SOOK CHING CENTRE

SOOK CHING CENTRE

On this day in 1942, the Sook Ching Massacre finally came to an end.

After the British colony had surrendered on February 15, 1942, the Japanese took over Singapore and Malaya. An order was given by senior Japanese officials to kill 50,000 Chinese, and from February 15 to March 4, a purge of the Chinese population was carried out in Singapore and Malaya. While the Japanese claim there were fewer than 5,000 deaths during the massacre, Singapore’s first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, said it was possible to have reached to 70,000.

When the Japanese surrendered Singapore and Malaya back to the British in 1947, the officers that carried out the massacre were placed on trial, with some receiving the death penalty and others, life sentences.

To this day, memories of the those who had survived the massacre are still on exhibition galleries in Singapore, on the same site where the British surrendered to the Japanese. The massacre sites in Sentosa, Changi and Punggol Point were also made into heritage sites in 1995, 50 years after the end of the Japanese occupation.

What other war crimes did you learn about in your History books?