Monique found out a little bit more about her grandfather Klaas van der Wal

Monique our daughter wrote an e-mail to Neil Macperson, and received an e-mail back from Andrew Snow TBRC. Thank you Monique.
This is the information she received:
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Andrew Snow
Thailand-Burma Railway Centre
Kanchanaburi
Thailand (www.tbrconline.com)

Hi Monique

I have searched our records for information on your grandfather Klaas van der Wal and have attached the records we have available.
Scan of Kui Yea Cemetery where he was originally buried
Scan of Kui Yea work Camp
Copy of Dutch burial records

TBRC POW Death record giving his death details and Cemetery site now.
Picture of his headstone.

I am afraid that we do not have details on his movements on the railway, before his death. So I hope that what we found gives you some information you were looking for. If you have anymore questions please ask and I will try to help you.

All the best,

Andrew

This is where he was laid to rest and from where his remains were transferred to Kanchanaburi.My father's grave is the third row letter K, fifth from the right.

Kui Yea work camp.

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His POW death record.

TBRC Pow death record. It shows details where his grave is in Kanchanaburi, Thailand.

                                              For every sleeper laid,a life was lost
                                              For every life lost, a sleeper was laid.
                                              Sleep in Peace, the crosses you bear
                                              Over 90.000 crosses, remember well!

And so they went, day by day, week by week, month by month, to the bridge on the River Kwai. With sudden stubbornness, unyielding to impossible odds, struggling to perish or to do the formidable, building the bridge for the twin line of steel. Winding through hills, plains and steaming jungle, two hundred and fifty miles long, resting on sleepers, resting on the memory of perished, working to death on the Burma Railroad.

My father's first resting place,Kuie at the site of the railway tracks, after the war his remains were transferred to Kanchanaburi.

Never look a Jap in the eye 

It's likely to trigger your time to die

Nowhere to hide and nowhere to run,

The remorseless fanatic with a gun

Cruelty and starvation they simply struggled on

All hope of any kind of future long gone

Laboring on the railway in the heat

Backbreaking and blistered feet

So was their lot, those years ago,

Their agonies! We will never know.

Win Rainer.

                                         

My father at the Dago Falls in Bandoeng, 1940.

                  

This beautiful country Indonesia. Paradise on Earth, so peaceful, was changed in violence, cruelty and into Hell by the Japanese.
My father was taken prison and transported to Thailand, where it was the beginning of a terrible ordeal in a"Green jungle of ' HELL'. The Japanese were planning to build a railroad-line, through the jungle.The ordeal had already started when they had to board a ship in Batavia and were taken to Singapore.