Two survivors of the Nanjing Massacre passed away last month and one this month, reducing the number of registered survivors to less than 100, sources with the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum said Wednesday.
The oldest survivor of the Nanjing Massacre died on Sunday, and fewer than 100 survivors remain, the Memorial Hall of the Victims in the Nanjing Massacre said on Monday.
Guan contributed verbal testimony to Irrefutable Evidences, A Memoir of the Lishui Bombing Caused by Japanese Invaders, published by Nanjing Press in November 2016. The book collected 31 survivors' oral accounts of the bombing in Nanjing's Lishui county on Nov 29, 1937, and took more than 1,200 lives.
He said in the book that he hid under a big rock during the bombing and witnessed his neighbors, including the four generations of a family surnamed Sun, being killed.
The number of the survivors of the Nanjing Massacre was registered at 1756 in 1984, 1200 in 1997, 400 in 2006 and 104 at the end of last year.
Li Xiuying, one of the survivors, died on December 4, 2004 at the age of 86. She was stabbed 37 times by the Japanese soldiers who attempted to rape her. She survived the ordeal due to the treatment by Dr. Robert Wilson at the Drum Tower Hospital but her fetus aborted on the second day.
Zhang Xiuhong, another massacre survivor, died on December 19th, 2016 at the age of 90. She was raped by the Japanese soldiers in her attempt to protect her grandpa. Her big legs and the tail vertebrae were torn apart by the cruelty from the Japanese soldiers.
She Ziqing, an 83-year-old survivor of the Nanjing Massacre, died on November 17 this year at the age of 99. She, born in April 1934, was only 4 years old when the massacre took place. His mother was killed, and he was clubbed on the head by a Japanese soldier using a rifle butt. He carried a scar for the rest of his life.
