Heroes

Extraordinary times bring forth extraordinary people, so it is said. I have been spending some time with both actually. My brother-in-law is Chinese and he recommended a book called The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang. It is the story of the December 1937 Japanese occupation of China and the brutal treatment of the Chinese by the Japanese invaders, specifically the city and the citizens of Nanking. I warn you. It is not an easy read.

The Nanking Massacre, as it is now called, is one of the more horrifying examples of wholesale inhumanity ever recorded. Over a quarter of a million men, women and children were killed by the invading Japanese army, tens of thousands of women were raped and often mutilated. To this day many Japanese refuse to acknowledge the full extent of the horror.

However, there were witnesses there, members of the international community in Nanking who recorded the carnage and also stayed to help save as many of the Chinese as they could. This ad hoc group of European and American missionaries, businessmen, doctors and educators established a Nanking Safety Zone and managed to save at least half of the Chinese who were unable to flee the city before its fall. They risked their lives every day for months to keep their charges safe.

They played a deadly game of bluff and bravado, pretending that their own governments would back them up when that was far from certain. In fact, their elected leader, businessman John Rabe, was a German and a member of the Nazi party who did, rather naively, believe that Hitler would care what happened to the Chinese of Nanking (he didn’t, as it turned out).

Aside from the book, The Rape of Nanking, we also have a docudrama on DVD entitled Nanking. Either of these two sources will give you a good introduction to the heroes of Nanking. They are people worth knowing. One, who affected me a great deal, was the American educator, Minnie Vautrin, who ran an exclusive girls school in Nanking. After her upper class charges had been evacuated, she took thousands of the women of Nanking under her personal protection on the grounds of the school. She stood between them and the men of the Japanese army who came looking for “comfort women.” She was physically threatened and one time even beaten but she kept at it day after day, night after night. She became known as “The Living Goddess of Nanking.”

One movie I do not recommend is John Rabe, a German production. Granted the title is John Rabe and it is a given that the movie should be mostly about him, but unfortunately, the movie makers saw fit to replace the real Minnie Vautrin with a gratuitous fictional French woman who has an unrequited crush on the titular hero and only protected her initial schoolgirls and then foolishly endangered the whole Safety Zone through misplaced compassion or something like that. And an American doctor who stayed and sacrificed quite a bit of his health and sanity was made to look like somewhat of a stooge.

I don’t know why moviemakers do stuff like this. I get the feeling that they were afraid that John Rabe wouldn’t look heroic enough if those around him were portrayed as they really were. That, of course, is nonsense. And I really resent the attempt to devalue their accomplishments. Because, you know what, we need all the heroes we can get.