Torture

Artist view of old YMCA Building

Elizabeth was put into a cell only 10 by 12 feet (4m by 5m) big. There were more than 20 people crammed inside. They knelt from morning till night. Elizabeth was the only female among them. Inside the cell was a tap and underneath it, a hole meant for toilet purposes. The stench coming from their perspiration, human waste and stagnant water fouled up the small cell and was suffocating. They had to crawl out through a small trap door at the side for interrogation. The captors beat them up, subjected them to electric shocks and pumped them up with water as part of the interrogation routine. The feeling of having one’s belly pumped full of water and then seeing the water gushing out of the body was hardly bearable. The prisoners were forbidden to speak to one another, although one of the internees, John Dunlop, secretly taught them to communicate in sign language.

At Elizabeth's first interrogation session, the Japanese told her that some ships had been sunk in the harbour and they wanted to know the location of a large amount of money. She claimed no knowledge of the matter but was repeatedly interrogated and beaten. At various times, the Kempeitai forced Elizabeth to kneel on some angled bars of wood on the floor. They stripped her topless and tied her to the wood so she could not go either forwards or backwards. Then they applied electric shocks to her. They even brought in her husband from Outram Prison to let him see her being tortured. After nine months in captivity, Elizabeth had lost half her body weight.

Kempeitai

“A suspect undergoing interrogation might be subjected to

all sorts of beating by various instruments, kicking and boxing, slapping and ju-jitsu throw, burning in the tender parts with cigarette ends or electric charges, pins being driven into nails, hanging by thumbs or ankles, and the infamous water-treatment

. Besides these, detained persons were subjected to inhuman prison conditions calculated to break the toughest resistance. Males and females were usually not separately confined, and cells were small, badly ventilated, infested with bugs and insects, and of foul sanitation. Food was merely sufficient to keep a person alive. The whole proceeding of Japanese torture can be summarised in two words: "unspeakable horror." Few ever survived these inhumanities.”

A description of the torture methods the Kempeitai used when interrogating suspects.Link http://www.angelfire.com/pro/ssf-136/Kempeitai.htm      

  

 Her psychological resilience and principle stand sustained her endurance

in the physical abuse and interrogation

at the hands of the Kempeitai and she never admitted to being a British sympthizer.Elizabeth spent 193 days in a stinking cell with inhuman conditions.She was only released after 193 days of starvation diet and repeated torture.