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You are here: Home / Grace Stories / 30 DoL Louis Zamperini – Trust 2 in the Depths of WWII

April 8, 2011 By Janneke

30 DoL Louis Zamperini – Trust 2 in the Depths of WWII

Creating Hope to Survive from Rage,

Creating Hope to Survive from Trust

The energy that fuels our survival comes from different sources. For Louis Zamperini, he starved but survived on a diet of rage at his cruelest captor, nicknamed “The Bird.”

As he went from one terifying ordeal to another, this rage, this battle of not-giving-in affirmed for him, that he had a spirit inside that remained alive. No matter how severe the attack or the deprivation – his spirit remained alive. In Japan in a freezing Japanese prison labor camp, Zamperini remainedd alive with the burning fire of rage inside.

Six thousand miles away, six million Jews and others were executed and toiled in German slave labor concentration camps. There, Viktor Frankl was also clinging to survival. Frankl also powerfully realized, that in deprivation and cruelty, his spirit did survive. He later wrote words read around the world:

Everything can be taken from a man but…the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 104

What attitude do you choose to survive and thrive, an attitude of rage for power, of life, of trust?

This is how author Laura Hillenbrand, Zamperini’s biographer in the book Unbroken, described Zamperini’s struggle to survive AFTER liberation.

Living in the midst of war, Zamperini knew exactly what he had to do to survive. Living in peace, however, was another story.

“What he was dealing with when he was in crisis, in the war, these were all physical things that he had to get over,” Hillenbrand says. “He had to figure out how to get water on the raft; he had to figure out how to catch that next fish.  Meanwhile, the damage was being done to him emotionally. It was something, I think, a lot of these men could kind of put off at the time, in the crisis, but once the crisis was over, that’s when it all kind of exploded inside them.”

When Louis Zamperini returned, in expectation of safety and comfort to his home, he could not find peace. For years, his emotional and mental recovery wavered as Hillenbrand described above.

A deeper trust and peace came to Louis Zamperini when he was contacted as a former Olympian.  He had run in the 1936 Olympics in Germany. He had alredy carried the Olympic torch again in 1984 and 1996. He had already become a motivational Christian speaker, often speaking of forgiveness.

In 1998 he carried the Olympic torch into the Japanese Nagano Winter Olympics to acclaim, not derision and torture. This experience, he told Hillenbrand, was what prepared him to tell his life story.

Over the years he has spoken to former Japanese war criminals who had been his torturers. He has found peace; he has found trust. He has

survived many years now, not through rage, but through trust.

The man who had met Hitler at the 1936 Olympics and had survived the worst of Japanese prison camps in World War II, had returned to another Olympics, the Japanese Olympics, in peace. We like to pretend our lives proceed in an orderly, linear fashion. Not so, our lives often come full circle. I believe  a circle was completed for Louis Zamperini as he carried the Olympic torch into the Nagano Japan Olympic stadium. 

The woman, me,  who never knew her father to tell of his own Japanese labor camp experiences during World War II, came full circle too. When I sit with my friend Fred, who started to tell his story about five years ago, I hear it all. He tells me about Japanese labor camps in Indonesia.He tells me all about starvation, deprivation, and today – trust. He helps me trust more too.

Are you ready to tell more of your story? Who will you speak to? Tell me here.

Do you think it’s too late to tell your story? Zamperini is in his nineties and is still telling his story. Fred is in his eighties and he tells his story, it’s never too late. My mother is in her eighties and still tells me more stories about life in Nazi-occupied The Netherlands (Holland) during World War II. It’s never too late.

 

 

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Filed Under: Grace Stories, Thirty Days of Light, Trauma-Healing Tagged With: Dutch East Indies, Japanese Concentration Camps, Jappen Kampen, Prisoner-of-war camp, Psychological trauma, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival Resilience and Redemption

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. DJ Hughes says

    April 21, 2011 at 9:12 am

    I just bought this book “Unbroken” for my husband. How interesting to read about it here too.

    It was nice meeting you at the conference. (I just put some pictures from Mt. Hermon on my blog.)

    • Janneke says

      April 22, 2011 at 1:32 am

      I like how all these influences cross. I’m looking forward to your photos. I can be kind of dense in finding you, so please feel free to send me a link for your photos on my email. I encourage you to read Unbroken too. I’m actually expecting my copy soon, so only reading excerpts so far. I am amazed how quickly or slowly, the humans spirit mends. Blessings to you.

  2. Margarita Volker says

    May 10, 2011 at 9:33 pm

    How can I express the amazing feeling I was left when I finished reading this amazing book. To think we had this amazing hero from Torrance that I never heard about was so wonderful. One of the most exciting parts of it all is that I was in Nagano for the Olympics and I had a picture taken with an older man from the USA who was carrying the Nanago torch. I looked up the picture and is looks so much like Mr. Zamperini I was besides myself to be near such a great hero. A treasure of a book..my favorite of all books I’ve read recently. Thank you this gift of a book.

    Sincerely,
    Margarita

    • Janneke says

      May 11, 2011 at 3:53 am

      Margarita, I am glad this was meaningful for you. I am amazed by your story – actually being at the Nagono Olympics. I do hope you were actually next to Luis Zamperini. One of the experiences this site is dedicated to is all our many connections which are no accident. I hope to hear from you again.

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Meet Janneke

Janneke Jobsis Brown
Following Shadows is inspired by my own story. As a survivor of an international childhood with parents who were World War II survivors, I know the generational after-effects of starvation and slave labor in Japanese concentration camps for my father, and the terror of Nazi occupation for my mother. I know the challenges of struggling to feel at home across three countries: The Netherlands, Iran and America.

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