Nanjing remembers massacre victims (BBC)

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By Michael Bristow
BBC News, Nanjing

Shortly after capturing Nanjing in December 1937, the Japanese army gathered together 1,300 Chinese soldiers and civilians at the city's Taiping Gate. They then killed them.

They blew them up with landmines then doused them with petrol before setting them alight, finally using bayonets to finish off anyone still left alive.

This was just one small incident in what has become known as the Nanjing massacre, a six-week orgy of violence in which tens of thousands of Chinese people died.

A day before the massacre's 70th anniversary, a small group of survivors, dignitaries and visiting Japanese citizens gathered at Taiping Gate to remember the dead.

It is just one of a number of commemoration events being held in Nanjing this week to mark a bloody episode that still reverberates in East Asia today.
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more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7140357.stm


Those who do not learn from history ... are doomed to repeat it.