WINONA LAKE – For the subject of the Angelina Jolie-directed movie “Unbroken,” Louis Zamperini, the difficult decision to return to Japan has roots in Winona Lake. Zamperini, a U.S. Olympian and athlete, was invited by Dr. Ronald Manahan, former Grace College president, to speak at the college in 2011 when students were reading the book based on his life. He also stayed at Westminster Hotel in 1952 in Winona Lake for an evangelical convention. Zamperini died July 2 at the age of 97. According to an oral interview conducted by George A. Hodak in June 1988 for the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles, Zamperini said of the decision to return to Japan that started 1952, “I never thought this would happen, because I had once made the statement that I’d rather be dead than to ever return to Japan, a country of such unpleasant memories.” He had survived in a raft for 47 days after his bomber was downed in World War II, then was captured by the Japanese. He was tortured in a series of prisoner of war camps. His story is told in “Unbroken,” a 2014 American war drama produced and directed by Angelina Jolie, based on the 2010 non-fiction book by Laura Hillenbrand, “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption.” Jack O'Connell plays Zamperini. In the interview he said, “Anyway, there was a big convention in Winona Lake, Indiana. Billy Graham was there along with missionaries and evangelists from all over the world. Then I heard a fellow from World Vision speaking on the Orient, he had just gotten back from Japan.” They were forming 100 teams at Winona Lake to go back to Europe but none to Japan. “As he spoke about the need in Japan, I sat there and had this tremendous burden in my heart to go back to Japan, and yet I didn’t want to. The last thing in the world I would have chosen to do was return to that country. So I left the meeting early.” He went back to his room in Winona Lake and met some friends who wanted to have a prayer meeting. In the oral interview he said, “When it came my time to pray, I said ‘Lord, I know this burden is burning in my heart, but I’m a new Christian and I have to have a real strong indication as to your will.’” A minister from the prayer meeting gave him $500 to start him on his way back to Japan. He then went to Japan and spoke and ministered at universities, high schools and factories. “I didn’t hold any punches, I told about my tortures in Japan and what the Japanese had done to me. Then when I finished, I gave an invitation to become a Christian. And I saw a vast number of Japanese students come forward, a lot of them with bandages on, which I knew to be the radicals” from the atomic bombs dropped on two Japanese cities, he is quoted as saying. “I turned to the interpreter and said, ‘Ask them what they want.’ He bent over and asked them and then he said, ‘They want to become Christians.’... Now, I knew when I became a Christian I had forgiven my Japanese tormentors.” In January 1998, Zamperini revisited his time as an Olympian when he ran a leg of the Olympic Torch relay for the Winter Olympic Games in Nagano, Japan. The site for his leg of the relay was not far from one of the POW camps where he was held during the war.
