Page 148 - Unit 731 Testimony

were pillows in there that were all bloody. Ordinary pillows, several of
them in one room. That puzzled me.

It took us three days to destroy the facilities. We probably started
on the tenth of August, because the Soviets came into Manchuria on
the ninth. My elder sister was working on the army telephone
switchboard in Xinjing. She called me and said that we'd be going
home. I think that was before we started breaking up the buildings, and
before the Soviets came into the war. It might have been around the

seventh or eighth that she called and told me that.
Y-SAN: I think the first time I saw Ishii was when we were getting ready to
destroy the buildings. We were all mustered, getting orders from the
officers. I was all the way in the back, and Ishii was sitting up front, so all
I saw was the back of his head. In fact, I don't really know if it was Ishii.

When we left Pingfang, we all loaded onto a train and pulled out.
There were food supplies already on board, and we traveled day and
night. When we got to Changchun, the train engineer ran away and we
sat there for two or three days until a replacement could be found.
They had to bring him at gunpoint.

[The problem of the fleeing engineer is mentioned also by Akama Masako,

who was evacuated on the same train. This is clarified by a Chinese
historical researcher who came to Japan to attend the Iwate exhibition.]

Y-SAN: At the end of the war, Unit 731 members raced for the Korean border.
Lines of communications were jammed, and confusion was everywhere.
When the train got to Changchun it was known that the war was over. At
least the leaders and the train engineer knew, and that's why the engineer
fled. He was Chinese, and if he were to enter Korea he would be in

trouble.
The officer in charge distributed potassium cyanide in small
brown bottles, telling us, "If you're captured, drink this." The bottles
were confiscated later, after we left Manchuria and the leaders felt that

we had made good our escape from the Russians. Then, when we
landed in Japan, we were told, "Don't contact other members of the
unit. Say nothing to anyone about it."
I was there only three to four months, so there are many people

who I wouldn't know. And we have nothing left from those days. They