A book telling the stories of Chinese miners forced into slavery by Japanese troops is to be published as the world commemorates the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II.

It contains the personal accounts of more than 180 miners and research on the graves of tens of thousands of their fellow workers in Datong, a city in 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," said Gao Huaixiu, 82, one of the contributors.

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 those 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 tons of coal was plundered from Datong, at a cost of over 60,000 miners' lives.

'So hungry we ate rats'

Although 73 years have passed, Gao is in tears as he recalls the day in 1942 when, only 8 years old, along with his father, he was put in a truck in Beijing by Japanese soldiers.

After a two-day ride, a 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, he said. "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, just 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 await death.

At the beginning, the bodies of dead miners were put in coffins, but as the number of deaths mounted, their skeletons were littered over the hillside 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.

To prevent an epidemic, bodies were eventually collected and burned in mass graves.

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