10:23am Thursday 25th March 2010
Reuben Kandler was a prisoner of war in Singapore during World War Two. His son Richard talks to Nick Elvin about his father’s captivity
WHEN Singapore fell to the Japanese in February 1942, thousands of Allied soldiers were taken prisoner.
And although their war may have been over, what followed were three years of hell in prison camps, with many not living to see freedom when hostilities ended.
In 1941 Reuben Kandler, a 25-year-old from Edgware, was sent to Singapore as a radar operator, although his destination was kept secret until he arrived. He was taken prisoner just weeks after arriving, and spent the rest of the war being moved around prison camps and working as a forced labourer, including on the construction of the Burma Railway.
Reuben’s son Richard, from Pinner, has written an account of his father’s experiences. Its title, The Prisoner List, refers to a handwritten list Reuben compiled of the first thousand Allied prisoners to be shipped into slavery following the fall of Singapore, as well as what happened to them afterwards.
He hid the list throughout his captivity, knowing that if it was discovered he would have been executed.
“It began with it being a normal list that would have been made anyway,” explains Richard. “But he also kept it as evidence of war crimes, and also to let their families know what had happened to the prisoners.”
Many servicemen died in captivity, from tropical diseases and the effects of starvation, or were executed following escape attempts. Reuben suffered dysentery and malaria.
“He was not an especially strong man physically, and much of the forced labour that he was required to carry out involved work that he was completely unused to,” says Richard.
“I think there are some clues in his personality. He was a quiet but very determined man and, although he fully appreciated the strong possibility that he might never return home, he also understood the importance of optimism and the need never to lose hope.
“He did tell me that optimism and making the best of circumstances were essential; so was comradeship, as the prisoners helped each other out in so many ways.
“His capacity never to lose hope, in spite of being fully aware of the grimness of the situation, must I think have taken great strength of character – as did his successful adjustment to normal living after he came home.”
However, Reuben might not have survived the war at all. Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945, following the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs. All 100,000 Allied prisoners had been scheduled for extermination later that month.
Reuben believed that had the bombs not been dropped, a prolonged, conventional war would have resulted in a much worse death toll than that caused by the bombings, but, Richard adds: “He fully understood the horror of the bombings, the indiscriminate nature of the damage that they caused to civilians and the implications for the future.”
During the war, Reuben’s brother Harry was taken prisoner by Rommel’s forces in North Africa, but was treated relatively well by the Italians, under the terms of the Geneva Convention. But despite his own maltreatment, Reuben did not hold a grudge against Japan after the war.
“So far as those Japanese who were responsible for these atrocities were concerned, his general approach was not to spend his time thinking about them,” Richard says. “His strong desire after he came home was to live in the present tense, and his determination and ability to do this may be why he readjusted so well to normal living after the war.”
Reuben died in March 2009, aged 92, having spent the last 40 years of his life living in Finchley. Richard wrote the book from taped conversations with his father.
“He was about 75 when I started to do this,” says Richard. “It had been a subject he had avoided, and he wasn’t too keen. But once he started he got into full flow.”
The Prisoner List, by Richard Kandler is released on March 31, published by Marsworth.
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