Iris Chang - Author.

The Woman Who Wouldn’t Forget

One of history’s worst atrocities might have remained little more than a footnote had it not been for Iris Chang.

She was just a little girl in the Midwest college town of Urbana, Ill., when she first heard the frightening stories from her Chinese émigré parents. They seemed unbelievable, conjuring visions of terror, death and a river turned red. Sometimes she imagined herself in a place and time far away, running and hiding, trying to escape a horror that remained formless except for one image – a man with a sword, hacking away.

The stories Iris Chang heard were from one of history’s worst acts of systematic bestiality – the Japanese rape and slaughter of the captive populations of Nanking, China, in December 1937 and the early months of 1938.

When Chang’s parents first told her about Nanjing Detusha, the Nanking Massacre, their voices had “quivered with outrage.” But her childhood library visits searching encyclopedias and history books turned up little on the carnage.

After Chang graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (where her parents were professors) and earned her master’s at Johns Hopkins, Nanking remained only on the periphery of her thoughts.

Why had such a terrible even passed out of the public consciousness? In the West the headlines from Nanking were supplanted by an avalanche of ominous events in Europe. Soon the horrors of a world at war became everyday fare in the media. Then the postwar West was engulfed in a new struggle with the Soviet Union and eager to turn Japan into a friendly economic bulwark. A war-crimes tribunal, which briefly focused attention on Nanking, was largely forgotten when the Korean War began.

By 1994 Chang had married her college sweetheart, moved to California and was happily pursuing a writing career that had already resulted in one published biography and won her numerous grants and awards.

While attending a conference in Cupertino, Calif., on the history of World War II, she encountered some poster-size photos from Nanking on display. Nothing she’d heard about the massacre had prepared her “for the helpless, terrorized looks of those about to die with no hope of rescue, the piles of bodies or the grins on the soldiers’ faces as they participated or looked on.”

She stood, almost paralyzed by the wave of anger and revulsion that swept over her. One photo showed a Japanese officer, his samurai sword raised high, about to decapitate a bound and kneeling Chinese prisoner. Here, indeed, was the nightmarish “man with a sword” of her childhood memory.

Chang did not cry … then. But in an instant she determined, “I will tell these people’s story.”

Systematic Murder. Chang expected a difficult search for a trickle of material. She found instead a great river of documentation. From the Yale Divinity School Library in New Haven, Conn., to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., to China and Taiwan. Chang culled her story from secret calves, missionary letters and diaries, war crimes trial testimony, and interviews with victims and Japanese soldiers. (She also discovered that Reader’s Digest published two stories on the atrocities in 1938.) Her research focused on three months in the midst of the long and bitter Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), a period that retains a special place in the annals of human butchery.

After capturing Shanghai in November 1937, the Japanese army was just outside Nanking by the second week of December. Commenting on the panic set off by the retreating Chinese forces, a German diplomat in Nanking wrote, “We expect that with the appearance of the Japanese, the return of peace, quiet and prosperity would occur.”

They were wrong.

Rather than deal with the tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers who had surrendered, the Japanese decided to systematically exterminate them. A chilling order to the 66th Battalion read: “All prisoners of war are to be executed.”

In one instance the Japanese spent most of one day tying the arms of 14,777 Chinese soldiers behind their backs. The prisoners were then marched to a river and surrounded by troops with machine guns. As evening approached, the firing began and continued about an hour. It took all night for soldiers to bayonet the bodies one by one to be sure they were dead.

Ongoing decapitation “contests” were covered in the Japanese press as if they were sporting events. Soon Japanese officers complained about not finding enough ditches for burials. Eyewitnesses reported that some ponds were so stuffed with corpses that they disappeared, the water completely displaced. Thousands of bodies were dumped into the Yangtze. It was the river red with blood Chang had heard about as a child.

Defenseless Civilians. While her husband, an electrical engineer, was away at his job, Iris Chang sat in their small apartment in Sunnyvale, Calif., poring over the documentation. She learned that as the prisoners of war were being murdered, rape and slaughter were underway inside the walled city. Japanese soldiers herded people to the roofs of the buildings that were then burned down, their bodies left on the sidewalks. But “women suffered most,” recalled one Japanese soldier. “No matter how young or old, they could not escape the fate of being raped.”

