The good man of Nanking : the diaries of John Rabe /
edited by Erwin Wickert ; translated from the German by John E. Woods.
- 1st Vintage Books ed.
- New York : Vintage Books : 2000.
- xix, 294 p. : ill. ; 21 cm.
Includes maps of Nanking and Asia in 1938.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 289-294).
How it began -- Things get serious -- Waiting for the attack -- The Japanese march in -- Christmas -- New year -- The diplomats return -- Closing down the Siemens Nanking branch -- The Japanese want to clear the safety zone -- The living Buddha -- Farewell -- Between the Nanking and Berlin diaries -- John Rabe's Berlin diary.
A unique and gripping document: the recently discovered diaries of a German businessman, John Rabe, who saved so many lives in the infamous siege of Nanking in 1937 that he is now honored as the Oskar Schindler of China. As the Japanese army closed in on the city and all foreigners were ordered to evacuate, Rabe felt it would shame him before his Chinese workers and dishonor the Fatherland if he abandoned them. Sending his wife to the north, he mobilized the remaining Westerners in Nanking and organized an "International Safety Zone" within which all unarmed Chinese were to be--by virtue of Germany's pact with Japan--guaranteed safety. As hundreds of thousands of Chinese streamed into the city, the Japanese army began torturing, raping, and massacring them in untold numbers. All that stood between the Chinese and certain slaughter was Rabe and his committee, and it is thought that he saved more than 250,000 lives. When the siege lifted in 1938 and Rabe finally felt able to leave, the Chinese gave him a banner that called him their Living Buddha, or Saint. Back home in Germany, he wrote Adolf Hitler to describe the Japanese atrocities he had witnessed. Two days later, the Gestapo arrested him. Miraculously, he was not sent to the camps. As it turned out, Rabe survived the war and the starvation that followed because the Chinese government learned that he was alive, and Madame Chiang Kai-shek had food parcels sent to him. This book is the journal he kept each night during those months of horror and the difficult years that followed. It is the record of an unpretentious hero who, when faced with the inhuman, refused to yield his ground.