(Xu Bao dictated) In September 1937, the Japanese army invaded my hometown of Shuo County and carried out a terrible massacre. About three or four thousand people were killed in this massacre, and I was the one who escaped death in this massacre.
The Japanese entered the city at about ten o'clock in the morning, and as it approached noon, the sound of gunfire gradually subsided. At this time, we thought that the danger had passed, so we came out in pairs and threes to listen. People looked up to see several corpses on the slope of the city, and looking at the wall, they saw their neighbor Jia Huwa dead in front of the door.
People were watching when suddenly the door to my house was opened, and the dogs in the courtyard were shot dead by the devil. The enemy soon found the manhole. When people were forced to come up, the men were beaten up with sticks, tied up one by one, and knelt in the courtyard, and the women and children were driven into a large house. There were ghost soldiers at the door, and a machine gun was set up in the courtyard.
Eleven men in our whole hospital, including me and my uncle, brother, brother, nephew, niece and son-in-law, as well as four sons and a son-in-law with the same surname, were escorted together by the Japanese army with a well rope to Erdao Lane. By this time the alley was crowded with people (hundreds of people). The bundled knot is strong.
The devils walked back and forth on both sides with bayoneted guns, kicking or poking at people from time to time, and some devils took knives and scratched people's faces. Some people took the opportunity to escape, but most of them were shot dead on the spot by the Japanese army.
Later, the devils brought a lot of thin wires and wrapped them around each person's neck a few times, one by one, and some put a small hole in their noses and strung many people on the wire to prevent people from escaping.
This alley was a meeting point in the southeast corner of the city, and when the captured people arrived, they escorted us outside the south gate. Walking, the wires around their necks pulled on each other, and even the breath could not come out, and many people were hanged in the middle of the road.
We were escorted to a clearing, where we were already kneeling in a large area, and there were many more in the back. The clearing was surrounded by heavily armed ghost soldiers, one machine gun after another, all muzzled at us.
In the afternoon, the massacre began. People were pulled in groups near the south gate, followed by gunshots, killings, and screams. I was also pulled away in the evening. With me was only my seventeen-year-old nephew Xu Zengshou.
The place where the killing was a moat in the past, more than a hundred meters long and more than three inches wide and deep. Horizontal and vertical corpses had filled the city trenches. There are quite a few people below who are not dead, some groaning, some screaming.
A dozen of us were dragged away, all kneeling one by one on the edge of the city facing the dead. Behind each of them stood a ghost soldier with a bayonet-mounted gun in his hand.
A devil in the form of an official did not know what to shout, and all the devilish soldiers shouted, and then they inserted their bayonets into our backs, shouted three times in a row, stabbed three times in a row, and if there was any movement or shouting, the devils stabbed them with the tip of their bayonets downwards like pounding garlic, and when they died, they dragged them into this trench.
I may have been tied up for a long time, and my whole body has gone numb, so although I was stabbed three times, I didn't feel any pain, I just felt that the tip of the knife was cold, the blood flowing out was hot, and my consciousness was still clear. So I can see all of this clearly.
My nephew knelt beside me, and he was stabbed eight times by the devil. Although the devil did not kill me, because of the excessive bleeding, lying in this dead man's trench was always awake and confused. The bodies dragged down from above piled higher and higher on my body, and some of the bodies below me were still squirming.
In a moment my nephew woke up from a long coma. The resurrection of my nephew from the dead made me have a desire to survive. With great effort, the uncles and nephews came out from under the dead man, rolled to the bottom of the trench in the dark, broke the ropes with each other, and slowly climbed out of the dead man's trench from the bend of the city trench. The eleven men in our hospital escaped our two lives by chance.
My nephew and I fled to the Ningwu Mountains for more than two months, and when we returned home, we saw that the streets and alleys were still full of bones, and our street near the city wall had more dead heads than rotten stones, and hordes of wild dogs nibbled at dead bodies like a temple fair.
Only then did I learn that the massacre of the Japanese army lasted for three days. In addition to the mass killings in Nanjogen, others were killed at home or on the street. There are also many women who commit suicide out of fear or because they have been trampled by a devil, and my niece committed suicide by throwing her own one-and-a-half-year-old daughter into a well.