Humanoid
Gallery
Stanley Willner: On the Railway
of Death
Story
by Gary
Greenberg
Photo
by Mike Price
Courtesy
of Boca
Raton Magazine

September 2001--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 Marine 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 a Merchant Marine sailor rather than a member of
the U.S. armed forces.
“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 Marine sailors 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.”
Next:
Chip Robelen: Natural science whiz
Humanoid Gallery
Reading Room
Outer
Space Art Gallery