This is a must see collection of drawings and poems  by  Kiuchi Nobuo, a Japanese POW in the Soviet Union during following the Second World War.    

By the end of World War II about 600 thousand Japanese soldiers and officers have been held captive in thousands of prison camps on a territory, stretched from Kamchatka in the East, across Urals to European part of USSR in the West and Yenisei Basin in the North.

Kiuchi-san created the drawings to commemorate the events and the people involved, specifically his “comrades-in-arms, who were not destined to return home.”

In Story 1, entitled “Going to the Soviet Union,” Kiuchi-san chronicles the soldiers  being packed into  train cars, sleeping 24 men to a 10-meters sq. room,  humiliating open lavatories, but also the downtime, when the men sought refuge in….baseball.  

“Baseball game. Catcher missed the ball.”
Whenever the weather was fine we walked outside for physical exercises. Vigorous ones played baseball with glove and bat.

The site was designed by Kiuchi-san’s son, Masato.

(Via Drawn!)