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Keeping their morale up

Heroes Remember

Keeping their morale up

Interviewer: So you must be thinking, is it going to end? Hope... hope. We'd, you know, hunger was the big thing, was no question about it, it was worse then the beatings. I can't describe hunger and I've never saw it described, what it really... It's just something that you can't describe it's just... especially after you get your little bowl of rice, boy are you hungry then. Interviewer: So how could you possibly keep the morale up? How did you keep going? Well, we, most of us did something, would say something to somebody, everybody else that you know, something positive and sense of humour. Now we are starving to death and that, this is the first camp we were in, North Point, I felt that they were starving us to take our energy away from us. Afraid of us, afraid of us escaping and they were building wire fences and all that stuff continually. But, in our, in the camp, the British navy had about 10 officers and they had girlfriends or friends on the outside and the Japs allowed them to come up to the fence and hand them small parcels. One day we were walking along and I'm looking at the hut and I see something and I walked up to it, here's a banana peeling nailed to the wall and underneath it a sign says "stranger then fiction". We hadn't seen anything to eat so it was strange to see a banana peel. Those are the kind of things that we'd try to, you know, laugh at, to keep us busy...

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