Illinois ? Marion Oltman spent the last eight months of World War II in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, and tears still fill his eyes when he recalls those desperate days.

After working all day to fill craters left from Allied bombing, each prisoner got a boiled potato and a slice of bread with sawdust used as filler. Oltman was given the task of slicing the bread to feed 12 men.

“You don’t know what it’s like to look in the eyes of guys that are that hungry,” the 89-year-old Pekin, Ill., resident said, his voice breaking.

The experience gave Oltman a unique perspective about the treatment of prisoners during wartime. As a national debate continues about the role of torture to get information from suspects in the war on terror, Oltman and others attending an ex-POW conference said that the United States should set an example for the world in the humane treatment of detainees.

“I don’t believe in torture,” Oltman said this past week at the 60th annual conference of the American Ex-Prisoners of War. “I’ve seen what humans can do to humans. I’ve lived through some of it. And that’s not right.”