Hi everyone, I'm a new member here and when I saw this thread I thought "I must jump into it!"

I'm a 20-year-old university student with a 94-year-old grandmother. She is the sweetest, most loving, most ADORABLE creature in the world. My grandmother and my uncle (aged 73, or thereabouts), both lived in Malaysia and Singapore during the 1940s and both of them used to tell me stories about WWII when I was a little boy.

Living in Malaysia and Singapore - they witnessed the battles of the Malayan Peninsula between the British and the Japs and they witnessed the Fall of Singapore in 1942.

My grandmother once told me this story about an old man...

I was a very little boy when she told me this, but I can still remember it. It was about this family in a hospital. The warning had gone out for the civilians to evacuate because the Japanese army was on the way. The family was at the deathbed of an elderly family-member and they were torn between being with him at his last moments, and facing possible death at the hands of the Japanese, or having to escape and save themselves, but leave the old man without anybody around him during the final moments of his life.

My grandmother never told me what happened to him, she probably heard the tale from someone else.

My uncle, who, if I remember correctly, was born in 1935, (yes, that would make him 73), used to tell me what it was like during the Japanese occupation and what it was like immediately afterwards...

He used to tell me about grandpa (who died in 1983 before I was born) and how life was full of uncertainty. To quote:

"...there was no gas, no running water, no electricity. We used to have this little lamp on the floor - burning coconut oil. We didn't know where our next meal was coming from...sometimes, it was just a small bowl of rice with...perhaps a little oil or sauce on top of it..."

He told me about how the civilians were given orders to hide in the jungles while the British and other allied forces fought it out with the Japanese. Both my grandmother AND my uncle testified to this. They used to say they'd wait in the forest until they'd hear British soldiers calling out that it was safe to return to town...