Purple Mountain

This is another of the books about the massacre of Nanking. It centers on two characters, Ning-Ning (who is 12) and her grandfather, who are in a small apartment. Her grandfather is not well and he has a coffin in the room that Ning-Ning can hide in.

The story starts out by past difficulties between Japan and China. It moves on to the Marco Polo incident and the Japanese attack on Shanghai. In December of 1937 the Japanese moved on to attack Nanking. There's some history given about the city and then the book moves on to the initial bombing and other attacks on the city.

The next main character is introduced who is John Rabe who is a Nazi and establishes a safety zone in the city which the Japanese soldiers plundered at times, but not at all on the scale they did to the rest of the city.

The story goes on to detail how the Japanese murdered thousands of Chinese soldiers, how they broke into homes and took whatever they wanted and how they raped innumerable Chinese women.

The book is basically a personalized view of the beyond horrible things that the Japanese soldiers did in Nanking. The Rape of Nanking, as it is known, has to stand as one of the worse atrocities that the Japanese during the war. The book gives the reader a good idea of the things that happened.

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