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Nanjing Massacre@80; War’s Post-Massacre, Irreversible Effects

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As soon as the Japanese troops arrived, Minnie Vautrin began to hear about the rapes.

Vautrin, the optimistic American missionary introduced earlier this week, had stayed behind during the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in order manage a refugee safety zone at Ginling College, where she was the dean. Unlike other refugee camps in the city, the Ginling safety zone was strictly open to young women, a group Japanese soldiers had intensely targeted for rape.

Early in Japanese occupation, Vautrin heard that troops were taking Chinese women, some as young as 12 and as old as 60, from their homes to be raped. On the fourth day of occupation, Vautrin watched a truck drive past, carrying eight or 10 girls crying, “save our lives!” (救命!)

Vautrin quickly sent word for any women under 40 to come to the Ginling campus, where they might be safer. As the weeks wore on, over 10,000 people flooded the small campus. Women slept in dorms, on classroom tables and even outside on the school lawn.

Although Vautrin had no control over Japanese troops, they tended not to rape women in foreigners’ presence, so she spent her days running after soldiers who had entered campus.

When Vautrin discovered a rape or looting in process, she would tell the soldiers to leave. She wrote in her diary, “In some cases, they are defiant and look at me with a dagger in their eyes, and sometimes, a dagger in their hands”.

Once, when she told a soldier she had no key to a room he wished to enter, he slapped her across the face. Another trained his gun on her when she told him to stop looting a school building.

Vautrin spent her days in a constant state of angst. Few nights or meals passed without interruption; she was constantly called to chase after prowling Japanese soldiers. And although she sheltered over 10,000 women, she could not prevent every rape, nor could she stop the murders. This fact weighed on her.

One night, during the first, bloody week of the occupation, Japanese troops boisterously dragged the school’s gardeners and labourers to the road and forced them to kneel. Vautrin was brought out to identify the workers, and she pleaded for the soldiers not to shoot them. In her panic, Vautrin did not realise that the whole event was a trick; the Japanese wanted to keep Vautrin off campus while troops pulled 12 young girls from the compound.

“Never shall I forget that scene”, Vautrin wrote, upon realising her mistake. “The people kneeling at the side of the road… the dried leaves rattling, the moaning of the wind, the cry of women being led out”.

Vautrin stayed in Nanjing 2 more years, and set up a trade school for women who had lost their husbands and fathers and needed to earn an income themselves. She penned articles about the state of the city and regularly met with Japanese diplomats to press them about the missing (likely murdered) civilians.

After the massacre, her once-cheerful diary entries grew darker. She was haunted by the friends she had lost and the violence she had witnessed. While in Nanjing, she kept up a whip-like pace, but away from the city, she had no purpose.

During her first trip out of occupied Nanjing, six months after the Japanese had arrived, she struggled to get out of bed in the morning. She wrote, “I had forgotten that life moves on normally, that there is ‘marriage and being given in marriage’; that there can be feasting and dancing. Always in the background of my mind are sad pictures; pictures of our refugees”.

Vautrin expressed symptoms of what’s now understood to be post-traumatic stress. She wrote that the hum of bomber planes haunted her endlessly. When she wrote the date in her diary each night, she would impulsively flash back to the corresponding day in December 1937. During the massacre’s 1-year anniversary, her memories felt near. “Hour by hour I relive them and re-suffer them”, she wrote. “And yet I have the feeling that the most difficult days are still ahead”.

On Sunday, 14 April, 1940, Vautrin wrote the final entry in her diary; “I’m about at the end of my energy. Can no longer forge ahead and make plans for the work”.

Weeks later, she suffered a mental breakdown, and was forced to return to America. Exactly 1 year after she left Nanjing, Vautrin took her own life.

Tomorrow, read how the citizens of Nanjing returned the favour and saved the life of Safety Zone leader John Rabe.

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