Mass Grave Near the Bridge on the River Kwai Stirs Haunting Memories : World War II: Though the book and the movie were largely contrived, the discovery in Thailand is all too real.

Takashi Nagase, 72, remembers very well what happened during the building of the bridge on the River Kwai in the jungle here.

The discovery of a mass grave last fall made his memories all the more excruciating.

As an intelligence officer with the Imperial Japanese Army helping oversee construction of the “Death Railway” from Bangkok to Rangoon, Nagase witnessed numerous acts of cruelty against Allied and Asian prisoners.

“The history (of atrocities) cannot be erased,” he says. “All Japanese are born guilty. The sin flows in our blood.”

In an act of penance for his wartime deeds, Nagase traveled in 1963 from his home in Tokyo back to the bridge at Kanchanaburi and laid a wreath on one of the graves at the nearby Allied cemetery.

“At that moment,” he said in an interview, “I heard a strange, sharp sound in my ears. I saw my body emitting yellow light in all directions. I felt I was pardoned by God for what I did while in the army.”

Nagase is not the only one who claims to have had an other-worldly experience near the remains of the railway, for which about 60,000 Allied prisoners and as many as 300,000 Asian prisoners were used as slave labor by the Japanese.

Last October, Sompong Chorenchai, a motorcycle repair shop owner in Kanchanaburi, had trouble sleeping. His dreams, he said, were haunted by ghosts. He saw mass graves and many bodies.

The ghosts begged Sompong to help relieve their misery, he said.

After several weeks of such dreams, he sought out Ananya Watanayam, who owns land less than a mile from the River Kwai and only a few dozen yards from the old railway tracks. Sompong learned that the farmer had found human bones in the soil.

This prompted local authorities to explore the area. They soon discovered the apparent source of Sompong’s ghosts.

The mass grave contained the skeletons of as many as 500 prisoners, some bound with wire. Some, according to those who found them, were in positions suggesting they had been buried alive.

The discovery has brought back a flood of unhappy recollections for the people of Kanchanaburi.

And, in a sad irony, it also has been a boon to Kanchanaburi’s tourist trade, drawing renewed attention to the reconstructed bridge and the cemetery.

“So many of the prisoners and Asian slave workers died or were executed,” said 70-year-old Boonrat Boonsiri. “Many were buried here, while hundreds of bodies were thrown into the River Kwai. Even the crocodiles stopped eating human flesh because so many corpses were floating in the river.”

The Japanese, of course, were at war at the time and were waging a military campaign through Southeast Asia. The Bangkok-Rangoon railway was seen as a key link in supplying troops in Burma (now Myanmar) for an invasion of India.

Thousands of captured Allied soldiers were sent to Kanchanaburi to build the railway--Britons, Australians, New Zealanders, Dutch and Americans. They were joined by thousands more Asian prisoners--mostly Indians, Malaysians, Singaporeans, and Tamils from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).

More than 16,000 men had perished by the time the 258-mile railway was completed in October, 1943. Many died of exhaustion, malnutrition or malaria, working in thick jungle amid unrelenting heat and humidity.

The episode of the Death Railway might have remained a footnote to the history of a long and violent war had not Pierre Boulle written his dramatic (and largely contrived) novel “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” followed by David Lean’s epic film version in 1957.

The teak bridge was not, as the novel and film portray it, blown up by British and American commandos moments before a trainload of Japanese dignitaries was to make the first crossing. It was destroyed, along with most of the railway, by Allied bombers in November, 1943.

Today the famous bridge, reconstructed of steel, still stands. It was rebuilt by the Japanese as a war indemnity and later purchased from the Allies by Thailand for $2 million.

The Thai segment of the railroad, which used to run from the capital, Bangkok, all the way to the Burma border, now ends at Nam Tok, about 40 miles north of Kanchanaburi. From there it disappears into the jungle.

Every December, Kanchanaburi holds an annual River Kwai festival, with fireworks and other activities.

The mass grave probably will be added to most tourists’ itineraries. When all the remains were collected from the pits, Chinese and Thai monks performed religious rites to bring peace to the troubled souls that had lain there.

And Sompong Chorenchai is sleeping well again.