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    Jack Jennings, P.OW. Who Helped Build Burma Railway, Dies at 104

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    He was captured by the Japanese in Singapore and was one of thousands of prisoners whose hardships were the basis for the film “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”Jack Jennings, a British prisoner of war during World War II who worked as a slave laborer on the Burma Railway, the roughly 250-mile Japanese military construction project that inspired a novel and the Oscar-winning film “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” died this month in St. Marychurch, England. He was 104.His daughters Carol Barrett and Hazel Heath told the BBC on Jan. 22 that he had died in a nursing facility, though the exact date of death was unclear.They said they believed their father was the last survivor of the estimated 85,000 British, Australian and Indian solders who were captured when the British colony of Singapore fell to Japanese forces in February 1942.A private in the 1st Battalion Cambridgeshire Regiment, Mr. Jennings spent the next three-and-half years as a prisoner of war, first in Changi prison in Singapore and then in primitive camps along the route of the railway between Thailand and Burma (now Myanmar).To build bridges, Mr. Jennings and at least 60,000 P.O.W.s — and thousands more local prisoners — were forced to cut down and debark trees, saw them into half-meter lengths, dig and carry earth to build embankments, and drive piles into the ground.In his 2011 memoir, “Prisoner Without a Crime,” Mr. Jennings described the dangerous process of driving the piles, using a heavy weight raised by the men to the top of a timber frame.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Lynn Lynn’s Journey From Rocker to Dissecting Myanmar’s Coup in Film

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      Lynn Lynn was a musical idol when he volunteered in 2015 to protect the life of Myanmar’s new civilian leader. Forced to flee after 2021’s coup, he has reinvented himself as a film director.Long before he became an award-winning filmmaker, Lynn Lynn was already a star.His voice was ubiquitous on the radio, belting out rock songs, and he played sold-out shows in stadiums across the country. Everywhere he went, fans hounded him for selfies and autographs.But all that fame was confined to Myanmar, a country he had to flee after a February 2021 military coup.It wasn’t only his lyrics about the suffering of people under military rule that had made him a target of the country’s generals. He was also close to the country’s now-imprisoned civilian leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, having once served as her bodyguard.Now living in the Thai city of Mae Sot, bordering Myanmar, the 39-year-old rocker has taken on a new identity: refugee.Despite the drastic changes in his circumstances, he has not given up on art, but he has changed his focus: to film.His first short movie, “The Beginning,” whose main characters are a fictional group of people from Myanmar, focuses on the importance of good will in building a democratic nation. Five months later, he followed with “The Way,” which captures the trauma and despair of a family suffering from a nation’s conflict; despite the dark themes, the movie is a musical — the first by a director from Myanmar.Both films have won multiple honors at international film festivals, with “The Way” also earning multiple accolades for its soundtrack.“I want to give the message that the military junta can oppress an artist physically, but the spirit and art cannot be oppressed,” Mr. Lynn Lynn said, speaking from his spartan music studio, a bedroom in a rented house in Mae Sot.Mr. Lynn Lynn walking behind Daw Aung San Suu Kyi when he was one of the bodyguards of Myanmar’s civilian leader.Lauren DeCicca/Getty ImagesMr. Lynn Lynn’s life story has been shaped by his country’s convulsive recent history, shifting from dictatorship to democracy to the present-day resistance.The youngest of four boys, he was born in the city of Mandalay to a railway worker father and a mother who stayed at home.When he was 5, he saw close at hand the brutality of the army whose leaders ruled the nation: soldiers pulling passengers from a boat and commanding everyone — regardless of age — to kneel. That scene of dominance and humiliation, he says, has stayed with him throughout his adult life.As a 9-year-old, he taught himself how to play guitar. After high school, he moved to Yangon, the capital at the time, where he cycled through a series of jobs, including bus conductor and security guard, while trying to start a musical career.His big break came in 2001, after he walked into a recording studio to drop off his demo tape and was soon hired to compose songs for some of Myanmar’s most famous singers. He established a reputation for composing original songs, a rarity in a country where nearly all the songs were copied from abroad.In 2007, he marched daily with the country’s monks during the Saffron Revolution protests. He read over and over again “Freedom From Fear,” a book of essays by Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, at the time the leader of the country’s opposition, who was under house arrest.He learned how to navigate the country’s censors. Out of every five songs submitted, he was instructed to change the lyrics of three. Sometimes, he submitted different lyrics and then later swapped back in the original words, without anyone seeming to notice.