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Lanky Livingston
Guest
Pretty amazing story.
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Sixty-nine years ago on Saturday, American and Filipino prisoners of war on the Bataan Peninsula started marching at gunpoint. By the time the survivors arrived at a prison camp in the Philippines in spring of 1942, they had watched thousands of their comrades die along the 60 or more miles. What they suffered endures as a symbol of wartime cruelty. A few months ago, the grandson of one of the survivors traveled from Northern Virginia to Japan with an old photograph in his hand. It was a grainy picture of a young Japanese boy. For Tim Ruse, a 27-year-old sleep disorders specialist from Centreville, and for the Japanese people who greeted him, the photo offered a way to pluck from a dark chapter of history one single act of compassion. It was a photo of the child who helped save his grandfather’s life. Now they just had to find him.
The image of the boy was one of two photographs that Carl Ruse clutched in his hands when he boarded the USS Rescue in September 1945. He stripped the filthy clothes from his emaciated frame and threw his makeshift crutches into the sea. He left everything behind except those two pictures: The first of himself when he arrived at the prison camp in Japan — his cheeks hollow, his gaze hard and haunted — and the second of the boy.
Click link for the rest of the story.
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Sixty-nine years ago on Saturday, American and Filipino prisoners of war on the Bataan Peninsula started marching at gunpoint. By the time the survivors arrived at a prison camp in the Philippines in spring of 1942, they had watched thousands of their comrades die along the 60 or more miles. What they suffered endures as a symbol of wartime cruelty. A few months ago, the grandson of one of the survivors traveled from Northern Virginia to Japan with an old photograph in his hand. It was a grainy picture of a young Japanese boy. For Tim Ruse, a 27-year-old sleep disorders specialist from Centreville, and for the Japanese people who greeted him, the photo offered a way to pluck from a dark chapter of history one single act of compassion. It was a photo of the child who helped save his grandfather’s life. Now they just had to find him.
The image of the boy was one of two photographs that Carl Ruse clutched in his hands when he boarded the USS Rescue in September 1945. He stripped the filthy clothes from his emaciated frame and threw his makeshift crutches into the sea. He left everything behind except those two pictures: The first of himself when he arrived at the prison camp in Japan — his cheeks hollow, his gaze hard and haunted — and the second of the boy.
Click link for the rest of the story.