"I never remember him laughing; just sitting at the dinner table eating his bowl of chilli with no expression at all," Vlastuin says. "He never talked about it, I just know it was a harsh story. But he never spoke a word about it to me."

After listening to his mother talk of his grandfather, he knows more of Opa's story, and over time his picture of Leendert "Len" Vlastuin's incredibly hard yet resilient life will be complete. Until then, Richmond's rising young star will content himself that in his genes is a rare capacity to push on through adversity when most would be broken.

Len Vlastuin's is not an Anzac story, but one of war at its most raw and inhumane. A Dutch soldier who enjoyed his posting in Indonesia prior to the outbreak of World War II, he was soon caught and imprisoned in Changi for four months then sent to work on the Burma Railway. The two are synonymous with suffering and death, yet he was an old man before he could purge his pain.

"He used to get very upset about how those stories were portrayed, people making assumptions about what happened," Cecily Vlastuin says. "I thought, 'I want your kids and grandkids to know your story', his survival story, the things that all those years later were still upsetting him."

As the Vlastuins spent the Christmas holidays with Opa Len and Oma Bep near Taree, over time Cecily coaxed some stories out of Len as he tended his birds in the vast aviaries that occupied his retirement years.

The abject misery of those stories will explain why Len was a hard and distant father, keeping Chris and brother Bas away from the beach at their doorstep even on Christmas Day and putting them to work building those birdcages, instilling in them a brutal work ethic without ever explaining why he was driving them so hard.

"He broke down a number of times as he was telling me those stories, he'd never spoken about it before," Cecily says. "They were treated like animals basically. It was barbaric."

Len told her Changi was nothing compared to the railway. He described marches from station to station in harrowing detail, could bring to life mates who struggled and died around him as if they were sat across the table. He gave her drawings, maps, and an overall picture of prolonged suffering.

"He told me survival meant you ate what was there. They ate boot leather on occasions. He said to me, 'It really upsets me when Nick cuts the fat off his meat.' Opa just ate everything." Sometimes, with hunger at its worst, he ate rats. Nick marvelled at how, even into his 80s, he could catch the mice and rats that got into his bird cages with his bare hands.

He was dogged by a question he could never answer: why did I survive when so many didn't? He talked of being in a convoy of trucks with other POWs, where all but their vehicle were obliterated. Among a fleet of ships sailing from island to island, theirs was the only one not blown to smithereens.

"He kept saying, 'I shouldn't be here, all my mates have gone.' There was that sense of guilt, that he was the lucky one."

Yet so many times he was hard done by.

Len and Bep settled in what was then Dutch West New Guinea after the war, and Chris spent his first five years in a ramshackle house his father had built with a dirt floor surrounded by chooks and a pet monkey. He set up a store, traded vegetables, groceries and the like with the locals, expanded to transporting bigger items by boat, won contracts supplying the navy and a local hospital. Sukarno moved in, and the Vlastuins lost virtually everything.

They moved to Australia and an army mate encouraged him to help establish a tobacco farm on the NSW mid-north coast, taking advantage of his struggles with the language by having Len sign what he thought was a partnership, which actually gave him rights to nothing. Over years he built a house, drying sheds, worked away the pain while establishing family life once more.

"You trust your mates in the army," Cecily says. "Chris still remembers this mongrel coming over on Christmas Eve one year, turning off the electricity and kicking them out. He lost everything again."

But Len Vlastuin picked himself up again, worked at a parquetry flooring factory in Taree for 28 years, starting out stacking timber and finishing up as foreman. He became known as "the Bird Man of Old Bar", was drawn to the underdog and regularly extended a hand to the local indigenous population. At home he was more withdrawn. He sat solemnly in his favourite chair in a corner, reading, drinking imported Dutch gin or cold black tea kept in beer bottles. All meals included chillies so hot they'd boil your head.

Nick hates chilli, but Cecily sees Len's steel in him, and other traits too. "At eight o'clock every night his Opa would go to the bathroom, to bed, and quickly be fast asleep. He said you had to train yourself to do it on the railway - you might get 10 minutes off, you couldn't lie down, but standing up against a tree he'd fall asleep.

"This one with his AFL, he's the same."

"Especially during pre-season," Nick adds.

Big brother Tim is an engineer in the army based in Brisbane, and Cecily thinks it's a shame Len isn't here to see what all his grandchildren have become. He died in 2003, aged 81, from complications of poisoning. "We'd only been up there a few weeks before, said our goodbyes, his story was told. He was ready to go."

She's certain that under all the pain he was proud of his torrid life. For all his hard exterior there was a softness; he insisted the family all squeeze into his and Bep's tiny house each Christmas, that he be seen to be providing for them.

When he sees the old soldiers parading with their medals on Friday, Nicholas Alexander Leendert Vlastuin will be proud too. "I just always think about Opa. That's my connection to the war."