“He is a rebel,” said his wife, Chit Thu Wai, a well-known actress and singer.Mr. Lynn Lynn with his wife, Chit Thu Wai, a well-known actress, in his music studio in Mae Sot.Lauren DeCicca for The New York TimesIn 2008, Mr. Lynn Lynn released “Think,” an album with love songs that he had written initially for other singers. It was an instant hit and catapulted him to stardom.In 2011, the military initiated a range of sweeping political changes, including releasing Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, who convened a gathering of the country’s artists at her house.There, Mr. Lynn Lynn told the Nobel Peace Prize winner he would be willing to do anything for her. He became one of her bodyguards during the 2012 by-election and the 2015 general election.After she won in 2015, becoming the country’s civilian leader, Mr. Lynn Lynn returned to music. Able to sing openly about the generals, he released an album called “The Fourth Revolution.”Then, in February 2021, two months after Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi won the 2020 election in a landslide, the military detained her and announced it had taken power in a coup.The junta charged dozens of actors and musicians, including Mr. Lynn Lynn and his wife, with “incitement.” After months in hiding, the family decided reluctantly to leave Myanmar.Mr. Lynn Lynn went first in August 2021, trekking across a jungle and then swimming to Mae Sot. Ms. Chit Thu Wai and their twin daughters, now 6, followed a week later.Mae Sot, the Thai border city where Mr. Lynn Lynn fled with his family.Lauren DeCicca for The New York TimesMr. Lynn Lynn had never wanted to make movies in Myanmar. While he dabbled in script writing and supported independent filmmakers through a production company he owned with his wife, he considered most of the movies made in Myanmar to be too lowbrow to much interest him.He says he turned to film in part to “challenge” his artistic peers back home, many of whom allow the generals to use them for propaganda.Myanmar’s Directorate of Public Relations and Psychological Warfare has always exploited actors and actresses, using them in films to portray soldiers as honorable heroes. In return for staying silent, these celebrities enjoy perks, like being paid to attend galas such as the Myanmar Academy Awards.Mr. Lynn Lynn says he has noticed that the timing of these celebrity events often coincides with reports about more military atrocities. Nearly every week brings horrific news: 100 dead in an airstrike. Bombs dropped at an outdoor concert. Eleven children killed at a school.Midway through an interview in Mae Sot, Mr. Lynn Lynn lifted up his T-shirt to reveal his back. In neat, cursive script, there were 700 tattooed names and ages of some of those killed in the coup’s aftermath.Aung Myint, 32. Tun Win Han, 25. Khin Myo Chit, 7.“There are so many more to come,” Ms. Chit Thu Wai said.Mr. Lynn Lynn’s back is tattooed with the names and ages of 700 of those killed after the coup.Lauren DeCicca for The New York TimesMr. Lynn Lynn says he looks at the names in the mirror to “compel a sense of urgency upon my consciousness.” The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a rights group, said more than 4,000 people had been killed in Myanmar since the coup.Mr. Lynn Lynn knew that shooting movies in Mae Sot, so close to Myanmar, was dangerous. Seventeen of 20 cast members of “The Way” stood accused of “incitement,” and they feared Myanmar military’s spies were everywhere, raising concerns they could be abducted or killed. In the movie, members of the central family sing about their suffering from conflict and their quest for peace and justice. Myanmar is never explicitly mentioned because, Mr. Lynn Lynn says, he wants the story to be universal.Two weeks before the shoot, he was still not sure how he would pull it off without the sophisticated equipment typically needed to make a film. He decided to borrow a friend’s iPhone 13 Pro to use as the camera. For the music, he gave himself a crash course in sound mixing.Mr. Lynn Lynn with a wooden ship that was used as a prop in his film “The Way.”Lauren DeCicca for The New York TimesMr. Lynn Lynn’s cast members had never acted before, but some had backgrounds similar to the stories that he wanted to depict. His directorial advice was to read the script and “feel it in your heart,” recalled Aung Lun, one of the actors, who had left his 5-year-old son and wife behind in Myanmar when he fled in 2021.Mr. Aung Lun’s character in “The Way” leaves his baby daughter at a school as soldiers set fire to their village. Years later, his character confesses that secret to his family.During that scene, Mr. Aung Lun cried so hard the crew had to pause the shoot for an hour.As Mr. Lynn Lynn waits to hear whether he and his family can be resettled in the United States, he has more film projects in the works, including a satire set in Myanmar before the coup.Wherever he finds himself, he intends to keep making films.“I want to use a language understood by the entire universe,” he said. ”I want to show that even while we are on the run, our art will continue to live powerfully.” More

