Exhibition on POW camp to visit US

An exhibition will travel to the United States to tell the stories of Allied troops held at a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Shenyang, China, during World War II.

Comprising about 200 photographs and dozens of duplicate artifacts, the exhibition presents the prisoners' difficult lives at the Mukden POW Camp, also known as Shenyang World War II Allied POW Camp.

The exhibition will be open to the public from Nov 21 to Dec 5 at the WWII Pacific War Memorial Hall in San Francisco. Besides photos, exhibits include diaries and cartoons the prisoners created while in captivity. The artifacts were donated by veterans and their descendants.

The exhibition is called The Forgotten Camp because the camp and its history were not widely known until researchers drew attention to it in 2003, said Fan Lihong, curator of the exhibition and director of the Site Museum of the Shenyang camp.

From 1942 to 1945, the camp housed more than 2,000 captives from six countries: the US, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands and France. About 1,200 were from the US. The camp was unusual because it held the highest-ranking officials of the Allied forces captured during the war, Fan said.

Many prisoners died from cold, beatings, hunger and heavy labor.

"Far from the battlefield, though, they worked together with local Chinese laborers to fight against the Japanese by destroying the machines," Fan said. They also made friends with the Chinese, a number of whom risked their lives to offer them food and medicines and even helped them escape, she said.

"Compared with (atrocities in) the European Theater of World War II, I doubt the American public has heard as much about the atrocities the Japanese Imperial Army committed in China and other Asian countries," said Chinese Consul General in San Francisco Luo Linquan.

The exhibition also recalls when US and Chinese troops fought side by side and helped each other, Luo said.

liazhu@chinadailyusa.com