TAIYUAN, Aug. 6 (Xinhua) -- A book of the horrifying tales of Chinese miners forced into slavery byJapanese troops seven decades ago will soon be published, as the 70th anniversary of the end of the war draws near.
The work by a group of the miners themselves includes personal accounts by more than 180 of their number and research on the mass graves where tens of thousands of their fellow workers were interred in Datong City, north China's Shanxi Province.
"This year is the 70th anniversary of the end of the war against Japanese aggression, so it's a good time for our stories to be heard," Gao Huaixiu, 82, a major contributor to the work, told Xinhua.
In 2003, Gao and more than 300 others who dug coal for the Japanese army during the war set up an institute to study the history of Datong collieries under the Japanese and the mass graves of miners.
Today, only 38 of the 300 remain alive, aged between 78 and 94. "The survivors are dying, but fortunately, we have kept our memories alive with words, images and video clips," said Gao.
The institute found 20 mass graves, each containing the remains of more than 1,000 miners. Between 1937 and 1945, more than 14 million tonnes of coal was plundered from Datong, at a cost of the lives of over 60,000 miners.
Although 73 years have passed, Gao still bursts into tears as he recalls the day in 1942 when, only eight years old, along with his father, he was thrust into a truck in downtown Beijing by Japanese soldiers. After a two-day ride, their three-year nightmare in the Baidong mine in Datong began.
"Our dorm was crammed with more than 100 people. We were so hungry we sometimes had to eat rats," Gao said.
"We had no protective equipment at all and just wore our everyday clothes down the shaft," said 85-year-old Wang Debao, another miner.
Sadistic supervisors, vicious guard dogs and barbed wire made escape all but impossible. "Even if we succeeded in escaping, we could never have survived. We only had vouchers usable at the mine."
Malnutrition, endless toil, plague and mining disasters meant Gao, only 11 when his ordeal ended, witnessed illness, despair and death every day. Sick miners were quarantined in a separate courtyard where they were left to suffer and await death.
At the beginning, the bodies of dead miners were put in coffins, but as the number of deaths mounted, the skeletons were littered over hillsides and thrown in ditches.
"Not only the dead, but those who were too ill to work were abandoned too," Gao said.
Gao and Wang were often exposed to brutal scenes, as the bodies of men and other children who had worked and lived alongside them were eaten by dogs and wolves. "You can't imagine how a pack of more than 100 wolves could emerge from a barren mountainside," Gao said.
To prevent an epidemic, bodies were eventually collected and burned in mass graves.
