Undaunted Women of Nanking: The Wartime Diaries of Minnie Vautrin and Tsen Shui-fang

Introduction

1 INTRODUCTION  World War II broke out in Europe on September 1, 1939, when Hitler’s troops assaulted Poland. Three years later, the United States declared war on the Japanese empire following the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Prior to America’s entrance into the war, however, the Chinese had been fighting the Japanese for ten years on Chinese soil, ever since the Imperial Army invaded Manchuria in September 1931.1 On December 13, 1937, Japanese soldiers occupied Nanking, the capital city of the Chinese Nationalists. As soon as Nanking fell, Japanese soldiers went on a rampage of killing, burning, looting, and raping. Within a few days, Nanking was reduced to a “hell on earth.”2 Gunshots and human wailing filled the air, corpses were piled on roads and in ditches, fires lit the sky at night, and smoke blackened the horizon during the day. Over half of the city was set ablaze. Homes and shops were broken into and looted, if not burned. Girls as young as twelve and women as old as eighty were raped, and some were tortured to death.3 According to the verdict of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial of 1946, during the first six weeks of Japanese occupation, an estimated 200,000 Chinese were slaughtered, and in the first month at least 20,000 women were raped.4 And the atrocities committed by the Japanese did not subside for several more weeks, until late February of 1938. And as the verdict of the court clearly stated, that estimate of 200,000 deaths did not include those bodies burned or thrown into the Yangtze River or otherwise disposed of by the Japanese army. Historians and other specialists on the Rape of Nanking still dispute the number of Chinese who lost their lives and the number of women who were raped.5 Some estimates of the number of deaths and rape victims run in excess of 300,000 and 80,000, respectively.6 On the other hand, some ultraconservative Japanese authors deny the existence of the Rape altogether.7 Iris Chang in her best-selling book, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, puts the number of deaths in Nanking between 260,000 and 350,000 and +X,QWURLQGG $0 2 INTRODUCTION the number of rape victims between 20,000 and 80,000.8 However, Chang’s book has been critically challenged by Japanese revisionists and some of the more recent works published in English.9 During those dark and tragic days, however, the besieged Chinese people of Nanking fortunately had some twenty Europeans and Americans stay with them to protect them. These Westerners, who had refused to evacuate Nanking , organized the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone and established a safety zone in the city to shelter refugees. They insisted that Japanese authorities recognize the zone’s neutrality by keeping it off-limits to the soldiers. The safety zone comprised an area of 3.8-square kilometers, including Nanking University, the American embassy, Ginling College, and other missionary schools and institutes.10 At the zenith of the Japanese terror, an estimated 200,000 Chinese poured into the so-called safety zone for refuge, though it was by no means safe. Japanese soldiers ignored the zone’s neutrality and went inside to commit atrocities as they pleased. Nevertheless, the undaunted efforts made by these few Europeans and Americans and their fearless protests lodged to the Japanese authorities saved the lives of thousands of Chinese and spared many women from rape. Among these humanitarian Westerners, Minnie Vautrin was the one most devoted to protecting Chinese women and children. Vautrin, acting president of Ginling College, assisted by Tsen Shui-fang and a small Chinese staff, turned the women’s college into a refugee camp specifically for women and children. At the height of Japanese atrocities, despite their lives being threatened by the intruding soldiers, the two women courageously protected over 10,000 refugees in the small campus designed originally for 2,750. In addition, they exhausted every possible means to care for the wellbeing of the refugees. As a trained nurse, Tsen also performed medical services for the sick. Both women labored without rest to save the people in their care. No matter how exhausted and terrified both Vautrin and Tsen were during the darkest days of the Rape of Nanking, each woman recorded faithfully what she saw, heard, and experienced day by day. The two women’s diaries...