In 1997, the Nanjing Massacre: The Forgotten Scourge of World War II was finally published, the first book in English to study in English detailing and describing the crimes committed by the Japanese army in Nanjing, China. As soon as the book came out, it caused a sensation in the world, and the whole world finally remembered that there had been a purgatory on earth in the East that was even more terrible than concentration camps. The author is Zhang Chunru.
On November 9, 2004, Zhang Chunru, who was only 36 years old, drove alone to the suburbs, sat in the car, and ended his life with a pistol. Zhang Chunru's suicide, now can be determined to be related to depression, and why depression, I think we all have to remember such a fact, we just read her book and feel that we can't stand it, she, as an author, will always be in contact with more than she wrote in the book, ten times more than more. Studying these historiographies, especially this kind of holocaust, just looking at those pictures, those crimes left by the Japanese, how much pressure and pain need to be endured, only 2 years of writing the book, has made her mentally broken, she often sleepless all night, tea and dinner, yellow muscle thin. What is even more frightening is that Zhang Chunru received a large number of death threat letters, and whenever he went out, someone followed him. Her family members have also received death threats.
10 years after Zhang Chunru committed suicide, Zhang Chunru's mother, Zhang Yingying, spent six years writing a memoir, "Zhang Chunru: A Woman Who Can't Forget History", and this mother said: The process of writing a book is also the process of calming her heart. At the same time, I also hope to encourage more people through Zhang Chunru's short, legendary and unremitting life of seeking.
In 2020, I borrowed "Zhang Chunru: A Woman Who Can't Forget History" in the library. After reading it, I deeply felt that the Chinese nation had lost a beautiful fighter. She dared to face the dripping blood and dared to challenge the darkness of human nature. And she's still a woman, and she's done a lot of things that hot-blooded men can't do, and I admire her.
After reading Zhang Chunru's biography, I found the movie "Rabe's Diary" and watched it alone. I hadn't dared to look at it before. Rabe's diary was also excavated by Zhang Chunru. The film is based on the wartime diary "Rabe's Diary" written by Rabe, and through this legendary story of the "Chinese version of Schindler", it recreates the thrilling and tragic memory of Nanjing.
Mr. Rabe, who saved 250,000 Chinese from massacres in the Nanjing Massacre, slept less than four hours a day and fainted twice because he was too tired, and he donated his property to save the refugees, which also delayed his diabetes treatment. On his return, he wrote to Hitler to submit a report on the Nanjing Massacre, but the report was not made public at the time. After that, he was even arrested by the Gestapo at one point, taking with him 6 diaries and film films. After the end of World War II, Rabe was arrested by the Soviet Union and then by the British for being a member of the Nazi Party. At one point, the family was on the verge of starvation. In 1950, Rabe died of a stroke in Berlin.
At that time, Wei Telin, the director of the Jinling Women's College, who saved tens of thousands of people, wrote a diary of nearly 600,000 words during that period, which became the strong evidence of Zhang Chunru's exposure of the atrocities of the Japanese army. Endless overwork and long-term mental stress caused Weitlin to suffer from severe mental depression, and she committed suicide on May 14, 1941 after returning to China.
The helpers and those who face history died early, and the Japanese imperial family who ordered the massacre and the ishii military god who engaged in human experimentation lived to the "hundred years" in a big way. Should we record history?
I've never been in a row. A friend asked: Will you cheer because of the earthquake in Japan? My answer is: of course not. A friend asks again: Will you donate money for the earthquake in Japan? My answer is still: of course not. In the old days, I studied in Changchun, and there were many Japanese classmates, and I felt that they were still quite polite and stylish. Only once did we talk to a Japanese student about the Sino-Japanese War, and this child said that he didn't know anything, which made us have a patriotic attack and immediately attacked the armed forces. Little Japan was much more honest after being taken by us for a lesson, and when he saw us, he was a good citizen. After graduation, he was assigned to an office, a shimizu yamen, but also able to access some internal materials. There is a record of the atrocities committed by the Japanese army, saying that in 1941, the Japanese army swept through the county, and the villagers of a certain township hid in a large local cave in order to escape, but they were unexpectedly discovered. The Japanese army shouted at the mouth of the cave that as long as it came out, it would not kill anyone. The townspeople really came out, and the result was extremely tragic, with a dozen people hacked to death and some raped.
A faint pen and ink, but a record of bloody history. In fact, things like 731 and the Nanjing Massacre were known a lot before, and the ferocity of the Japanese army was far greater than this. Why is this particularly impressive? Because I was a person from this township, when I was a child, I often climbed in and out of this cave, and I never knew that there were so many wronged spirits there. My unit once compiled a special issue for the fiftieth anniversary of the War of Resistance Against Japan, and it has never talked about this matter.
Many people say that Chinese people are particularly forgetful, but in fact, they may not be. The vast majority of Western world war II history books almost avoid talking about the historical truth and contribution of China's War of Resistance Against Japan, and their forgetting is definitely greater than that of Chinese. Or rather, memory is selective, and all history is contemporary history. Therefore Chinese asked Japan everywhere to face the truth of the Nanjing Massacre, but it was constantly rejected. On the contrary, in the commemoration of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the Japanese showed a role as the biggest victim of World War II, as if forgetting that they were the original perpetrators of the war. All this is the strategy of sino-Japanese checks and balances used by international powers to prevent China's rejuvenation.
This set, in fact, we Chinese will also play. In the case of the limestone cave just mentioned, it is said that ancient human ruins have been discovered in recent years, and the city will develop it into a tourist attraction. Look, the things of tens of thousands of years ago were hyped up, and the things of decades ago were forgotten, and we are not stupid.
To forget history is to be betrayed. But too much to remember, too much to remember. Therefore, for the Chinese people, if we only know the Pingshiguan, the Hundred Regiments War, the Lugou Bridge, Taierzhuang, and the Nanjing Massacre, "Rabe's Diary", I think, is still not enough, the tragedy of Nanjing is not to be said, these battles worth mentioning (such as "Eight Hundred"), but the secondary operations in the Sino-Japanese War - not even the battle, of which the more important Taierzhuang operation is also the first half of the entire Xuzhou Battle. But how can this explain the fact that more than one-third of the Japanese army is trapped in the Chinese theater? If these 800,000 to 1.2 million troops could not move in the Chinese theater, the Japanese army would have been able to open up India and go straight into the Middle East to meet the Nazi division, or threaten the Soviet Red Army in Siberia with full force to move west to fight the Nazis, or they could also capture Australia and make the Pacific War undergo geopolitical changes. These are fundamental strategic changes that will affect World War II, and without China's struggle from beginning to end, the results would have been different.
How can Western historians explain why China, which can be omitted, has become the main initiator of the Ungalaction Four, Cairo, and Potsdam Declaration? These historical meetings and declarations determined the strategic operational framework of World War II and the reorganization of the post-war world structure. Not to forget that before World War II, China was a semi-colonial country bullied by Western countries, oppressed by all unequal treaties, and failed to enjoy full national sovereignty. In short, I sincerely hope that all Chinese should know that the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression was China's rebirth from the ashes of fire and was an immortal glory formed by all the blood and tears of the Chinese, and as long as Chinese have this self-confidence, the rejuvenation of our nation can be expected.