Seeds of peace

2015-08-19    Source: Chinadaily

Zhang Yawen has devoted herself to researching war history.[Photo provided to China Daily]

Fighting against Evil, Zhang Yawen's latest book, talks about the elusiveness of harmony, Yang Yang reports.

Since the end of World War II, Germany and the rest of Europe have been tracking down, arresting and prosecuting Nazi war criminals.

But in Japan the situation has been alarmingly different, Zhang Yawen writes in her new book, Fighting against Evil.

The Chinese-language book, published by Chongqing Publishing House, is a tribute to China's victory over Japan in World War II. China will mark the 70th anniversary of the end of war this year, with large-scale celebrations planned for Sept 3.

On Nov 24, 1948, Class A war criminals from Japan, sentenced by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in trials held in Tokyo, were set free as a result of the support of the United States, Zhang writes in her book. One of them was Nobusuke Kishi, who became Japan's prime minister in 1957.

The author, 71, quotes an editorial by Asahi Shimbun, a Tokyo-based newspaper, after Nobusuke's death in 1960 as saying: "Because Nobusuke Kishi, a Class A war criminal, returned to power as the prime minister, quite a few people think that (it) is the reason why Japanese people cannot account clearly who is to blame for the war."

"They kept denying history, including the Nanjing Massacre, and falsified textbooks to understate their crimes in China, and aim as a whole nation to finally forget that history," Zhang tells China Daily.

"Humans must not forget history, for the present is a repeat of the past."

Zhang devotes most of the book's 353 pages talking about how hard it is to achieve peace, and how some individuals from China, Germany, Denmark and the US made a difference by trying to save as many fellow humans as they could.

Author Zhang Yawen (left) visits Qian Xiuling, who saved more than 100 Belgians from the Nazis, in 1999.[Photo provided to China Daily]

She makes a special mention of Verda Majo, originally named Hasegawa Teruko, from Japan, who came to China during the war and pleaded with Japanese soldiers on radio to stop killing and raping Chinese people.

Fighting against Evil is Zhang's latest work in her decadeslong research on World War II.

In 1999 she went to Europe to interview the "Chinese mother of Belgium" Qian Xiu-ling, who was awarded a Hero of the State medal for saving more than 100 Belgians from the Nazis.

Based on history, Zhang wrote the script for the TV series A Chinese Woman at Gestapo Gunpoint, which was aired on CCTV in 2002.

She then wrote a novel with the same name and it was translated into English in 2003. In June, when King Philippe of Belgium visited China, President Xi Jinping gave the book to him as a gift.

'We suffered a lot ...'

While writing Fighting against Evil, Zhang traveled extensively for interviews. In July last year, she spent nearly a month visiting Nanjing, Jiangsu province, and Yiyang, Hunan province, for interviews.

In Nanjing, she visited the site of Jiangnan cement factory, which served as a safe house for more than 30,000 Chinese refugees during the massacre.

In Yiyang she learned about the childhood of He Fengsha, who granted visas to thousands of Jewish people as consul-general of the Kuomintang government in Vienna during the war.

Also last year, Zhang went to Europe to do interviews about German Alexander von Falken-hausen, who even as a Nazi leader tried to save Belgians from mass killings in Belgium; John Rabe, who helped save about 250,000 Chinese during the Nanjing Massacre (also known as the Nanking Massacre); the Dane Bernhard Arp Sindberg, who was one of two foreigners working at the cement factory in Nanjing from 1937 to 1938, and provided shelter to Chinese refugees.

Fighting against Evil is a tribute on the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II.[Photo provided to China Daily]

In addition, Zhang went to Vienna to visit the place He rented to grant visas after the original offices were forced to close.

Of the reasons for her interest in war history, Zhang says: "It may be because I come from Northeast China, which was occupied by Japan for 14 years. ... We suffered a lot at the time."

She has researched Army Unit 731, a Japanese military wing that conducted biochemical experiments on living Chinese people in Northeast China.

"Humans can even be much worse than beasts, for animals kill only for a living, not on purpose or even for competition or for fun," she says.

Zhang says, during her interviews in Europe, she was shocked to hear a story about the twisted version of Japan's invasion of China.

"At Heidelberg University, a German student majoring in Japanese asked a Chinese student, 'Who started the Marco Polo Bridge Incident (in Beijing) that marked Japan's overall invasion of China?" Zhang writes in the book.

The Chinese student answered, "of course, it was Japan" but the German student said that according to historical materials, it was China, Zhang says, adding that "it's a shame" that the German student thought in that way.

More than 35 million Chinese people were killed or injured in the years of the war.