In the wake of any war comes the witness. Witnesses are men and women who testify with the authority of direct experience. They are the survivors of battles and atrocities, whose lives were swept up in tragedy or trauma, who resolve to speak out against the most unspeakable of crimes. Historians have labelled them ‘moral witnesses’. Burdened with ‘a terrible tale to tell’, their whole sense of self is often defined by their stories.

This chapter looks at three different kinds of witness testimony about the prisoner-of-war experience under the Japanese. The first two concern survivors who returned to the sites of imprisonment soon after the end of the war. The third is a documentary made by an Australian journalist who journeyed through Borneo gathering material.