A hero's tale heads home
An opera production, The Diaries of John Rabe, that tells a tale of humanitarian heroism during the Nanjing Massacre of 1937 has opened in the German hometown of its protagonist to rave reviews, Chen Weihua reports in Hamburg, Germany.
When the Imperial Japanese Army advanced toward Nanjing in its all-out invasion of China, John Rabe, a German businessman working for Siemens in China, and 20 other foreigners established the Nanjing Safety Zone that sheltered 200,000 Chinese refugees.
A total of 300,000 Chinese civilians and unarmed soldiers were slaughtered by the Japanese army over a period of six weeks from December 1937, when Japan captured Nanjing, then the capital of China. The event is widely known as the Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanking.