He told of coal trucks sent through the streets and filled with women “allocated to 15 to 20 soldiers for sexual intercourse and abuse.” When the raping was over, those women still able to tried to flee. “Then we would – bang! – shoot them in the back.”

The awful images sometimes left Chang shaking or reduced to weeping in front of her word processor. But some incidents she found “so shocking I could not even cry.”

Safety Zones. When the city’s fall seemed imminent, 15 American and European missionaries and businessmen organized a small island of sanity. They carved out a 2 ½ square-mile sector near the city center, marked it off with white flags and Red Cross banners, and declared it an International Safety Zone. Even though their governments urged them to flee, the Samaritans stayed, saving hundreds of thousands of lives.

Their leader was a most unlikely hero – a German businessman and member of Nanking’s Nazi party – John Rabe knew and loved China, having lived there since 1908, raising a family while selling telephones and electrical equipment to the government. Since Japan had become an ally of Germany a year earlier, Rabe hoped this would give weight to his protests to the Japanese government. “Yesterday, women at the seminary were raped right in the middle of a room filled with men, women and children!” Rabe wrote in an outraged letter to the Japanese embassy. But his letters and telegrams were ignored.

In desperation and disgust, Rabe roamed the city, trying to prevent atrocities himself. He’d wade into scenes of rapes and beatings or killings, sometimes pulling stunned soldiers off their victims. George Fitch, head of the Nanking YMCA, noted that when soldiers tried to resist Rabe, he thrust a Nazi armband in their faces, and they backed away.

Summoned home by his company in February 1938, Rabe appealed to Hitler to stop the carnage. Instead, he was interrogated by the Gestapo.

By the end of March 1938, most of the rape and killing ended. Japan had delivered its “lesson” to the subjugated Chinese.

Before the Japanese came, the population of Nanking was about one million. More than half managed to flee the city or jam into the International Safety Zone. But of those left, some 300,000 Chinese men, women and children died at the hands of the Japanese after the Chinese army had thrown down its arms. In comparison, the American armed forces suffered about 291,000 battle deaths during all of World War II.

China’s Schindler. Wondering what became of John Rabe, Chang was led to his granddaughter, Ursula Reinhardt. Rabe had survived the war, but his Berlin apartment had been bombed and his family reduced to poverty.

In 1948 news of Rabe’s plight had reached Nanking, where survivors raised $2000 – a huge amount at the time – for food parcels. The mayor of Nanking arranged to have the parcels sent to Rabe’s family. That food meant survival for them.

Rabe died in 1950 of a stroke, but as Chang learned, he left an amazing 2000-page chronicle of Nanking, meticulously typed and illustrated. It included eyewitness reports, telegrams, photographs, newspaper articles, even transcripts of radio broadcasts. At the urging of Chang and others, Reinhardt made copies available to the public in 1996. Despite Rabe’s party membership (he claimed he was unaware of Nazi atrocities while living in the Far East), Chang refers to him as “the Oskar Schindler of China.” A complex and ultimately ambiguous figure, “he deserves to be better known.”

Though other books have documented the Nanking atrocities, Chang’s own book, published in 1997, has done more than any other to rescue the victims from oblivion. The Rape of Nanking first struck a chord with Chinese communities in the United States and other countries, and then with the general public. As a best-seller it has triggered political and intellectual reverberations across the Pacific in Japan and China. Through the book and her subsequent lectures and public appearances, Chang has played an enormous role in forcing the world to remember what happened at Nanking.

Chang learned from her research that “civilization itself is tissue-thin.” She adds; “Some quirk in human nature allows even the most unspeakable acts of evil to become banal within minutes, provided that they occur far enough away to pose no personal threat.”

For Chang, writing the book “helped put many things in my life into perspective. It made very trivial some things that once seemed to be big conflicts or problems. It made me value the free expression we have in this country all the more. Only a tiny fraction of the earth’s people have this freedom.”

She often recalls the night when, sitting before her word processor, she would hold her face in her hands and let the tears flow as she saw in her mind’s eye individual victims of torture and murder.

“Perhaps now,” Chang says “they will not be forgotten.”