A memorial for the victims of the Nanjing Massacre was held in the city on Wednesday as a prelude for the upcoming 4th National Memorial Day.
The mourning activities were held in the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall. Wednesday’s event is the third of its kind this year.
Families of the victims prayed, brought flowers or wrote and read letters to their loved ones in front of a name wall in the hall.
Ai Yiying and Yang Cuiying, two elderly survivors of the Nanjing Massacre, were accompanied by their children to mourn their deceased ancestors who were murdered by the invading Japanese troops.
Yang, who is 92, could not help shedding tears when feeling the names of his families on the wall.
Her father and maternal uncle were both killed after Nanjing fell to the Japanese troops on December 13, 1937.
In 1937, 12-year-old Yang followed her parents to take shelter at a refugee camp in Dafang Lane. Her father and uncle were taken away by the Japanese on the pretext of being disarmed Chinese soldiers.
Yang managed to survive by cutting her hair and blackened her face with pot ash.
Ai Yiying lost her father and paternal uncle in the massacre 80 years ago. As a survivor, she used to travel to Japan to tell the Japanese youth about the truth of the Nanjing Massacre. As long as she is alive, she will tell the other people of her family’s sufferings during the massacre so that people will never forget history.
Last month, two massacre survivors passed away, reducing the number of officially registered survivors to 99.
On the eve of the National Memorial Day, the family memorial is meant to denounce the Japanese war crimes and remind the people that the tragedy like the Nanjing Massacre it not to be repeated.
On Dec 13, 1937, the Japanese army occupied Nanjing and during the following six weeks bore witness to the inhumane disgrace and bloody massacre exerted on the city. No less than 300,000 innocent civilians and unarmed Chinese soldiers were brutally slaughtered in mass and individual beheadings, burying alive, burning, and killing races. More than 20,000 women were raped and many were then killed.
