After nearly 80 years their story is about to be told. It is a story of deceit, suffering, neglect and death. After being deceptively lured to Thailand to work on the Thai-Burma (Death) Railway, these Asian Laborers underwent great suffering in the jungles to complete that project. Those buried herein were among those who survived that ordeal. In 1944, they were consolidated to a large camp here in Kanchanaburi.
But their deprivation and neglect did not stop. Their Allied POW counterparts had their maladies treated in a newly founded hospital; they were afforded no such luxury. Their access to food and shelter may have improved, but not their overall plight did not. They continued to die in large numbers; still unnamed, uncounted and uncared for.
In 1945, they watched as those POWs were rapidly evacuated to their home counties. No one came to assist them in going home. The vast majority were British subjects if not actually British citizens, but London ignored them. Many of them remained in those camps well into 1947. Many more died there and were buried in shallow graves.
Post-war, the remains of the Allied POWs were meticulously collected, identified, and reburied each with a dedicated grave and marker. The Asians who had died in the jungles were rarely even buried much less accounted for by name or number. Even these survivors of the Railway were buried in anonymity.
To continue the indignity, even when their bones were discovered in the early 1950s, no one asked who they were. No one sought to tell their story, to uncover their plight. Instead thousands of remains were simply warehoused, cremated and reburied. In 1957 that burial site was marked by a memorial, but was known only as Chedi Niranam or grave of the anonymous.
Now in 2024, we strive to tell their story. We now know that the majority of those buried in Chedi Niranam are Tamil-Indians from Malaya. They would have been Hindus. Finally, after 80 years their descendants have a place to come to honor them.
We will never know their names.
We will never know how many nor exactly where they came from.
We can, however, try to tell their story
so that they will never be forgotten.
May the Lord Shiva recognize their suffering and answer their prayers.
Initial photo gallery; more and better to come
