ex Japanese P.O.W

John Franken

Both John Franken and his wife Sonja were POWs during the Second World War. John was held in captivity in Japan, and Sonja survived the horrors of Auschwitz.

John Franken is pictured here at 26 years of age, three years after his release from a Japanese POW camp. John Franken endured three and a half years of horrific treatment during his internment.

When Japan was offered a place in the UN Security Council, many Canadian and American veterans called for an apology from the Japanese government for the attrocities committed in POW camps.

John Franken's Medals (Left to Right): Star for Order and Peace ("Orde-Vrede") for service in the Dutch West Indies; the War Commemorative Cross Javazee 1941-1942; Decoration for Devoted Service.

WWII | Navy | Québec

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"I was really slave labour, because we were really pushed to the utmost."
Recording Transcript
My name is John Franken, born in 10 of April 1922, at a place by the name of Semarang , Indonesia. From there I moved to a little place Purworetjo where I grew up. There I followed high school, and then I went to Jakarta , where I finished my schooling in the technical school. And then I was conscripted for the navy/air force, and I was sent to a school to learn the mechanics of aircraft - mechanical and electrical. And then on the 7th of December, Pearl Harbour happened, and Indonesia was at war.

I was sent to a little town on the south shore of Java to depart to Australia to finish our course. And on the way to Australia, we were intercepted by two big Japanese battleships, with all the torpedos pointed at us. And we were captured by the Japanese.

We were four of us, and we went through the war, all four of us. Except one, who died during the war. And then we went to a little place of Markartha (?), and there we spent time... nine months, and then I were shipped to Japan. In nine months we had to clear the debris the Americans... were damaging...they were bombing the harbour, and everything else. And there I learned also that I have to work in the - what they call today - where the sex slaves were. Where the Japanese picked up the girls from the street and put them on trucks, and brought them to the to the hospitals to checked for venereal diseases. And then they were used... first by the officers, and then by the soldiers. And my job was to clean the room, so to see that the girls were taken care of with the clean water. And we had to clean the room. And I that's... I witnessed what they call today the sex slaves.

I went from Makartha (?), 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.

So I always say that the my life was saved by the atomic bomb. When you go to Japan... I went to Japan two times now. I went to the prison camp where I was. 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.

Well, the Japanese people... they're nice people like anyone else. There are bad people, and there are good people.

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