Dear Grandpa,

I never knew you. I don’t even have a photo of you to remember you by. What I know of you, I heard from third party sources.Our older relatives recounted that you were dragged away by Japanese soldiers from your shop in Bukit Timah Village at the height of bitter street fighting in February 1942.

Your neighbours quavered in fear and watched haplessly as you were taken away, never to be seen again. Your wife reproached herself for the rest of her living days for insisting that you had to leave the safety of your home to return to your shop and guard it against looters. How would she have known that by saying that did she just send her husband to his death.

Please don’t blame grandmother. She searched for you in vain and suffered too at the hands of marauding, ill-disciplined Japanese soldiers. I was too young to remember how she looked.

But her guilt-stricken conscience dogged her for life and became part of our family’s psyche as she tried to explain to her children how she lost her husband.

Sixty three years later, as I went through heartwrenching oral history testimonies of those witnesses to the horrific atrocities taking place in February 1942, I could feel the pain and senselessness of the violence committed against you.

Lined up next to a disused pond, bullet riddled and dumped unceremoniously into the watery grave, your final resting place known only to your remorseless killers.

We could not even find your body to give you a decent burial. But your spirit lingers on and your grandsons will not let you die in vain.

We will never allow a repetition of February 1942 as we stand ready to fight and die for this land we call home. We shall never forget!