"Eric Lomax, who died on Monday aged 93, was one of thousands of British soldiers taken prisoner by the Japanese in 1942 and forced to build the 418-mile railway to Burma. He was tortured until there was not a patch of unbruised skin between his shoulders and knees; 900 blows in six hours broke arms and ribs. At night he was confined to a cage coated in his own excrement.
Somehow he survived. But back in Scotland, Lomax was tormented for decades by nightmares. Post-traumatic stress led to estrangement from his father and the breakdown of his marriage. The mental scars refused to fade...
... Anger, hurt and bitterness is the commonest response to cruelty. It fuels sectarianism in Iran, resistance in Afghanistan and the blood feuds of Syria. Often it does not abate. When the killers of James Bulger were released, eight years after the murder, the dead toddler's mother said: "I never knew I had so much hate in me." Winnie Johnson, the mother of one of the victims of the Moors murderers, could not forgive for almost half a century until she died recently...
... Eric Lomax was different. He set out almost 50 years after the war to meet [his captor and tormentor], his heart filled with utter loathing and hate. But something extraordinary happened. "When we met, Nagase greeted me with a formal bow," he wrote on the website of the Forgiveness Project. "I took his hand and said in Japanese, 'Good morning, Mr Nagase, how are you?' He was trembling and crying, and he said over and over again: 'I am so sorry, so very sorry'. Lomax found himself saying: "We both survived."
Forgiveness turned to a friendship of nearly two decades."
From The ultimate heroism is forgiving the enemy - Comment - Voices - The Independent:
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