After finishing Cleopatra, and as UPS delivered the book I ordered last week to the wrong address — or so it seems, because it sure isn’t here — I decided to read a book I’d heard much about over the past dozen years and that a friend had just given me. It’s The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II by Iris Chang, published in 1997. The book is in two parts: the massacre and the coverup. I’ve finished the first.
The Japanese assault on the capital of China late in 1937 is one of history’s most deplorable bloodbaths. In just a few weeks 300,000 or more Chinese non-combatants were killed by Japanese soldiers. Tens of thousands of women, from young girls to the elderly, were raped and mutilated and killed. The atrocities were so extreme that a German national Nazi party leader in Nanking wrote to Hitler to ask the Führer to get the Japanese government to end the massacre.
It’s an important book, horrific but not horrifying, and worthy of your time.
Iris Chang committed suicide in 2004. She was 36.
Sounds like a tough read, but, as you say, important.