Edith of Malaya

When the Japanese invaded Malaya, a plain-faced Eurasian woman named Sybil Kathigasu was living in the town of Ipoh with her doctor-husband, Addon, and their four-year-old daughter, Dawn. The Kathigasus moved into the interior, took up farming, and started a "grow more food'' campaign. After a while the Japanese discovered what else the Kathigasus were doing: a radio in Sybil's bedroom picked up information which was relayed to the guerrillas; wounded resistance fighters and British stragglers were sheltered and given medical treatment in their house.

The Japanese caught and tortured Sybil to extract information about the underground. At one point they tied her to a stake and suspended her daughter Dawn over a blazing fire. Dawn shouted: "Mummy, I love you very much!" In the family code it meant that Dawn would not talk and Sybil must not talk either. The Japanese halted the fire torture in time, but they invented others for Sybil: beating, branding, dripping water. By the time a British captain found her at war's end, her skull, jaw and spine had been broken, her legs temporarily paralyzed.

Sybil Kathigasu was flown to Britain, where the King gave her the George Medal for civilian heroism. Ten operations failed to knit together her broken body. During two years, in & out of British hospitals, she laboriously wrote her story, to be published under her underground code name, "Sab." "The world must know what kind of people these Japanese are," said Sybil. "Already memories are growing short."

She dictated the last 50 pages of her book just before death came. Last week her body was buried in the village cemetery of Lanark, Scotland, far from husband Addon and daughter Dawn, who had been waiting in Malaya for her return. Sybil's epitaph came from Whitehall's Colonial Office: "She was the Edith Cavell of Malaya."

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