The road to Hsiakwan is nothing but a field of corpses strewn with the remains of military equipment. The Communications Ministry was torched by the Chinese, the Y Chang Men Gate has been shelled. There are piles of corpses outside the gate. The Japanese aren't lifting a hand to clear them away, and the Red Swastika Society 24 associated with us has been forbidden to do so.
It may be that the disarmed Chinese will be forced to do the job before they're killed. We Europeans are all paralyzed with horror. There are executions everywhere, some are being carried out with machine guns outside the barracks of the War Ministry.
Katsuo Okazaki, the consul general, who visited us this evening, explained that while it was true that a few soldiers were being shot, the rest were to be interned in a concentration camp on an island in the Yangtze.
Our former school porter is in Kulou Hospital; he's been shot. He had been conscripted to do labor, was given a paper attesting to the work done, and on his way home was shot twice in the back for no reason at all. His old certificate of employment, issued by the German embassy, lies before me drenched with blood.
As I write this, the fists of Japanese soldiers are hammering at the back gate to the garden. Since my boys don't open up, heads appear along the top of the wall. When I suddenly show up with my flashlight, they beat a hasty retreat. We open the main gate and walk after them a little distance until they vanish in dark narrow streets, where assorted bodies have been lying in the gutter for three days now. Makes you shudder in revulsion.
All the women and children, their eyes big with terror, are sitting on the grass in the garden, pressed closely together, in part to keep warm, in part to give each other courage. Their one hope is that I, the "foreign devil," will drive these evil spirits away.
Rabe, John. Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe.
Westminster, MD, USA: Vintage Books, 2000. p 94-8.
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