In 1937 horrific atrocities were committed against the citizens of Nanking, a Chinese city. Japanese soldiers murdered countless civilians, and rape many women. An American doctor in the city at the time described it as “modern Dante’s Inferno, written in huge letters with blood and rape” (Madison 16).
A short time later Jewish men, women and children were being rounded up and murdered by the thousands. The Holocaust was an event of inconceivable evil, people deemed subhuman were worked to death, starved or gassed immediately. Marie Claude Vaillant-Couturier was a French prisoner, she gave chilling testimony about things that transpired at Auschwitz. She describes what she was told by other internees tasked with removing corpses from the gas chambers, “They told us that the internees must have suffered before dying, because they were closely clinging to one another and it was very difficult to separate them” (Madison 121). …show more content…
Even after traveling to Washington DC and England and visiting historical museums there, I missed any mention of the horrors Chinese citizens endured at the hands of the Japanese. It was shocking to me, and while the Holocaust had a substantially higher death toll, you cannot put a price on human life, deeming one event “more horrific” than the other. As I learned of Nanking I was left questioning why it is seemingly glossed over, at least in American
A short time later Jewish men, women and children were being rounded up and murdered by the thousands. The Holocaust was an event of inconceivable evil, people deemed subhuman were worked to death, starved or gassed immediately. Marie Claude Vaillant-Couturier was a French prisoner, she gave chilling testimony about things that transpired at Auschwitz. She describes what she was told by other internees tasked with removing corpses from the gas chambers, “They told us that the internees must have suffered before dying, because they were closely clinging to one another and it was very difficult to separate them” (Madison 121). …show more content…
Even after traveling to Washington DC and England and visiting historical museums there, I missed any mention of the horrors Chinese citizens endured at the hands of the Japanese. It was shocking to me, and while the Holocaust had a substantially higher death toll, you cannot put a price on human life, deeming one event “more horrific” than the other. As I learned of Nanking I was left questioning why it is seemingly glossed over, at least in American