Recalling life in a Japanese POW camp

British visitors at a special exhibition on the Shenyang World War II Allied Prisoners Camp in Liverpool's iconic St. George's Hall. [Ma Chi / For China Daily]

The last thing you expect when you are a prisoner suffering under the brutality of a Japanese prisoner of war camp is a cheerful Christmas card from the management at the engineering factory that you are being forced to work in.

Yet that just what happened to Gunner Ronald Joy in Mukden prisoner of war camp in the winter of 1944.

The management of the Mashu Kosaku Kikai Kabushiki Kaisha factory sent all the workers a card "Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happier New Year".

Gunner Roy's son Alan still finds it a little bizarre 71 years later.

"It's as if they knew the war wasn't going to end well for the Japanese," he says.

The card is part of a collection of artefacts he intends presenting to the Shenyang WWII Allied Prisoners Camp Site Museum, which has curated an exhibition about the camp, once known as Mukden Camp, which was formally opened by Shen Peilin, minister at the Chinese Embassy in London at Liverpool's St. George's Hall on Nov 6.

The exhibition is being arranged and coordinated by the Shenyang City Government, the Chinese Embassy in London, Liverpool Council and China Daily.