But then his luck ran out. He was captured by the Japanese in Shanxi province and thrown into a labor camp in Hebei province about 200 kilometers away.
"My uncle had been a carpenter before joining the army. So the Japanese asked him to make wooden barrels. But this type of carpentry he had little idea about," Zhao said, adding that his uncle never mentions those days, as they are too painful to discuss.
The only story the old man has shared with his nephew involved a failed escape attempt. "A small group of internees－about 15 people－built an underground tunnel that was about four meters long and led directly from the camp yard to the outside," Zhao said. "It took them four entire months since they were only able to work during the change of guards that took place a few times a day."
On the eve of their planned escape, they were betrayed.
"The traitor must have been among us," said Zhang, who saw three of his fellow internees beaten to death during interrogation.
For movie buffs with a keen interest in World War II history, the horror of such interrogation could be glimpsed through the 2013 British-Australian war film The Railway Man, starring Colin Firth as Eric Lomax, a real-life British officer captured by the Japanese in Singapore during WWII and tortured at a POW camp for building a radio receiver from spare parts.
World of darkness
At age 95, Song Yupu has also lived a life that, at times, saw him exposed to inhumane treatment.
Joining the army in 1941, Song was captured during a battle in the summer of 1942, when his 800-member regiment was rounded up by 5,000 Japanese in Shandong province, eastern China. "About 200 Chinese soldiers died by the end of the fighting. The rest of us were captured," Song recalled. "I was put into a truck with about 40 other people, heading for a place unknown."
At around midnight, the truck stopped. "It was dark, and we waited until the next morning, only to be driven into another world of darkness where we would remain for all our waking hours for the next few years."
That was the underground world of the iron mines, deep in the mountains of Northeast China's Jilin province, occupied by Japan since 1931.
"Every morning, we were driven into the tunnels before dawn, and were only able to return long after sundown to our living quarters, where 30 men slept on the floor in one room," Song said.
Cave-ins happened quite often, according to Song. And when illness struck, many of those overworked, malnourished young men, mostly in their early 20s, were too weak to survive. "Once so robust, they broke like chopsticks," Song said. "Of all the people in that truck, only three eventually went out of the mountain alive."
Song was one of them. And he did so by fleeing the deathtrap two years ahead of Japan's defeat in WWII. "I tried twice－the first time was just a few months after my arrival at the mine. I ran into the mountains with a couple of fellow captives, before realizing that all roads down the steep slope had been blocked by the Japanese," he said. "When night came and the bitter cold set in, we were left with two choices: to die in the wild or to return to the camp. We chose the second."
