World War II POW Learns Forgiveness as Path to Happiness
Chicago Sun Times. Louis Zamperini, age 95, spoke at a Barrington High School recently, recounting his heroism and harrowing experiences prior to and during World War II. He was the featured person in Laura Hillenbrand’s (Seabiscuit) best-selling book, Unbroken. A key to living well, he told the students, was learning to forgive. He used to have nightmares about one particular Japanese soldier who abused him. Asked by one of the students what he would do now if he met that soldier, he said he would forgive and hug the man.
As a 19-year-old track star known as the “Torrence Tornado” for his hometown in California, Louis Zamperini went to the 1936 Berlin Olympics and met Hitler.
But his dramatic life story hadn’t even begun to be written until several years later, when his plane was shot down in the Pacific Ocean in World War II and he went on to cheat death many times in dramatic fashion.
It’s a story that was turned into a best-selling book, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand, author of another bestseller, Seabiscuit: An American Legend.
