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Forty-six families were killed, and almost all the women were humiliated before they died.
All 600 houses in the town were burned down and food and belongings were looted.
In October 1937, the Japanese Sakagaki Division raided Meihua Town in Jizhong and carried out a terrible massacre here for four days and three nights.
This tragedy was one of the worst in the entire War of Resistance.
Because the crimes committed by the Japanese invaders here were so shameless that almost all the ordinary people were tortured and killed.
So, what exactly did the Japanese invaders do in this tragedy?
In the early morning of October 12, 1937, more than 5,000 Japanese troops surrounded the small town of Meihua.
It was just dawn, almost no one was moving around the streets, and the people were still asleep.
But when the Japanese invaders arrived, they smashed the door, rushed into the house and began to kill people, and after killing people, they set the house on fire.
In the firelight, the sound of gunfire, smashing, and the cries of unarmed people rang out, and this scene of hell on earth lasted for four days and three nights.
During the day, in a family named Wang Tao, as soon as the three devils entered the door, they stabbed Wang Tao's mother to death with bayonets.
After his father Wang Bao saw it, he picked up an axe and slashed it at the Japanese army, and when the axe went down, he directly killed a Japanese soldier.
But this action made the Japanese immediately angry.
The two devils who survived, even if they called more than a dozen Japanese criminals to rush into the door, Wang Tao's family was treated madly.
The devil tied his father Wang Bao hand and foot, tied him into a sack, and then lit a fire on the sack, watching Wang Bao clump together in the sack, screaming miserably from the raging fire, and clapping his hands on the side.
But even so, they were still angry.
The devil tied up Wang Tao again and gang-raped his wife in front of him. After that, he tied his two children to his arms and picked Wang Tao's wife's belly open in front of the father and son.
The children cried out in pain, and Wang Tao was even more grief-stricken.
In Xiguan Town, in the family of Ma Erhei, an ordinary farmer, the four people also suffered extremely miserable treatment.
The Japanese tied them up in strings and drove them up and down the streets, laughing and amusing themselves.
Ma Erhei's wife was pregnant with Liujia and soon couldn't walk.
Ma Erhei begged for mercy and pleaded with the Japanese army, but he didn't expect the Japanese to hear it, and he directly cut the belly of Ma Erhei's wife, picked the fetus on the bayonet and threw it around in front of Ma Erhei's eyes.
Ma Erhei struggled to break free of the rope in pain and pounced on the Japanese army desperately.
But the Japanese raised his hand and shot both of his sons.
There is also a wealthy family in the town, Lu Quancheng's family, their family is a large compound, living in six households of 20 people.
After storming the compound later, he first shot and killed Lu Quancheng's two sons, who were less than 10 years old, and then trampled his five-year-old daughter to death with military boots with iron nails.
Lu Quancheng's 80-year-old grandmother saw everything and collapsed on the ground crying.
The Japanese rushed forward again, picked the old lady's clothes, cut off her breasts, cut off her feet, and left the old lady struggling in a pool of blood.
Then, Lu Quancheng himself, his wife, and the other residents of the compound were pushed into the well in the courtyard, and the Japanese invaders stoned them to death with bricks on it.
Six families in the entire compound were killed, and five were killed. There were a total of 20 people, 15 of whom died tragically on the spot, and the two who survived were both seriously injured.
In addition, while the Japanese army massacred women and children in the town, they also arrested the only group of young adults in the town.
Tie them together with ropes, make them kneel in the street, and the Japanese invaders take them away in rows, pull them out and kill them.
The puddle of the Lun Dam in the west of the town, which was originally just a pond for raising fish, has now become the largest killing ground for the Japanese invaders.
More than 100 hideous-looking devils stood beside the water with bayonets and machine guns, leading the people who bound their hands and feet from the street and pushing them into puddles.
The water was so deep that many people jumped and struggled a few times before drowning.
