  Israel
Forcing governments and adults
To find a means to save the baby state and protect  lives of the unborn

Instead, Canadians  need to buy children overseas.
Because you ,Mortgentaller, never learned respect
For home grown Canadians,
Instead outsourcing birth and babies
As an auxiliary service to your abortion factories.

Instead of releasing a mother and child
From the terror of the term " unwanted child"
You rejected love and  Jesus
Picking up that first stone, pelting the woman
And bashing in the head of the unborn
Squeezing brains with forceps, snipping baby spinal cords
And flushing Canadian wombs like a toilet.

Instead of being a physician who identifies
Correctly that the poverty, the rape, or the shame
Or whatever else is the 'disease' you 'blamed the victim',
And used advertising words like Goebbels
To conceal the truth of your murderous insanity.

Life and children are never the disease.
Children and Jews are never to be exterminated
With dehumanizing words and abortion chambers.

Physicians save mother and child.
No obstetrician worth his salt would declare abortion victory.
We are not fascists in this country, Canada.
We worship life and love.  L'chaim!


Now women are denied children or child care
And mothers go unrewarded
And families are destroyed,
And Canadians buy children overseas.
This is your legacy.
This is the cold hearted consequence of Auschwitz.

Now fascists and communists
Turn their thanatos agenda to adults.
A future Canadian will be given the Order of Canada
For his euthanasia gas chamber
Just as you were given an Order of Canada
For your abortion scalpel.
No wonder true Canadians returned their Orders of Canada.

Having  killed Canadians babies en mass
Fascists can get on now with the 'final solution'.
Like you the medicine they will prescribe to others
They will not take themselves.

In Canada you died at 90
Saved by Canadians from an early death in your 20's
But you went on to emulate not Canadians who freed you
But the Nazi murderers who imprisoned you to die so very young.
Now dead at 90 you join all those children whose lives
You reduced to weeks and months.
While Canadians gave you 70 more years
And did not kill you in their prison
But freed you once again.
But still you could not learn the Canadian way,
So warped were you by Hitler.

Forgive me but I am a physician.
I took an oath to do no harm
And as a scientist  I know  as you knew that a fetus is a baby.
Even Goebels couldn't convince my family
That Jews were not human and needed extermination.
My father, a Canadian veteran,
Went to war to save the world from the Fascists and Communists,
And the Jews from the Holocaust.

Leonard Cohen wrote
"First we take Manhatten, then we take Berlin'
He is a Canadian who will stand before the Lord
If only with a broken hallelujah.

You with your bloody Mengele scalpal
Will be speechless finally,
Having silenced so many Canadians.
What a sick and sad tragedy Hitler left us.
I will pray for your soul,
For as Jesus said,
"You did not know what you were doing."

Hallelujah. Hallelujah, Hallelujah