Humanoid Profiles
Story by Gary Greenberg
Photo by Mike Price
Stanley Willner: On the Railway
of Death
Stanley Willner was one of the guys who built the
bridge over the River
Kwai. But it was nothing like the movie.
“No one stood up to the Japanese like they did in
the movie,” he says. “The
Japs thought nothing of cutting off the heads of their own men, much
less ours.”
Willner, now 82 and living at PGA West in Palm Beach
Gardens, was a
young officer in the Merchant Marines when his transport ship was blown
out of
the water by a German warship in 1942. After treating him for serious
shrapnel
injuries, the Germans turned him over to the Japanese in the South
Pacific.
“The German doctor gave me a note for the Japanese
doctors explaining
my condition,” he says. “But there were no Japanese doctors. And when
I gave the
note to a Jap officer, he hit me in the face with a rifle butt.
I knew things were
going to be bad after that.”
Willner is an unassuming, soft-spoken, gentle soul
of a man whose eyes
and manner belie the fact that he witnessed and somehow managed to
survive
horrific atrocities while working on the infamous Death Railway through
Thailand
as a prisoner of war.
“We’d work before sun-up until after sundown, seven
days a week,” he
says. “If you didn’t work, you didn’t eat, or were just beaten to death.
“We had every disease known to man–beriberi, scurvy,
amoebic dysentery,
malaria, pellagra–some I’d never even heard of. People were dying like
flies. The
worst job was collecting bodies to burn. Some were still alive.”
Willner, a slight man who weighed about 130 pounds
before the war,
dropped to seventy-five while in captivity. He also lost an eye.
“I didn’t shave or cut my hair for over two years,”
he notes, “but I was so
malnourished, it barely grew.”
He was known about the camp for collecting a scrapbook
of drawings and
writings from his fellow prisoners, who were mostly British, Australian
and Dutch.
“I did it for morale,” he says. “It made the guys
feel worthwhile just to
have someone ask them to write something down or draw a picture.”
He still has it, the pages of scrap paper now plasticized
for posterity. The
book is both pitiful and inspiring, a testament to the power of lost
souls.
Willner has lots of stories to tell, like the time
his buddy Dennis Roland
underwent a crude emergency appendectomy in the Thai jungle. Willner
stole a
duck and fed Roland its eggs, the extra nourishment helping him to
pull through.
“If they’d found out about the duck, they would
have killed me on the
spot,” Willner says matter-of-factly.
The brutality of the Japanese still haunts him.
He tells about a one-legged
Englishman who used to heat bath water for the Japanese officers. One
day, he
made the water too hot, so they boiled him alive.
“We had to stand there and watch,” Willner recalls.
“I never forgot those
screams.”
Perhaps Willner’s greatest indignity came after
the war was over, after he
was sent to be de-wormed at an Army field hospital in Calcutta, after
he was
shipped home to Virginia an emaciated, sore-covered, shell of his former
self. It
came when he was told he wasn’t entitled to veteran’s benefits because
he’d been
in the Merchant Marines.
“At that point, I was too sick to care,” he says.
“I went to private
physicians and my family took care of me.”
Many years later, he righted that wrong by successfully
suing the
government to win veteran’s rights for all of the Merchant Marines
who fought in
World War II. In the meantime, he raised a family and worked hard in
his mother’s
small chain of apparel stores before going into the motel business.
In 1976, Willner went back to Thailand to participate
in a march of
forgiveness. As the march participants approached the bridge over the
River Kwai,
the media turned up in force. Willner made news by flatly refusing
to walk across
the bridge.
“It wasn’t something I planned,” he explains. “In
fact, I was surprised to
see so much media there, Peter Jennings, a reporter from the Times
and all.
“I saw the Japanese standing there in fancy suits–they
had become so
rich–and I refused to cross the bridge because I never felt they were
sorry for what
they did. They haven’t paid one cent in reparations and there’s no
mention of the
atrocities in their history books. It’s like it never happened.
“The truth is they had no more regard for a human
being than you have for
a cockroach. We can forgive, but we should never forget.”