A Heroic Few
By NANCY DEWOLF SMITH
April 25, 2008; Page W9C
More than 70 years have passed since the events described in "Nanking" (7-8:30 p.m. EDT Tuesday on Cinemax). This vivid account of the Japanese assault on China's then-capital city will be as stunning to many now as reports of the Rape of Nanking were to the world in 1937. Back then, the deliberate targeting and mass murder of civilians by a military machine was a horrifyingly new phenomenon. We, alas, are not so innocent.
But how many today, outside of Asia, remember when it all began? Fewer still know the story of how a Nazi-party member and a tiny group of other Westerners banded together to shelter, and save if they could, a quarter of a million Chinese. "Nanking" finds the flame of courage in the darkest places.
(snip)
The narration is interwoven with archival film -- first of a lovely, thriving pre-war Nanking, and later of mutilation, death and destruction. Some of it, secretly filmed by a missionary and other brave souls, contains the images that eventually reached the outside world with the grim news, and proof, of warfare like no other seen before it. All so long ago, and yet so new to modern eyes and ears that it might have happened yesterday. So real and engrossing is the terror that we can almost taste it as Nanking endures months of bombardment and then waits, helpless and hopeless, for the Japanese army. What happened when they arrived was beyond the imagination even of people who had seen their family and neighbors obliterated by bombs and shrapnel. In stories and images too numerous to recount here, we learn how Japanese soldiers bayoneted, shot or otherwise slaughtered some 200,000 people. By early 1939, a war-crimes tribunal later estimated, 20,000 women and children had been raped.
In the midst of the killing was an enclave known as the Safety Zone, which offered refuge at one point to more than 250,000 Chinese. It was created and administered by a tiny group of Westerners, including the American surgeon Bob Wilson (Woody Harrelson) and the American missionary and educator Minnie Vautrin (Mariel Hemingway). Then, as now, the most remarkable leader of this group was John Rabe (Jurgen Prochnow), a Siemens AG official and a member of the Nazi party. Rabe -- who had lived in China since 1910 -- labored under the grotesque impression that Hitler would help once he heard of the Chinese people's suffering. But the Nazi alliance with Japan did come in handy one way: Rabe found that by wearing a swastika armband, he could sometimes scare off Japanese soldiers who made forays into the Safety Zone in search of victims for rape or execution. Minnie Vautrin waved the American flag to ward off marauding soldiers at the steps of her Ginling College. Sometimes they backed off.
(snip)
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120907795885643143.html (subscription)
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
