The bleak face of TRAUMA

As the bus weaves its way along the road to Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall in Jiangdongmen, west of Nangjing City, Buan our guide tells us that this might be of the most uncomfortable and depressing journeys we have or will ever make.

 

“It makes you want to puke”, Buan enlarges, as he leads us from the bus to Building No 418, a huge edifice on Shuizimen Street.

The building itself looks strange. Constructed on the site of one of the mass graves – the Jiangdongmen Mass Grave, where over 10,000 victims of the massacre were buried – it resembles a long and large triangular box. To some, it looks like a coffin, to others a bayonet. Both groups agree however that this is a hall of terror.

On December 13, 1937, eight years before the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II would end, Japanese troops crossed the East China Sea and occupied Nanjing – or Nanking – in China’s East. In the six weeks that followed thousands of men, women and children were killed, and 20,000 cases of rape and gang rape took place in urban Nanjing alone. Nanjing, which during the Taiping Rebellion was known as Tianjing or the “Heavenly Capital”, was transformed into hell on earth almost overnight.

“The Japanese soldiers raped Nanjing women before bayoneting their sexual organs and killing them,” says the guide. “Many small children were thrown into the air before being bayoneted to death.”

Spread over 30,000 square metres and with nine gates, the Massacre Museum is composed of four main sections: Site Square, Exhibition Area, Mass Grave of 10,000 Corpses and the Peace Park.

My glance is immediately drawn to the towering statue of a mother and child writhing in pain as they struggle to flee.

“The mother symbolises the whole of China, while the baby in her hands is Nanjing,” says the Chinese guide.

Both are in agony.

A concrete path leads visitors past a line of smaller mournful statues, most of them bearing lines from Chinese poetry.

 

“Ah. Close your eyes. Rest in peace. You innocent soul. You poor boy!” are the words inscribed under the bronze statue of a monk trying to free a boy‘s soul.

Built on the slaughter site, the main exhibition hall is half-buried in the earth, creating an experience of descending into the grave. And this really is a Chinese cemetery. The dim hall is only slightly illuminated to reveal the interior of a war-torn city with crumbling walls and towers. Once in a while you hear the sound of siren in the distance.

“On December 13 every year, the City of Nanjing sounds a siren to remember the murdered civilians and raped women,” says Buan.

The names of the victims are etched on the Wall of Victims. Lui Jie, Zhang Shaozhou, and Chen Changhe are just some of the 300,000 names.

The coffin-like exhibition hall contains more than 1,000 items related to the Nanjing Massacre including an immense collection of pictures, objects, charts, photographs, paintings and sculptures. Illuminated display cabinets, multimedia screens and documentary films serve to demonstrate to visitors the crimes committed by the Japanese forces. The hall, dim and dark, simulates a war-torn experience for the visitors. Surrounded by thousands of Chinese visitors during the school holidays, I almost feel like a victim of the Nanjing Massacre myself. Trapped in a dark hall with the crowd is suffocating.

The distress continues in the adjacent “Rape and Rooting” hall. One image shows a pregnant Nanjing woman, her organs slipping out of her body, lying abandoned in the dirt after being raped then killed by the Japanese troops.

Another black-and-white photo underlines the atrocities committed by the Japanese soldiers.

Blurred and grainy, it tells the story of a woman and five girls taken from No.6 Jianjin Alley. The ordinary-looking girl was raped 20 times per day, while her younger and more attractive cousins suffered this cruel abuse as many as 40 times in a 24-hour period. The crime was committed inside the Safety Zone – an area provided by the international community.

With the hall half-buried in the mass grave of Jiangdongmen, the exhibition site reveals many skeletons – men, women and children – in rough dirt. Iron nails were hammered into some of skulls, and a child’s skeleton reveals bayonet scars.

Yet for me the most shocking scenes are not the graphic photos nor the pile of corpses in the dirt but the archive of the 300,000 victims in old-fashioned paper files. The noise being made by the Chinese visitors disappears as I stand on the bridge overlooking the huge walls of black-and-white paper files and grasp the enormity of the 300,000 pointless deaths and the terror of the war.

 

 

IF YOU GO

NokScoot, a low-cost long-haul airline, operates four direct flights weekly between Bangkok and Nanjing, the fast-developing capital of China’s eastern province of Jiangsu.

Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall is a short walk west of Yunjinlu Station on the Nanjing Metro.

It’s open Tuesday to Sunday from 8.30am to 4.30pm.

Admission is free and photography is prohibited.