IN EARLY 1942, Mr Yew Kian Chang and eight other men in their 20s were roused by a squad of Japanese military police from their dormitory in Bukit Timah.
They were marched, hands tied, to a nearby railway track and made to squat there.
The next day, they were beheaded one by one.
Mr Yew was the last. When the metre-long blade struck his neck, he fainted and was left for dead.
But the Singaporean, now 93, survived the horror, which he recounted last month to oral archivists seeking to preserve the remnants of stories about the Japanese Occupation during World War II.
The National Archives of Singapore's Oral History Centre has collected more than 870 hours of testimony from 261 survivors. But Mr Yew's is one of a kind. He is the only one to have lived to tell about being nearly beheaded.
The closest parallel is an account by Washington-based Barbara Scharnhorst, now 77, whose father had been with the Royal Army Medical Corps in Singapore and was beheaded by the Japanese in Bahau, Malaya.
Oral History Specialist Lye Soo Choon said the centre had embarked on collecting accounts for several years, but time was running out to get to the whole truth of the Occupation.
The Japanese Military Administration that ruled Singapore left almost no written records behind in Singapore regarding its work.
'The newspaper and magazines they published present only one perspective of the Occupation,' she said. 'It was to close the gap in our knowledge of our past that the Oral History Centre launched the project on the Japanese Occupation.'
The Straits Times visited the nonagenarian in a four-room flat in Bukit Batok where he lives with his wife, not far from the railway tracks in Bukit Gombak where his life had hung on the edge of a sword more than 60 years ago.
Mr Yew's unlucky compatriots were all single, like him. The married men, who lived in another block nearby, were not taken.
As he marched, the Fujian native was resigned to his fate.
'It was night, I was afraid and did not dare to look around,' he said in Hakka with his daughter translating. The next afternoon, they were taken one at a time, made to walk a few metres to lower ground and had their heads felled in a single blow by a sword wielded by a Japanese soldier.
There was no interrogation before the killing began.
'There was no commotion, no noise, no struggle. I felt resigned and did not resist and walked without feeling,' he recalled.
The men were not blindfolded. He was the last.
Clad in a singlet, shorts and China-made cloth-shoes, he walked to the spot where he was to die, and knelt down.
'When I was chopped, I fell and fainted,' he said.
It is believed he fell as soon as the blade hit him just below the neck and the downward slide of the blade missed the vital areas. The Japanese left him for dead.
Mr Yew believes he lay unconscious for more than a day, 'then I heard the voice of my grandfather as if in a dream, calling me to get up and run'.
With his hands still tied, he got up and fled to a friend who treated the wound on his neck with herbs. But maggots appeared in the gaping flesh after some days.
'My friend told me there was nothing more he could do and I had to seek medical help.'
Mr Yew found help at the Nanyang Clinic in the North Bridge Road area. After months of recovery, he fled to Endau, an agricultural settlement in Johor, Malaya, where he remained till the end of the war.
Till this day, a deep scar is visible on the back of his neck.
When the war ended, he returned to Singapore before going to China to find a bride.
He has been married for more than 65 years to Madam Lee Ah Hang, now 85, and they have eight grown-up children and several grandchildren.
Mr Yew was a carpenter by trade before and after the war. He went on to become a construction foreman and site supervisor before retiring in his late 60s.
Long ago, he had made peace with the unspeakable. 'I have no ill-feelings towards the Japanese soldiers who chopped me at that time. I thought they were just following instructions,' he said.
A Japanese group of peace activists, whose aim is to promote better understanding among the Japanese about the atrocities that took place in the region, visited Mr Yew last month.
Its spokesman Yoshiyuki Onogi told The Straits Times in an e-mail yesterday: 'To directly hear the story from someone like Mr Yew is rare, valuable and momentous to let ordinary Japanese people learn historical facts related to Japan during World War II.
'He may be the last possible person who can bear witness to the first-hand experience of the horrible massacre.'
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