News Plus慢速英语:腾冲民夫及纪录片首发 纪念伟大配角

You are listening to NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
A new book and documentary film on China's war survivors has been released, capturing the increasingly rare tales from witnesses to World War Two.
Sadly, one third of the war survivors featured in the book passed away before the book was published.
Li Genzhi, the author of the book entitled "Wartime Civilian Workers in Tengchong", said it is a race against time before they are all gone.
The book draws its interviews from Tengchong, a county-level city in southwest China's Yunnan Province, which was home to one of the worst battlefields in the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression seven decades ago.

The book tells stories of civilians who voluntarily transported rice and other supplies along a dangerous mountain path for the Chinese Expeditionary Force in 1944 as they planned to reclaim the China-Myanmar border town occupied by invading Japanese troops during the war.
Continuous rain made it impossible to deliver food to the Chinese troops by air. So almost 30,000 local people, mostly women, elders and children, served as porters and took around 300,000 kilograms of rice from a village on the other side of the mountain, which is 3,000 meters high.
Ninety-seven-year-old Zhao Shunguo was among the volunteers. He described the scene during the trip, saying the team could never get lost on the mountains because people could always find the right way by following the dead bodies of the volunteers. He recalled accidentally stepping on a decayed body, resulting in a foot infection.