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      in Music

      Phyo Zeya Thaw, Burmese Pro-democracy Rapper, 41, Is Executed

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      The hip-hop star became a democracy activist in military-ruled Myanmar, and then a lawmaker. After the latest military coup, he joined the resistance, and was hanged for it.U Phyo Zeya Thaw, a Burmese hip-hop pioneer whose democracy-affirming lyrics led to a career in Parliament and, after Myanmar’s military coup last year, as a resistance leader, was executed on Saturday in Yangon, Myanmar, by the country’s military junta. He was 41.His execution, and those of three other political prisoners, were announced in the junta-controlled news media on Monday. His mother, Daw Khin Win May, confirmed his death.The four men were convicted of terrorism charges in trials widely denounced as a sham. The four executions, including that of the veteran democracy activist U Kyaw Min Yu, popularly known as Ko Jimmy, were the first to be carried out in decades in Myanmar.Since the junta seized power last year from a civilian government, it has killed more than 2,100 civilians and arrested 14,800, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a monitoring group. Large swaths of the country are in open rebellion, with civilian militias defending against military incursions and launching occasional raids on army bases.Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw, already well known as a democracy activist, led an underground resistance cell in Yangon, Myanmar’s commercial capital. Many such civilian militias, loosely grouped together as the People’s Defense Force, are led by ousted legislators, pro-democracy activists and even the occasional doctor or lawyer.After Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw was arrested on terrorism charges last November, the authorities released a photo of him surrounded by weapons that they said he had been planning to use to kill members of the military forces.His defenders disputed the authenticity of the photo. Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw’s face in the photo was visibly bruised and puffy.“I laughed when I saw the weapons in the picture,” said Ma Thazin Nyunt Aung, Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw’s fiancée, who said she had been with him when he was arrested. “The military council is an organization that is never trusted because it never tells the truth.”Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw, who was commonly known as Zayar Thaw (pronounced zay-yahr thaw), was adept at career makeovers.Toward the end of the military’s first round of iron-fisted rule, in the early 2000s, he fronted one of Myanmar’s first hip-hop groups and co-founded Generation Wave, a collective of rappers, activists and other young people who used music as a medium of dissent.“With hip-hop, we can express ourselves without fear,” Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw said in a 2011 interview, shortly after he was released from his first stint in prison. “Music can make us brave.”As the ruling generals began to open up the country and allow members of the long oppressed National League for Democracy to run for Parliament in a 2012 by-election, Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw reinvented himself as a politician, trading his baggy hip-hop outfits for the demure shirt and sarong of the political class. His sideways baseball cap gave way to a neat hairdo worthy of a business executive.He won a seat in Parliament for the N.L.D., the party of the democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.His was a rare young face in a political party whose stalwarts had grown old battling the military generals who had ruled Myanmar for nearly five decades, a period of international isolation and destruction.“I was just an activist who rebelled against injustice,” Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw said shortly after his electoral victory. “When I was in prison, I thought seriously about what I wanted. I wanted to end injustice, so I joined the N.L.D.”He grew close to Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, traveling overseas with her and soothing her often cranky dog.