Remembering the 'forgotten Holocaust'

Published: Thursday, February 26, 1998

Thursday, February 26, 1998

BOOK: 'Rape of Nanking' chronicles horrifying, graphic cruelties of war

By Christopher Bates

Daily Bruin Contributor

"War is cruelty," said General William Tecumseh Sherman in 1863. Sherman was speaking of his own war, the United States Civil War. However, his point has become relevant even during the 20th century. With the development of weapons of mass destruction, mankind has been able to inflict cruelties unheard of fourscore and seven years ago.

Sometimes the cruelties have been so great, so horrifying, that there has been resistance to incorporating them into the historical record. Such has been the case with the events Iris Chang chronicles in "The Rape of Nanking."

In December of 1937, Japanese troops managed to capture Nanking, then the capital city of China. It was the successful culmination of a six-month long struggle with Chiang Kai-shek's troops in the Yangtze valley. For the Chinese, it was a crushing defeat.

What followed were the sort of unspeakable atrocities that human beings like to think of themselves as being incapable of. Between 260,000 and 350,000 people were killed in an eight week period. Chinese men, women and children were used for target practice, decapitation contests, and, of course, as victims of rape. The destruction was finally curtailed with the establishment of a "Safety Zone" controlled by Westerners.

Given the nature of the crime and the time frame, even the most historically uninformed reader will be inclined to draw a comparison between the rape of Nanking and the Holocaust. Chang notes the parallels frequently; in fact her account is subtitled "The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II" and is in many ways structured like a history of the German-initiated Holocaust.

Chang begins with the political and historical context for the Japanese invasion of Nanking. The typical Holocaust narrative generally begins with the end of World War I and the punishment inflicted upon the Germans at the end of that conflict in 1918. This is an extremely shortsighted approach, for the tensions that led to the Holocaust date back much further than that.

Chang improves on this approach a bit by starting her narrative in 1852, with the arrival of American troops under Matthew Perry. She argues that his swashbuckling display of force created immense resentment among the Japanese and awoke a militaristic strain in Japanese culture that made the rape of Nanking possible. Going back this far is an improvement, but she would have done better to go even further back, for, like the Holocaust, the cultural tensions that allowed the the invasion of Nanking to happen were centuries in the making.

Having set the stage, Chang moves next to graphic descriptions of the violence inflicted upon the Chinese people by Japanese troops. One of many examples:

"Death by Dogs: One diabolical means of torture was to bury victims to their waist and watch them get ripped apart by German shepherds. Witnesses saw Japanese soldiers strip a victim naked and direct German shepherds to bite the sensitive areas of his body. The dogs not only ripped open his belly but jerked out his intestines along the ground for a distance."

Stories like this are extremely powerful by themselves and less skilled authors will tend to rely too much on them to carry their book. To Chang's credit, she offers enough examples to convey the story she is telling without going overboard.

Still following the basic structure of most Holocaust narratives, Chang moves on to what might be described as the rescue. The German Holocaust was so immense that there was no large-scale rescue prior to the end of World War II, only isolated instances of human lives being saved thanks to the efforts of individuals like Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg, who saved, respectively 1,200 and 100,000 Jewish people from the German concentration camps.

Since the Japanese invasion of Nanking affected fewer people and was geographically condensed, there was a bona fide rescue. The successful effort to establish a Nanking Safety Zone was led by one John Rabe, an avowed member of the Nazi party. Not surprisingly, Chang makes the obvious connection to Oskar Schindler, but does nothing with it.

More distressingly, she does not do much to explore the character of John Rabe and to explain the complexities of a man who was a white supremacist, and yet was willing to risk arrest and death to save the lives of Chinese people.

The Holocaust narrative structure is not surprising, for it works well for this kind of history. It allows the details, which are so emotionally affecting, to speak for themselves, with a minimum of interference from the author.

However, Chang breaks from this format in two interesting ways. First, most stories like this are told from the point of view of the victim, presumably under the assumption that the guilty parties are not worthy of any more historical examination than is necessary to label them the "bad guy" and move on. Chang, however, makes an effort to tell the story from multiple points of view, including that of the aggressors. This adds much more complexity to the story.

The second aspect that distinguishes Chang's account is her continuance of the story to the present day, arguing that a "Second Rape of Nanking" has occurred, with the Japanese government still refusing to accept responsibility for the crimes committed in China between 1931 and 1945. Some readers might take objection to this part of the book, by equating the lapse in historical memory with the event itself she necessarily cheapens the significance of the actual event. Nonetheless, the point is an interesting one and provides for thought.

The great weakness of this book is its handling of the "other" Holocaust. It is tempting to draw the connection between the rape of Nanking and the German Holocaust, because the two events involved mass destruction and happened at essentially the same time. But there are key differences that should be considered: the German Holocaust lasted much longer, was supported by a much larger number of people and resulted in 20 times as many deaths.

However, if the comparison between the Holocaust and the rape of Nanking had to be drawn, Chang should have done so much more fully, using the two together as a case study to determine how these things happen and more importantly, how they can be avoided in the future. If she had done so, the book would have been not only a service to those whose anguish has been forgotten but to the rest of humanity as well.