Re-Reading The Rape of Nanking

I made the mistake of re-reading The Rape of Nanking on the train home today.

Isn’t one time reading that book of horrors enough? I mean, I can’t get the images out of my mind from the first time reading Iris Chang’s book.

It’s one of the most depressing brutal awful books I have ever read. Also one of the most important.

The descriptions of some of the rapes are … I wince, personally, when I read that book. It all goes beyond words. You read, and you feel yourself going cold. You try not to identify, but you cannot help it. You cannot help trying to imagine yourself in that situation, what it would be like, what they went through. But the stories – you just can’t believe it, even though you know they happened – the little girls hemorrhaging, and women tied to chairs, their genitals torn apart, the Japanese soldiers cutting open the vaginas of small girls so they could rape them – the horror that the family members went through.

And the men of Nanking went through their own horror as well. Not to mention being murdered, and tortured, and used for bayonet practice, and having to dig their own mass graves, and being buried alive … they also were forced to watch Japanese soldiers rape their baby daughters, their grandmothers, their wives, whatever … I mean, the mind just blanks out trying to contemplate it.

The whole thing is just … beyond words. It leaves me speechless with horror. Man’s inhumanity to man. Make that man’s GLEEFUL inhumanity to man. The faces of laughing soldiers in the background, the pictures of naked raped women, with a leering soldier grinning at the camera …

Iris Chang haunts me now. And I guess I felt like – ever since her suicide a month or so ago – that I owed it to her to read her book again. To not close my eyes, turn away. No. She didn’t. She was courageous enough to LOOK. To try to LIVE with those images. To tell the story of the people of Nanking. To shine a spotlight on this “forgotten holocaust”.

But the book leaves me with this blank awful SPACE in my brain.

The contemplation of evil. Trying to comprehend evil. The book is a catalog of monstrosity. Evil, violence, torture, brutality …

I was on the train, reading it, reading about John Rabe (the Nazi who really is the hero of the story – they still call him “the Buddha of Nanking” in China for all that he did to stop the raping and killing). Rabe came back to Germany and basically was ostracized and fired and punished because of his role in protecting the Chinese (and going against Germany’s ally at the time – Japan). Rabe’s diary entries become a litany of poverty, feelings of betrayal, and illness. And apparently, word of Rabe’s difficulties reached the people of Nanking, a couple of years after WWII ended – and these people, ravaged as they were by war and death, took up collections of money, and food – and sent them all to John Rabe in Germany. To help him in his time of need. Poverty-struck people from China, all the way across the world, remembering the man who strode through the corpse-strewn streets of Nanking, pulling Japanese soldiers off of crying Chinese girls and women, and dragging the women to safety. The people of Nanking remembered. Sent him bags of rice, as much money as they could send …

I’ve read the book before, as I’ve said. But the horror of the photos and the descriptions of the rapes pretty much blotted out all else, in my time reading it before. This time, though, on the train – what struck me, like an arrow through my heart, was the people of Nanking sending John Rabe bags of rice 10 years after the war ended. I just …

It’s the blinding light of goodness, in the middle of such death … it kills me. It is like an arrow through the heart. Such goodness, after experiencing what they experienced, is difficult to contemplate, difficult to understand. It cannot be explained. It just IS.

John Rabe died forgotten by the world at large. But not to the people of Nanking. Iris Chang said that people still talk of him in Nanking to this day. People remember. And now, because of Iris Chang’s powerful powerful book, he will always be remembered.

But still.

The goodness … sending him bags of rice … which pretty much was all that these people had … Thinking about that is just like an arrow through my heart.

I put my scarf over my eyes, as we sped past New Rochelle, and cried my eyes out until the train pulled into Penn Station.

I don’t even know what part of the above tale I was crying about. Guess I was just crying about the whole damn thing, really. A catharsis. Necessary after reading, again, about such horror. I cried, silently, and REALLY HARD, for 35 minutes straight. I suppose I was shedding some tears for poor Iris Chang, too. Poor woman. She must have walked around in psychic agony … too great to bear.

It’s a brutal book. Brutal. I don’t think I will subject myself to it again – but I certainly will never forget it.