Four different artists give pictorial informations about their experiences in Japanese prisoner-of- war camps: The German lance-corporal Willy Muttelsee spent four years, from 1916 – 1920, behind barbed wires in the refined atmosphere of the exemplary Bando camp on Shikoku island. The Dutch illustrator Charles Burki (1909 – 1994) was arrested in camp Fukuoka close to Nagasaki when the American A-bomb fell. The two British artists Jack Chalker (b.1918) and Ronald Searle (b.1920) experienced the brutal conditions in Changi Prison in the eastern part of Singapore and in the Thai-Burma Railway camps.
A reprint of Willy Muttelsee´s sketch-book was published in Osaka in 2005.
The drawings are accompanied by poems of Karl Bähr.
Physical activities: the race
The “Esau”: cellular imprisonment
Changi Goal, May 1944 (Searle)
Labour camp, Singapore, May 1942 (Chalker)
Building the railway bund, 1942 (Chalker)
Hintok cutting, Thailand 1942 (Chalker)
“light duties” for sick men, July 1944 (Searle)
Working for the Thai-Burma Railway, 1943 (Searle)
Roll-call with beating-up, 1943 (Searle)
Lunchtime games, Siam 1943 (Searle)
“Holding the stone”, Siam 1943 (Chalker)
Street scene, Singapore 1942 (Searle)
Prisoner dying of cholera, 1943
Our guard, June 1945 (Searle)
Dying friend, July 1943 (Searle)
Uncooperative Chinese and Malay civilians, Singapore 1942 (Searle)
