In the macabre history of human horrors the Japanese Army’s Rape of Nanking, China, December 1937, stands in the first ranks. As a young man who had lived in post-war Japan and had thought of returning as an adult, attracted to the aesthetic, the culture, the status of being an honored outsider, I first heard the whisperings of The Rape of Nanking with dubious disbelief. Though my growing knowledge of human behavior told me the Japanese, for all their politeness and Buddhist beliefs, were not exempt from such crimes, from engaging in actions that for savagery and gruesomeness can scarcely be comprehended. Indeed not.

The Second Sino-Japanese War (which goes under various names — War of Resistance Against Japan, the China Incident– depending on the speaker) began in earnest in July of 1937 when the Japanese Army captured Beijing and Tianjin. Chiang Kai-shek for the Republic of China then led the Chinese army against the Japanese foothold in Shanghai in August of 1937 in full scale warfare that lasted for three months, the Japanese eventually victorious, though with heavy casualties. In Nanking, then the capital of the Republic of China, all eyes were on Shanghai, knowing it would be the gateway to Nanking if the Japanese were successful. As the evidence mounted the wealthy led the way in fleeing the city, followed by all who had the means to travel and a place to go. The army itself, under Chiank Kai-shek was withdrawn, following a strategy of trying to draw the Japanese deep into China and defeat them piecemeal, with the added practicality that the army was in tatters and deeply dispirited after the battle for Shanghai. Nanking was left under the authority of an International Committee, led by John Rabe, a German born member of the Nazi Party and Siemens business man, and some 17 additional westerners who chose to stay despite the ominous news of the Japanese advance.

As the army poured into defenseless Nanking, after days of bombing from the air, massacre, rape, gratuitous killing, burning groups of people alive while they were tied together became common place. The Committee had set up a Safety Zone about the size of Central Park where, in 25 refugee camps, some 250,000 people sought safety, and to a large degree found it, through the courage of the outsiders who stayed behind. The invasion of Nanking and deaths of an estimated 300,000 souls became known to some as The Rape of Nanking, though for most the knowledge of the horror was submerged in the world-wide conflagration of World War II where the victims seemed more familiar and therefore more precious to the press and historians.

It was only in 1997 with the publication of Iris Chang’s powerful book, “The Rape of Nanking” that memory began to be recovered in the west, and to be indelibly stamped in my own. In 2007 Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman undertook to re-imagine the unimaginable with a film called, “Nanking.” It was short listed for an Academy Award and became the highest grossing documentary film in Chinese history, though its presence in American theaters was short and not much commented on, despite universally approving reviews [100% of “Top Critics” at Rotten Tomatoes.]

The heart of the film is actual footage shot during the invasion, some of it secretly by John Magee, one of the western missionaries who stayed, some of it, presumably, by the Japanese themselves, discovered by the film makers in wide ranging searches around the globe. Cut between the war footage, and some of it is the most gruesome you will ever see, are wrenching recollections of the days of killing by now elderly Chinese survivors. One in particular, is a very old man who recounts watching his mother being repeatedly knifed by soldiers, and his baby brother being pitched away at the end of a bayonet. He found his bleeding brother after the soldiers left and brought him to the dying mother who tried to nurse him, blood from her wounds mixing with the milk. The man, remembering this and speaking about it 70 years later, is so overcome with emotion he can barely continue talking. The sobs of the translators can be heard below his own voice.

The framing device for the film is 9 actors reading from the memoirs of those who stayed with the Committee and helped save so many. Though a bit odd — the actors are sitting in chairs as at a theatrical reading for a part– their familiar faces — Woody Harrelson, Mariel Hemingway among them– and the sense that they are reading, gives a useful distance to the direct witnessing of the survivors’ stories and the sequences of rape, burning and killing. They calm us, as it were, allow us to get our breath without suppressing what we have seen. And, in their own witnessing-by-reading they give us the very little light that seeps out of such horrors: that a few brave people, over and over again in history can make a difference. By their actions — sometimes in daily confrontations with Japanese soldiers– tens of thousands of lives were saved. The elderly Chinese, speaking of them and weeping at the memory, call them heaven sent, and angels of survival.

The memories of elderly Japanese men who were part of the invading murdering army are disturbing in their own right, as there is so little repentance, so little self reflection at what they had participated in. The age-old war cry — “Everyone was doing it. I had no choice!” — is offered in exculpation. We see a few rabid nationalists in full denial, familiar to us from our own homegrown apologists for torture and targeting civilians in war.

A terrible moment in history told in a way to help us absorb it. Two other films, Chinese productions, have also been made of the Nanking massacre. I haven’t seen either nor are they readily available in the U.S.. Some commentators seem to have found copies on e-bay or gotten them from over-seas vendors: “Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre,” 1995, and “Nanjing, 1937.”

For an interesting account of how this film came to be made — a direct result of one man reading of the suicide of Iris Chang and then reading her book — see the website of “Nanking,” here.

For more about the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone see here. For the Nanking Massacre, here, and of course “Chang’s book.