Word: sybil
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...
...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...
...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...
...Nickleby (Rank; Prestige) emphasizes, by contrast, the fine restraint that distinguished Great Expectations (TIME, May 26). The producers of Expectations realized that Dickens' literary grimaces would be made ridiculous by the least suggestion of mugging by the actors. The producers of Nickleby have permitted Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Dame Sybil Thorndike, Stanley Holloway & Co. to tear into their meaty parts with about as much finesse as a pack of jackals. Still, this particular melodrama-which intersperses the quarrels between a vicious uncle and his virtuous nephew with a savage attack on the schools of Dickens' day -scarcely deserves better...