The forgotten drama of the Pekanbaru railway on Sumatra, built by prisoners of war under the Japanese occupation.
Under the yoke of the Japanese army they performed forced labour on the Burma and Sumatra railways.
Approximately 4000 Dutch, +/- 1000 British, Australians, Americans and New Zealanders (300 in total). Together with more than 120,000 Indonesian workers, called Romusha by the Japanese, were used as the most important workforce on the railways. They built dikes and cut passages through the jungle and along the ravines.. The degree of extermination of the local labour force was unfathomable, with reports at the end of the war estimating that only 16,000 survived.
So many years later, the scars of that past are still visible.
