John Franken

Excerpts from John Franken's account on thememoryproject.com linked from www.mansell.com on Fukuoka #2 "Nagasaki" using Slaves for the Kawanami Shipyard [Kawanami Zosen, Seibu-gun, Keiri-fu]:

... I was shipped to Nagasaki, where I worked on a shipyard. I was really slave labour, because we were really pushed to the utmost. And, it was three months before the end of the war. I was shipped to the... I got transferred to the coal mine. And that saved my life, because the atomic bomb destroyed Nagasaki and the shipyard. When we came up from the coal mines, we saw the big plume and we thought they'd hit an ammunition dump - we didn't know anything about atomic bombs at that time.

...And there's a school built now, and the school children doesn't know anything about where the school was built - on ground that used to be prisoner of war camp.

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(Last Updated: January 15, 2004.)