Lack of vitamins

Your mind went, really your mind, everything went. If you don't get vitamins it affects everything in your body; your eyes, your ears, your, everything is affected by not having vitamins and we got no vitamins. We get, well, the only vitamins we got was what we could get weeds, when we could get a weed and eat the greens from that weed that's the only way we were getting any vitamins. There's no vitamins in rice, I mean it's all starch and you got beri-beri, you had electric foot. This electric foot, everybody will tell you you had electric foot and it was malnutrition, that part of the malnutrition that you had was, it was like an electric shock started on each of your toes and it was like electric shock but it was pain, absolute pain. Your feet was just burning, you figured your feet was on fire but if you touched them, they were cold as ice and it was what you got from not having vitamins.

Some of the diseases that were present during captivity and the importance of vitamins.

Gordon Durant

Gordon Durant was born on December 20thth 1921. Things were busy for him and his 7 sisters and 4 brothers growing up on the farm in Saskatchewan. His father lived most of his civilian life with a disabling injury from the First World War. Mr. Durant left school after grade eight to help out around the farm before joining the army at age 17. After completing basic training, he was sent to Jamaica for garrison duty and then to Hong Kong where he was captured by the Japanese. He spent the remainder of the war as a prisoner of war in Hong Kong and Japan where he worked in the mines and on the railroad.