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September 3, 2015

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Home » Metro » Education

City professor’s link to Nanjing Massacre

STUDENTS at New York University Shanghai heard this week how one of their professor’s relatives rescued people in Nanjing during World War II and collected evidence of the massacre.

In a speech to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, biology professor David Fitch highlighted the exploits of his grandfather George Ashmore Fitch, the son of Presbyterian missionaries in China who himself became a missionary with the Young Men’s Christian Association in Shanghai.

Fitch was head of the YMCA at the time of the Nanjing Massacre between 1937 and 1938 when around 300,000 Chinese were killed by the Japanese. He helped establish the International Committee for the Nanjing Safety Zone with a small band of other foreigners, including German businessman John Rabe, to give shelter to 250,000 refugees.

He kept a diary of Japanese atrocities, such as the hundreds of civilians being taken from their homes to be shot or used for bayonet practice, and smuggled film taken by American missionary John Magee back to Shanghai in January 1938.

His accounts created a sensation in Shanghai, for it was the first news of what had happened in the then capital of China, and they were widely distributed.

He traveled throughout the US for 10 months, giving talks about the massacre and showing the films to try to persuade the US to stop selling iron, gas and other materials to Japan.

“Some Japanese had confronted him when he was talking the Nanjing Massacre in the United States,” Professor Fitch said. “They said it was unbelievable and Japanese people were incapable of that. They asked him to retract the statements he had made. But he said: ‘I have many Japanese friends and I know many Japanese are not capable of these things. But these things are happening in Nanjing and I cannot take back my words’.”

His grandfather returned to China in 1939 to serve with the YMCA and later with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration until 1947. He died in 1979 but his role is immortalized in accounts of the massacre. In the documentary “Nanjing,” directed by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman, he is portrayed by actor John Getz.

Professor Fitch said it was important to remember the Nanjing Massacre.

“It reveals a dark side of human capability,” he said. “It’s an example of a type of human behavior that still occurs and involves all kinds of people, all races, all religions and all countries. But it also reveals the human capacity for compassion, altruism and heroism.”




 

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