Sophie’s Reviews > The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II > Status Update

After all, history does not belong to one single region of the world, history belongs to all of us, to all humans.

By all means, I don’t mean to denounce the fact that western countries have committed atrocities (god my whole study program is about that) but this book showed me that I shall not forget that the world is bigger than that, that these atrocities stretch farther than what I am seeing at the moment and that I shall be conscious of my ignorance in that sense.

Well. I cannot say that I am happy to have read this per se because who could be happy about such inferno? I think this book has added a lot to my education and my ability to look behind the western curtain, to spread my knowledge farther than just Europe and North America.

Honestly, I had never had the chance to learn about Japan and its Asian conquest during world war 2 and evidently I had never heard about specifically this horror of 1937, when the Japanese’s army massacred over 260,000 non-combatants in Nanjing in a matter of weeks (this gets even more gruesome considering the murder of 90,000 Chinese soldiers/PoWs who had surrendered and were under complete Japanese custody).

And now I am here, utterly shocked by what this book has to tell and also incredibly grateful that I have had the chance to read it. As a german myself, most of my high school education was filled with German guilt, with what my nation had done from Hitler‘s taking of office in 1933 to the collapse of the German world order he had imagined in 1945.

Well, guess who is back. It is indeed surprising that I shall finish my first book of the year in the middle of march and then also with such a heartbreaking, horrible book. What has happened to me? I guess, you could say that when I watched a video essay about the Nanking massacre a week back, something in me was immediately intent on finding out more, to hear and see these stories for myself.

The Japanese soldier had endured in silence whatever his superiors had chosen to deal out to him, and now the Chinese had to take whatever he chose to deal out to them.

It has often been suggested that those with the least power are often the most sadistic if given the power of life and death over people even lower on the pecking order, and the rage engendered by this rigid pecking order was suddenly given an outlet when Japanese soldiers went abroad.