Michael Hurst vividly recalls one of his first real finds. It was 1997 and he was rummaging around a site in Jinguashi (金瓜石), Taipei County, when he spotted a piece of pottery lying partially buried in the dirt. After turning it over he couldn’t believe his eyes.
“I was jumping up and down like a kid who just got handed a million bucks,” he said referring to his reaction after discovering that the shard had the blue star of the Imperial Japanese Army etched into it.
“If anybody had seen this foreigner jumping around ... they would have thought that the guy had gone out of his mind. To find something from that era right there in the ground at the camp, what an exciting thing,” he said.
Hurst’s discovery might not elicit the same kind of reaction from the average person, but as director of Taiwan POW Camps Memorial Society (www.powtaiwan.org) every object found at sites like Jinguashi, which was home to the notorious Kinkaseki POW camp, is a piece of a puzzle that sheds light on the living conditions of the men who were interned in Japanese prisoner of war camps in Taiwan during World War II.
Hurst, a long-time resident of Taiwan, will give a lecture tomorrow beginning at 2pm about the POWs entitled They Were Prisoners of War, They Were in Taiwan, for the Lung Ying-tai Cultural Foundation’s (龍應台文化基金會) Taipei Salon (台北沙龍). He will discuss the development of the POW camps in Taiwan, provide a description of their conditions and place them in an historical context. Thomas Hodges, spokesman and public affairs section chief for the American Institute in Taiwan, will moderate the lecture.
Amateur historian, archeological enthusiast and occasional sleuth — Hurst wears many hats in his role as the organization’s director. Since forming the society in 1997 with representatives from the Australian, New Zealand, Canadian and British trade offices, Hurst has spent countless hours scrutinizing maps, reading diaries and picking over the 14 resident POW camps — many of which he discovered — and one temporary evacuation camp erected on Taiwan between 1942 and 1945.
“It’s not like you go out and find the [camp] and you’re done. It takes months or years of putting pieces together before things come together,” he said, adding, “I’ve talked to about 300 POWs and their family members over the past 13 years.”
Hurst’s fascination with the POWs stems from the respect he held for his uncles who fought in both World Wars.
“I’ve always wanted to do more than just go to the Remembrance Day and wear the poppy every year. I always wanted to do something tangible,” he said.
Whereas Hurst spent the first few years picking through the camps and collecting artifacts, today most of his time is spent making sense of the mountains of documents and objects in his possession, dealing with government officials and, most importantly, maintaining a daily correspondence with POWs and their families throughout the world.
“When [the soldiers] came home from the war their experiences were so terrible. POWs have said that after the war they quickly formed POW associations and clubs because they had to go and have a drink with their mates and talk about [the war] because nobody else would understand. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t get an e-mail about something to do with POWs or their family members regarding, you know, finding grandpa or dad or Uncle John or whatever. A lot of my work is helping the families to have closure and have knowledge of the men,” Hurst said.
“It’s probably one of the reasons why I was awarded the MBE,” he said.
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