No Dram of Mercy by Sybil Kathigasu

New edition with a review by Dr. Wong Soak Koon.

No Dram of Mercy is the story of a woman’s courage, told simply and unassumingly in her own words. Sybil Kathigasu was the wife of an lpoh doctor who along with her fellow Malayans became caught up in the horrors of the Japanese occupation of Malaya during the Second World War. Her selfless concern for the sick and wounded anti-Japanese guerrillas who came to her house secretly for treatment ended inevitably in her betrayal and her arrest and imprisonment by the Japanese authorities.

The tale of fortitude and endurance under duress and torture which follows is testimony not so much to the ruthlessness of a conqueror as to the indomitability of the human spirit informed by faith and belief in God. As such, the story of Sybil Kathigasu, reprinted here after a lapse of five decades (first published in 1954), is a tract for our times as much as it is a reminder of the tribulations experienced by a former generation of Malayans.