MOUND, La. — Erwin Johnson’s memories of World War II include severe illness, surviving 120-degree heat in the bowels of a Japanese ship in the tropics and the freezing cold of Mukden in Manchuria.

Johnson, of Lacombe, La., is a Japanese prisoner of war camp survivor; one of the more than 340,000 soldiers, civilians and children held prisoner by the Japanese during world War II in camps in the Philippines, China and Japan.

He has one other distinction. He is a Bataan Death March survivor who walked the 65-mile distance from Mariveles on the southern end of the Bataan Peninsula to San Fernando, where the POWs boarded trains to Camp O’Donnell, the first — and for many their last — stop in a trail of camps over a three-year period.

“They packed us into those boxcars tightly … if anybody died, they did it standing up, because there was no place to fall,” he said.

“I remember on the walk, Filipino women would come watch us and throw packets of food to us,” he said. “One of the women was holding a baby and threw something to one of the men. A guard saw her. He took the baby from her and threw it on the ground. He bayonetted her, and then he bayonetted the baby. I thought, ‘How can people be so cruel,’” he said.

Johnson, who was liberated from his camp by the Russian Army on Oct. 17, 1945, was one of more than 100 people at the Southern Heritage Air Foundation hangar attending a screening of the documentary “Never the Same — The Prisoner of War Experience,” which chronicled the experiences of prisoners of war of Imperial Japan.

The film, produced by Jan Thompson and narrated by Loretta Swit, looked at the POWs’ experience through interviews with former POWs of Japan, excerpts from diaries kept in the camps and artwork by the POWs that portrayed camp life. Thompson and Swit attended the presentation, making remarks before the film and answering questions after.

Thompson, whose father was a POW of the Japanese, said the eyewitness accounts, diary excerpts and artwork were used “because there were no photographs or archival footage from that time. The only thing available was Japanese propaganda.”

She said she attended POW reunions to get the interviews with the survivors who appeared in the film.

The artwork, the diaries and the POW accounts in the film, she said, “showed how creative these men were to be able to survive in these camps.”

Starting with their capture and voyages in the “hell ships” that took them to their camps in Japan and Manchuria, the documentary recounts the prisoners’ ordeals trying to survive.

It’s a story of men who found ways to keep their sense of humor and face the daily challenge of just keeping alive; a challenge that at times forced them to supplement their diets with things unthought-of of in a civilized society.

Mixing the artwork, diary entries and POW recollections, it gave viewers an account of camp life in which men were beaten and worked to exhaustion, fed a thin rice gruel concoction and faced death daily.

“The priest came and gave me the Last Rites and they put a blanket over my head,” one survivor recalled. “For some unexplained reason, I was still around in the morning.”

Escape, the prisoners said, was a deadly adventure, because the Japanese would execute not only the escapee, if caught, but the men next to him, regardless if the “offender” was caught or not.

“Every night before we went to sleep, somebody would stand up and say, ‘If you’re going out, let me know. I’ll be right behind you. I don’t want to be left and get shot,’” said Jim Collier, a POW interviewed in the film.

Work details were common, and if a prisoner regarded as healthy by his captives refused to work, he did not eat.

“I found out if you were on a work detail, you got more to eat,” Johnson said in an interview before the film was shown. “We would either be repairing a bridge or doing something.” He recalled having to carry 6-foot logs on his shoulders out of a Philippine jungle to a truck “that was not too close, but not that far,” to repair a bridge.

The film includes a diary entry from a POW doctor that recalls men receiving severe injuries on the details.

POWs were also forced to work in Japanese plants. Johnson worked in a machine shop. He said his camp was also near a steel plant where prisoners worked.

Following the film’s conclusion, Thompson said the prime minister of Japan is coming to speak to the U.S. Congress April 29, which is Emperor Hirohito’s birthday. She said there is movement in Japan that wants to deny the Bataan Death March happened and put the U.S. as the aggressor starting World War II.

“You can’t run away from history,” she said. “All countries have their dark chapters, and we have ours, but we’ve been able to teach about it because we don’t want it to happen again.”

“Once you see this film, you will give up the right to complain about anything,” Swit said before the showing. “You can’t wrap your brain around what these men went through. We cannot grasp the depth of suffering they endured.”

She said the film needs to be shown to students “because young people today need to know about courage. They need to learn what these men went through.”