According to records, from 1940 to 1943, during the Period of Japanese and Puppet Rule alone, the Beipiao Carbon Mine used various means to recruit 4,213 child laborers, accounting for about 13% of the total number of laborers at that time. In some sectors, child labour accounts for about half of the adult labour force. The oldest child labourers, aged 15, were only 9 years old, and most were twelve or thirteen years old. These children are forced by life to do the same heavy work as adult laborers.
The same was true of other mines, where in October 1937, nanman Mining Co., Ltd., which moved from Dalian to Dashiqiao, employed 34%-35% of child and female workers. They do so because the amount of work of these child and female workers is not much different from that of adult men, but the wages are only half or one third of that of adult men. This is precisely the insidious cunning and viciousness of the Japanese aggressors.
Inhuman treatment, heavy labor, torment these poor lives all the time. If you escape and get caught, your fate will be even more tragic. In 1944, Zhang Yongmian, who was only 14 years old at the time, was working as a child laborer in a mine. One day, he was so tired that he was so weak that he put down his back basket and wanted to rest a little, but he was found by the Japanese overseer and beaten with a pickaxe, but he had to endure the pain and continue to work.
He suppressed the anger in his heart, and while working, he tried to escape. One evening a few days later, he sneaked out of his dormitory and ran desperately up the hillside. Unexpectedly, he was found by the guards and arrested back. The guards tied him up and hung him from a tree, beating him with an iron pickaxe to his face and passing out.
The guards thought he was dead and had not been tied with wire, so they threw him directly into the mass grave. In the middle of the night, Zhang Yongmian woke up and slowly climbed out of the mass grave. Saved by an old lady, he was lucky enough to return home.
In fact, it was a miracle that Zhang Yongmian was able to escape the clutches of the devil, because most of the escapees were captured, not only beaten to death, but also tied with wire and thrown into the mass grave. "That's why so many of the bones dug out of the mass grave are wrapped in wire."
The use of labor, the oppression of labor, the destruction of labor. In the 14 years from 1931 to 1945, the Japanese invaders plundered more than 13 million tons of magnesite from Dashiqiao and left it to China, just as the Japanese scholar Hondo Katsuichi said: "There are only three mass graves, three mountains of skeletons of tens of thousands of Chinese."
Torture not only makes the fate of the laborers even more tragic. It is also an important cause of mass death of laborers.
Takefumi Kanazawa, one of the post-war executioners, explained: "When I was the head of the secret service department of the police station, I mainly brutally ruled the dam repair workers in Fengman at that time, and I personally or under the command of the command arrested more than 300 workers who escaped from the Dadong Company and the Feidao Group, and beat them severely.
More than 50 people were seriously injured by torture. He personally beat and tortured more than 10 people. Then forced to do hard work. More than 70 so-called suspected political ideology elements were arrested, and after severe torture, they were sent back to the Water and Power Bureau for hard labor, and continued to monitor, and more than 30 people died tragically due to poor labor conditions. ”
One of the war criminals, Tian Shenhuilong, head of the Special Agent Department of the Fengman Police Station, explained the methods of torturing peaceful residents of China: "Generally, they hit their buttocks with wooden sticks or slap their faces and heads with bamboo swords, but sometimes they also use cruel means such as torture and telephone power.
For example, in mid-June 1945, when I tortured a peaceful resident of China. As many as 5 times in 2 hours, it was unconscious. More than 50 of the injured (who need to recover after 1 week) were directly beaten and interrogated by me and more than 10 were released. More than 70 people were arrested, beaten and tortured by the hydropower guards. In order to prevent the Ding people from escaping, more than 20 labor group leaders (heads) were used to suppress the workers. ”
Whether it's coal mines, power stations, or military engineering under Japanese rule. Thousands of laborers are dying of starvation, disease and torture.
The so-called "special workers' training center" in the Jixi coal mine is a prison for the persecution of workers. According to Zhang Mingyuan, an old worker at Hengshan Mine, "During the puppet Manchu period, my number number in Shannan's power grid was No. 7502, and Comrade Li Ming, the former chairman of the Hengshan Miners' Union, was more than 9,000. This shows that the southern power grid of the pseudo-Manchurian Hengshan coal mine has detained at least 9,000 people. These tens of thousands of miners escaped more than 300 people until the 1945 "August 15th" restoration. There were only more than a hundred people alive in the power grid, and the rest were all tortured to death. ”
In Fengman Power Station, from 1936 to July 1943, the exact number of verifiable deaths reached 6500, and in 1936 alone, 1651 people died, an average of more than 5 deaths per day, and more than a dozen or dozens of people. Among them are those who starve, freeze to death, those who are killed, those who are sick, and those who burn to death. There are drowned, smashed, fallen, rolled, electrocuted.
Eighteen layers of hell on earth, and at the bottom of the eighteenth floor are laborers, which is indeed a true portrayal of the fate of laborers. The livestock raised by the Japanese are a hundred times stronger than the Chinese laborers, and the Chinese laborers are thrown in the mass grave when they die, while the dogs and horses raised by the Japanese are dead, and they have to build a decent tomb and erect a monument. As mentioned earlier, in September 1942, there was such a dog grave in Tonghua Qidaogou. Miner Sun Shulin was caught and slapped hard for not saluting the dog's grave.
Near Fengshun Village in the west of Dongning County, there is a horse soul monument nearly 5 meters high. At that time, it was the military horse hospital of the Japanese army stationed in Dongning. The commander of the Japanese army in Dongning, Lieutenant General Zhaoxi Duojiazang, died of war horse disease here, so he erected a monument to this horse here, and wrote the three words "Horse Soul Monument". The handwriting is still clearly visible.
For example, there is a "Chariot Soul Monument" in Suiyang Town, one kilometer southwest of the eastern section of the Erdaogangzi Forest Farm of the Suiyang Forestry Bureau.
These inscriptions, which are still standing on Chinese soil today, have become the most direct and powerful evidence of the war crimes committed by the Japanese aggressors.
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