For Nanjing Massacre victims, every name matters

NANJING, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- Ahead of this year's national memorial ceremony for the victims of the Nanjing Massacre, survivors gathered to mourn their lost families in the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders.

At the commemoration, survivors presented bouquets of flowers with the help of their families, and the memorial activities evoked tears, and more importantly, memories.

The Nanjing Massacre took place when Japanese troops captured the city on Dec. 13, 1937. Over six weeks, they killed more than 300,000 Chinese civilians and unarmed soldiers in one of the most barbaric episodes of World War II.

The "Wailing Wall," located at the corner of the memorial hall, was 43 meters long and 3.5 meters high when it was first set up in 1995, with 3,000 names of the victims engraved.

During the past 26 years, more names have been added onto the wall. Now, the extended wall has a total of 10,665 names on it.

Xia Shuqin, a survivor, used a brush pen dipped in black ink to trace the names of her family members on the wall.

Xia, then an 8-year-old girl, was stabbed three times on her back by a troop of Japanese soldiers who broke into her home, and fell into a coma. She was later awakened by the crying of her 4-year-old sister, only to find the other seven family members were all dead.

In recent years, the Wall has been repeatedly extended, but at a slower pace, as fewer new names had been identified. No new names had been added to the Wall since the end of 2019, according to Zhang Jianjun, curator of the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders.

Jiang Liangqin, a professor at Nanjing University, has been experiencing increasing difficulties. Her team has spent eight years collecting information on the victims at institutions across the Taiwan Strait by sorting 14,931 cards uncovering the brutal truth.

"Investigation for the invaders' crimes and losses in the war had various limitations," Jiang said, noting that when some families were murdered with no survivors, archives or oral content could hardly be left.

"If we could promote joint research by historians across the Strait, more victims would be identified," she added.

Sun Zhaiwei, a scholar who has begun researching the Nanjing Massacre since 1983, said that the names collected so far mainly came from post-war citizen surveys, but the unarmed soldiers without relatives in Nanjing were hard to find out.

Luckily, more and more ordinary people are joining the research on the massacre. They collect the names of the victims and record video stories for survivors, Sun said.

"Their efforts not only help deepen a shared memory of Chinese people, but also reflect the nation's appreciation for individual lives," said Zhang, the curator.