I read with interest YSG’s Today in History section for the day. It read:
February 20 Massacre at Changi Beach Park
On this day in 1942, 66 Chinese males were lined up along the edge of the sea at the now popular Changi Beach Park and shot by the Japanese military police. This was part of the infamous Sook Ching Massacre. This was the first of the many mass executions.
I wonder if this execution site has ever been marked?
Does anyone know exactly where this is?
It’s kinda surreal to think that such systematic genocide happened right here and to our own countrymen.
Just a couple of days ago I was walking back to the office after lunch with a colleague and we happened to be cut thru’ Chinatown.
We passed by these “doors” (left) without giving it a second thought.
The date was Feb 18 – the exact anniversary of the start of the Sook Ching massacres for which this marker was erected.
In this little square, young Chinese men were rounded up and taken in trucks to an isolated beach where they were slaughtered.
Sook Ching means “”a purge through cleansing”. That was way before sanitised terms like “ethnic cleansing” entered the modern vocabulary.
Fast forward 60-odd years and the memory of this is long forgotten and its marker is, a mere curiosity.
Looking back, I wonder who those 66 young men were and what they would have become had fate not intervened. They would have been husbands, fathers, grand dads and probably much more.
War can be such a tragic waste with too many what-ifs …
5 Responses
Hello, the Changi Beach Massacre site is marked. As well as the Punggol and Sentosa one.
Posted on February 21st, 2009 at 8:11 am
I’ve seen this obscure piece of heritage monument marker beside the cycling track around the junction of Nicoll Drive and Telok Paku Road, near Changi Point. I use ‘obscure’ as it took me countless visits with family there before I stumbled on it one fine day. It’s got lots of notes on it, but I doubt many of the beach goers know that it exists.
Posted on February 21st, 2009 at 9:14 am
National Archives has a recording of Lee Kip Lin’s oral account of the Changi Beach massacres:
http://cord.nhb.gov.sg/cord/public/internetSearch/catalogueForm.jspcommand=loadUpdate&id=143&xAccess=false&total=0¤tPageNo=1&startPageNo=1&startNoBatch=0&thesaurusFlag=on&searchType=0&startIndex=0&count=10&simpleSearch=kip&B1=Search
Posted on February 21st, 2009 at 9:57 am
So what did Lee Kip Lin say about the massacre? He did not experience it, neither was he a resident near Changi Beach (he lived at Amber Road). If we read his brother Kip Lee’s book, in it he mentioned losing a cousin (Victor, IIRC) to the massacre.
Posted on February 21st, 2009 at 3:35 pm
“obscure piece of heritage monument marker” Any pictures of the place? i want to bring my child there someday.
Posted on February 22nd, 2009 at 5:52 pm
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