CRI听力:Skeletons Found in Mass Grave in Northeast China Show Atrocities of Japanese Invaders

During the Japanese occupation in the 1930s and 1940s, the Japanese troops coerced Chinese people into mining in coal-rich northeast parts of the country.

Many miners were killed in accidents due to absence of protective measures, intense labor or cruelties.

The "Dongshan" mass grave is located in Hegang city, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province.

An interpreter from the Dongshan mass grave monument says it is difficult to find a skeleton that was complete.

"We only excavated part of the pit, which was about 10 meters long, eight meters wide and a little less than 3 meters deep. Many of the unearthed skeletons had broken spines, while others had bullets gone through their skulls. We even found seven skeletons that were connected by a barbed wire through their orbital bones."

The whole pit is 40 meters long, 30 meters wide and seven meters high.

The 87-year-old Xu Yanzhang is a surviving miner who used to work in the Dongshan coal mine.

In 1942, the 14-year-old boy was thrust into the mine for hard labor.

Malnutrition, endless toil, plague and mining disasters meant Xu witnessed illness, despair and death every day. But the supervisors, guard dogs and barbed wire made escape all but impossible.

Xu says workers who became too ill to work were abandoned. He had witnessed those who were still alive being thrown into mass graves.

"If you can't work, they would beat you heavily and throw you out at the end to the mass grave. At that time, I saw that some miners were too sick to get up from bed. They couldn't go to work. A Japanese came and saw these people still alive but couldn't do anything, so they dragged them out to the mass grave and left them there to suffer and await death."

Li Shujuan is a contemporary historian who has studied several reports written by the Japanese army during their war of aggression and reconstructed the historical scenario.

"Through the documents recorded by the Japanese side, we knew that the Japanese army shipped coal produced in Hegang to the Hegang station, and then the coal would be shipped to steel mills and ironworks in Japan through the Manchurian railways. We all know that steel mills and ironworks were used for the production of weapons. Japanese invaders were using coal produced by Chinese people in Hegang to produce weapons and used them to suppress the Chinese people's struggle against Japan's aggression."

According to Hegang's coal research institute, from the September 18 Incident in 1931 to the time when Japan announced surrender in 1945, Japanese aggressors had plundered more than 1,300,000 tons of coal from Hegang.

More than ten thousand miners died of unnatural causes in the city.

For CRI, I'm Xie Cheng.