However, as more and more people drowned, the corpses underneath were cushioned, and the people at the back would not drown directly, so the Japanese would stand on the shore and shoot the people who emerged from the water one by one.
After the tragedy, the surviving villagers endured their grief to salvage the bodies here, and the process lasted for five days.
It was later determined that half of the town's population had died in the puddle.
On October 13, the Japanese forcibly dragged more than 100 women from their homes to a local landlord's compound and took turns insulting them.
In addition to Ma Erhei's wife, 11 pregnant women in the town were disemboweled alive by the Japanese army, and the inhumane Japanese invaders also hung the fetus from a tree to practice target shooting.
Many women still have a faint breath when their bellies are broken, and they beg the devil to spare the rest of their families.
But the devil actually tortured and killed their relatives in front of them directly before they died.
After a pregnant woman pleaded for mercy, the eldest 15-year-old daughter was arrested, stripped naked, cut off her breasts, and stuffed the flesh from her daughter into the pregnant woman's torn belly.
Such a loss of conscience is rare in the history of the world.
On the afternoon of October 14, when 45 young people were tied up in a peach orchard, the young people who witnessed the previous tragic situation knew that there was no way out to beg for mercy, so they scolded the Japanese invaders.
The devils, who were just going to shoot them, immediately changed their minds when they heard the abuse, threw them into a dry well, poured gasoline on them, and burned them alive.
In this way, four days and three nights, it is difficult to write.
According to later statistics, more than 5,000 devils were slaughtered for four days, and 1,547 innocent people in the town died.
Meihua Town, which was once rich in the Jizhong Plain, has completely turned into a ruined ruin.
What was the result of this historical tragedy? Did the innocent and tragic deaths of the residents of Meihua Town be drowned in history?
Of course not, after the outbreak of the Meihua Massacre, the Jizhong Column of the Eighth Route Army led by our party, under the leadership of General Lu Zhengcao, took the initiative to attack the Sakagaki Division that caused the tragedy.
Although the enemy was strong and we were weak, the Eighth Route Army also did its best to avenge its compatriots.
And General Lu Zhengcao himself, after witnessing the ruins of the Meihua Town tragedy, made up his mind completely, and in the subsequent guerrilla warfare, he would no longer go to the previous mountainous areas, but completely take root in the Jizhong Plain.
Wu Zheng-sao
The Jizhong Column of the Eighth Route Army led by him also became a well-known main force in the North China Plain of the Anti-Japanese War.
Repeatedly taking the initiative to attack, ambushing Japanese invaders, destroying communication lines, and the famous tactics of "tunnel warfare" and "mine warfare" were all carried out by this heroic unit.
Their efforts have made many Japanese criminals with blood in their hands leave their sinful lives on this land.
After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the people's government under the leadership of our party attached great importance to the innocent compatriots who died tragically during the national disaster.
In 1949, from the meager financial revenue, a special allocation was made to build the "Martyrdom Pavilion" in Meihua Town to commemorate the victims of the Meihua Massacre.
Later, the building was rebuilt twice in 1968 and 1986 to form a monumental monument.
In the main hall of the memorial hall, everything about the plum blossom tragedy is recorded in detail.
The waterhole, where half of the inhabitants died, was also deliberately preserved, and in 1987, the government erected a monument in front of the pit.
Only four words were engraved on the inscription, "Blood Sea Feud".
Today, the Meihua Massacre Memorial Hall has become a key patriotic education base in Hebei Province.
Since the beginning of the new century, party and government cadres at all levels and mass students have come to visit this place every year.
Although we are now living in an era of peace, we must never forget the suffering suffered by our compatriots in history.
History is constantly moving forward, and as we move forward, it seems that we should also look back, and perhaps one day, the sins of the past will be revealed.
Resources:
"The Plum Blossom Town Tragedy" - Anti-Japanese War Memorial Network
"The Plum Blossom Tragedy" edited by the Shijiazhuang Party History Research Office of the Communist Party of China