Attention!
Cette vidéo est disponible en anglais seulement.
Description
Mr. MacLean describes being liberated from Niigata.
Transcription
Interviewer: Can you tell me about the day when you find out, you're going home? You've gotten through this and you're going home.
Well, we had been working on a regular shift then one day, it was around the middle of between the second, second, first and second week in August I guess, 45'. The honcho or the boss at the foundry said, "Tomorrow no work." And that was fine we went home and the next morning the camp commandant sent the word down to the American officer that was in charge of our POW's in the camp, he was a POW too, that there was no work today, and that went on for about four days. "No work today, no work today." And then, this one day I was coming back from the washroom, they had, they had established a fairly good washroom then, and as I was coming back to my hut, I could see a group of people standing around in a group, at the corner of the building and I'm getting there I discover there was two American airmen...
Interviewer: That was a great sign...
And that gave me a wonderful feeling.
Interviewer: You knew it was getting closer.
Yep. They had been out in their fighter planes, reconnaissance planes whatever it was, and looking for camps. And so they, they came into the camp and they said, "We'll be back with heavier stuff for you in a couple of days." And so in the meantime the American officer was given a guard to take him down to see MacArthur in Yokohama or Tokyo wherever he was at that point. And about two days after that we were on a train to go to Yokohama. And ah...
Interviewer: Can you tell me how you were feeling then?
Pretty elated I'll tell ya, it was just a, it was so hard to believe that the, that this day had come. Just after so much devastation and so little food and cold places to sleep and it was almost hard to, hard to, hard to believe you know. It was, you could almost think that you were in a nightmare and...
Interviewer: And that you had survived it.
That you had survived it, yeah it was, but I'll tell you those American friends were, they were hard to describe.