“He is almost like a son to her,” U Win Htein, a now-imprisoned N.L.D. elder, said of Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw in 2019. “He is very obedient. He believes in her, and she believes in him.”Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, who rose to de facto leader of Myanmar after elections in 2015 and 2020, is also imprisoned and has been convicted of crimes that Western governments and human rights groups say are trumped up.Phyo Zeya Thaw was born on March 26, 1981, in Yangon. His father was a rector of a dental school, and his mother was a dentist. In ninth grade, he told his parents that he wanted to become an artist. They encouraged him to pursue more traditional studies.A year later, he informed his mother, Ms. Khin Win May, that he wanted to become a D.J.“I asked him to explain what a D.J. is,” she said. He obliged.She survives him, along with his father, U Mya Thaw; his sister, Daw Phyu Pa Pa Thaw; and his fiancée, Ms. Thazin Nyunt Aung.Myanmar was then one of the most closed countries on earth, moldering under the generals’ inept rule. The military secret police terrorized the population. Listening to foreign radio broadcasts or holding foreign currency could result in long prison sentences.While completing his university studies in English, Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw opened a recording studio and began to form Myanmar’s first major hip-hop band. The band was called Acid, and his music name was Nitric Acid.In 2007, amid rising fuel prices and yet another economic crisis, Buddhist monks led mass protests in Yangon and other cities, overturning their alms bowls to signal disenchantment with the military junta. Young protesters syncopated their rebellion with local hip-hop.As it had with previous mass demonstrations, the military ultimately responded with gunfire. Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw then co-founded Generation Wave, a secret band of anti-government hip-hoppers and youth activists.He was arrested in 2008 and convicted of violating a law-and-order statute and of illegally possessing the equivalent of about $20 in foreign currency.After his release from prison in 2011, he still performed at occasional gigs, but he began to focus on promoting the National League for Democracy.With the military agreeing to power-sharing with a civilian authority, he was elected to Parliament in 2012 and re-elected in 2015, this time to represent a district in Naypyidaw, the capital built by the generals early this century to replace Yangon. The military-linked party was shocked by its defeat on home turf.Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw busied himself as an assistant to Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, helping to prepare briefing papers on legislation and peace talks with ethnic minority rebels. He remained loyal, even as she earned international condemnation for her support of the military when it unleashed a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims.During parliamentary season in Naypyidaw, Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw lived in an austere concrete dormitory for legislators, his room outfitted with little more than a hard bed with a mosquito net and a table piled high with legislative paperwork. There was little evidence of his life as one of Myanmar’s most renowned hip-hop artists.“He liked singing more than politics,” said Ms. Thazin Nyunt Aung, his fiancée. “But he did his duty to the end.”Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw declined to run for re-election in 2020, hoping to return to rap. The National League for Democracy won an even bigger margin of victory that year. The military-aligned party was mortified.The putsch came less than three months later, and the country’s top leaders were quickly rounded up and imprisoned.When mass protests against the new junta spilled onto the streets, Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw joined the rallies. But with soldiers killing unarmed protesters with single shots to the head, even targeting small children, he and others went underground.His activities in the resistance are not publicly known. He was arrested in November when 300 soldiers descended on the Yangon housing project where he was in hiding.The military accused the four men executed on Saturday of being responsible for the deaths of at least 50 civilians, as well as soldiers, but it has not publicly presented any evidence of that.In January, the junta’s court sentenced Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw and the three other activists to death.“These death sentences, handed down by an illegitimate court of an illegitimate junta, are a vile attempt at instilling fear among the people of Myanmar,” the United Nations said in a statement.Mr. Phyo Zeya Thaw was hanged before dawn on Saturday, along with the three other democracy activists.“I will always be proud of my son because he gave his life for the country,” Ms. Khin Win May said. “He is the martyr who tried to bring democracy to Myanmar.” More