EVERYONE knows about the Holocaust, but few today have heard about what was infamous as the Rape of Nanking, when 200,000 residents of what was then China’s capital were massacred by invading Japanese troops.
As this powerful documentary reminds us, 20,000 women were raped, some men were forced to have sex with dead women, mothers were bayoneted while nursing babies, and other civilians were set on fire.
These horrific stories from 1937 are related by elderly Chinese who were children at the time, as well as by a former teenage Japanese soldier.
A team of actors, including Woody Harrelson and Mariel Hemingway, reads from journals and letters from a handful of Westerners who risked their lives to establish a safety zone that saved as many as 250,000 Chinese.
Jurgen Prochnow reads the words of a German businessman who used his Nazi connections to try and stop the atrocities, which are chronicled in great detail in this mostly English-language documentary by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman.
NANKING
In English, Cantonese and Japanese with English subtitles. Running time: 90 minutes. Rated R (disturbing images and descriptions of wartime atrocities). At the Film Forum, West Houston and Varick streets.