Hello and welcome to this week's edition of Family Stories, the podcast written by you,

our listeners. This week's Family Stories, Segway in Dramatic Fashion, from an illegal

printing press in Denmark to scavenger hunts in the desert minefields of North Africa.

We start though with this extraordinary story from Alissa Brathwaite. Alissa writes,

which roughly means Achtung in the Dwarrug Aboriginal language. My name is Alissa and yes,

I'm Australian, don't hold it against me, I live with my English partner Rob in Sydney.

He's an avid listener of your podcast and he's been urging me to write to you for some

time about my family's pretty remarkable war story. I'd always put it off as it's

a very emotional story for me and want to feel a huge responsibility to do justice to. However,

once I heard the episode Prisoners of the Empire, I knew I had to bite the bullet and just

do it. My grandfather, Dick Brathwaite, was a prisoner of war of the Japanese in North

Borneo in the Second World War. He was one of only six survivors of the infamous Sandokan

Deathmarches of 1945. It was the worst atrocity ever inflicted on Australian soldiers.

1,787 Australian soldiers and 641 British soldiers perished.

Dick was born James Richard Brathwaite on 15 June 1917. When World War II broke out,

Dick was ambivalent about what to do. He had heard the stories from the First World War

and seen what the war had done to those who returned. He said he had no desire to hurt

anyone nor any desire to be hurt by anyone, but he also felt that if it was necessary,

all should do their part. He joined the Australian Army in June

1940 and became a bombardier in the Second 15th Field Battalion before Singapore fell

in February 1942. Dick spent more than three years in a Prisoner of War camp in Sandokan

in North Borneo, where the prisoners were starved, beaten and refused medication to

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