The Railway Man: A True Story of War, Remembrance, and Forgiveness,by Eric Lomax (Ballantine, 276 pp.; $12, paper). Reviewed by Eric Metaxas, a writer whose work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, Books & Culture, and other publications.
Eric Lomax’s The Railway Man is a curious book, not least because it connects two things that are wildly and absurdly incongruous: trains and torture. But as one reads along, one sees that in the life of this son of Scotland the congruity between them was especially, terribly tangible.
Lomax grew up near Edinburgh between the wars, and during his childhood, which marked the twilight of steam power, he developed a singularly powerful affection for trains, often riding his bicycle for hours merely to catch a glimpse of a particularly worthy engine. His writing about trains betrays this affection and can be strangely heartbreaking: “We have never created any sound so evocative of separation as the whistle of a steam locomotive, that high note of inhuman relief as vaporized water is blown off and meets the cold air.” There is a profound sadness in that sentence, and behind others as well: “That explosive, rhythmic sound we call puffing says more to us about getting under way, about departure, than a petrol-driven snarl can ever do: perhaps it has something close to the beat of our pulse.”
It struck me early in his book that the man who wrote these sentences must possess a well of sadness within him, that their simple and poetic poignancy must have been born of some brokenness and suffering. How else might someone make the sound of a train seem so particularly mournful? And reading further one is soon struck by the awful and unfathomable depth of that well.
Early on in World War II, Lomax, then a British lieutenant, was taken prisoner by the Japanese. His horrific experiences at the hands of his captors form the bulk of this moving book. But it all unfolds gradually, making for a read that is somehow all the more unsettling. The Japanese incrementally increase their presence—and their cruelties toward their prisoners. Soon, Lomax is pressed into slave labor on the infamous Burma-Siam Railway.
This would seem the ultimate ironic fillip. But Lomax and his fellow pows yet possess the giddy optimism that seems to be their British birthright. They still feel that, given the right circumstances, they will surely triumph over their barbarous captors. So when several of the pows conspire to make a number of radio transmitters, you come to expect them somehow to get away with it, twitting their captors as they do so.
But they don’t get away with it. Monstrous reality soon shatters their self-confident bearing; the Japanese discover the radio transmitters. And here the story turns irretrievably tragic. For his part in this episode, Lomax is mercilessly beaten with ax handles:
I went down with a blow that shook every bone, and which released a sensation of scorching liquid pain which seared through my entire body. Sudden blows struck me all over. I felt myself plunging downwards into an abyss with tremendous flashes of solid light which burned and agonized. I could identify the periodic stamping of boots on the back of my head, crunching my face into the gravel; the crack of bones snapping; my teeth breaking; and my own involuntary attempts to respond to deep vicious kicks and to regain an upright position, only to be thrown to the ground once more.
It continues, and it is a terrible thing to read. In the months and years that follow this horrifying beating, Lomax is subjected to other sadistic tortures by the Kempetei, Imperial Japan’s Gestapo, to whose evil custody he is turned over. It comes across as all the more awful because one is reading not about some hardened soldier—some martial tough—but rather a member of the quaint-sounding Royal Corps of Signals, shy and physically awkward, whose overwhelming passion in life was—trains. And so it is no wonder that the experience broke him as it did and then dominated his life for a half-century after it was over.
But there is something redemptive in the end. Lomax unexpectedly locates the Japanese interrogator Nagase, whom he especially hated. We learn that Nagase, consumed with remorse, has spent the decades since the war trying to atone for his deeds. The passages in which the former interrogator and Lomax, now both old men, meet are extraordinarily touching.
As I read, I compared Eric Lomax’s experience of torture with that of one of my heroes in the faith, Richard Wurmbrand, whose horrors in Romania’s communist prison system have been documented in his bestselling books In God’s Underground and Tortured for Christ. Pastor Wurmbrand’s experiences at the hands of his torturers actually seem to exceed—if one dare compare infinities—those of Eric Lomax.
And yet it somehow seems Eric Lomax’s spiritual and emotional sufferings exceed those of Pastor Wurmbrand. After all, Wurmbrand faced his tormentors with a towering Christian faith. The torturers’ blows seemed not to strike him; they were countered with an amazing Christlike love—which is to say, it all reads very much like a battle of sorts. Wurmbrand had a fighting chance, as it were, and actually won. But Lomax comes across as a victim. In receiving his story, we are merely witnesses to an episode in the endless tragedy that is man’s proverbial inhumanity to man.
And though the ending of Railway Man is obviously redemptive, it is a small redemption. It is certainly not triumphant. This is difficult to accept. But why? I think it is because the redemption offered in Lomax’s story seems less than what he and his experiences deserve. The reconciliation, amazing and heartening as it is, does not quite seem a fitting recompense. Of course we are glad for it—for anything pointing toward hope and redemption—but in the end it pales in comparison to the ultimate and infinite redemption that we cannot help longing for in reading this unforgettable story.
Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
