Getting Beat Up

If you didn’t want to do what they wanted you to do they’d make you stand to attention and beat you up and give you a rifle butt in the side of the face or right in the middle of your face at the front. I got my teeth knocked out here with a rifle butt. I can say this something about a buddy of mine. He was a foreman in our group. Like, our foreman, not the Japanese foreman. Because they would go to him if he wanted something for us to do, something special or something like that, you know. And I was quite good there too, I could, I did quite a bit of interpreting, I picked up the language quite well. I could communicate with them by this time. And they would beat you with a rifle butt. And this, this, one day they picked on me for some reason or other, and I kind of resented that and I kind of let them know that I did resent it. The guy marched me in front of a big boulder. The little guy wasn’t four feet to a grasshopper, he marched me to a boulder and he bat me in the face with his fist. And then every time I would jar back or get off balance and step back, he, two other guards would push me toward the rock again. And if I didn’t push it I’d feel the bayonet in my back. So I got beat up pretty bad that day. The guys had to help me back into camp.

Mr. Friesen describes being beaten by his guards

Isaac ‘Ike’ Friesen

Isaac ‘Ike’ Friesen was born on a farm in the Russian Ukraine on October 19, 1920. His father died while Ike was an infant, leaving his mother to run the farm. At the onset of the Bolshevik Revolution, Mrs. Friesen sold the family farm and emigrated to Winkler, Manitoba, later moving to and buying a house in nearby Pomcooley. Mr. Friesen attended the four room school across the street, completing grade eight before becoming a farm laborer to help support his mother. He eventually tried working on a sugarbeet farm in Carmen, Manitoba, but quickly decided joining the armed forces was a better option. He tried to join the Royal Canadian Navy, but was deferred to the Army. He took basic training as a member of the Eighteenth Manitoba Reconnaissance Regiment at Shilo. He was designated as “D” - unfit for overseas service, until being recruited by the badly depleted Winnipeg Grenadiers where his status suddenly became “A1.” Once the conflict in Hong Kong ended with the Allied surrender, Mr. Friesen worked as a laborer at Kai Tek airport. He was eventually shipped to the camp in Niigata, Japan, where he labored as a stevedore. After being liberated and returning to Canada, Mr. Friesen, as the result of a chance meeting while hitchhiking, was offered and accepted employment with what is now Shell Oil.