I heard on the BBC that China is planning large-scale commemorations this year of the The Nanjing Massacre, apparently over the objections of Japanese diplomats. Between 150,000 and 300,000 civilians are thought to have died in "The Rape of Nanking", as it is commonly known, a six-week riot of murder, rape, theft and arson, following the Japanese takeover of Nanjing in December 1937.
For those who don't know WWII history, the Empire of Japan invaded China on July 7, 1937, conducting a bloody campaign across the largely rural country. The invasion would prove to be a dress rehearsal for a larger imperial expansion across the Pacific. Partly because Japan never formally declared war on China, partly because Nanjing and other war crimes in China (and Korea) were left out of the post-war International Military Tribunal for the Far East, and partly because the reports from Nanjing are simply so horrific, a minority of nationalist Japanese have never fully acknowledged the crimes.
Needless to say, the Rape of Nanjing had many eyewitnesses, including a number of foreigners who gave shelter to Chinese in the Nanjing Safety Zone, saving up to 250,000 lives in the process. Despite that, there are Japanese Diet members who deny the event (and claim the foreigners' "Safety Zone" never existed). Late last month, some Diet members even rallied in support of a prominent Japanese filmmaker, Satoru Mizushima, as he announced plans to make "The Truth About Nanjing" (Nanking No Shinjitsu), a "documentary" rebutting what Mizushima calls Chinese propaganda. Talk of Nanjing "not only put[s] shame on the Japanese people," Mizushima said, "but also disgrace[s] those who fought in the war."
Of course the story is about disgrace; the fundamental fact that we often can't recognize ourselves in the mirror, when the image is abhorrent. Though it's hardly a "silver lining", there is some comfort in knowing that Holocaust Deniers are not uniquely confined to Europe or to those who criticize Israel; in fact, the species seems widely distributed whenever a country or nation bears responsibility for an act that's simply beyond moral comprehension.
When prose fails to explain, I turn to poetry. One of my favorite poets is W. H. Auden (1907-1973), who moved to the United States in 1939 shortly after finishing a travelogue (with Christopher Isherwood) about a February-July 1938 visit to China. Journey To A War was co-commissioned by Faber and Random House, and by chance, a U.S. first edition turned up while unpacking a box a couple weeks ago:
Here war is simple like a monument:
A telephone is speaking to a man;
Flags on a map assert that troops were sent;
A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan
For living men in terror of their lives,
Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon,
And can be lost and are, and miss their wives,
And unlike an idea, can die too soon.
I've always admired this sonnet, which is number sixteen in a series at the end of the book. (Isherwood wrote the prose in Journey To A War, Auden the poem sequences, including "In Time Of War", which is where this comes from. Auden also took funny snapshots, which are included in the 1st ed.) I've always admired the way Auden reduces the war to a tactical scheme — he was meeting, after all, with Chinese generals on the front line, and no doubt saw his share of war plans. In the poem, the flags move gracefully into talk of ideas, fascist ideas, as if they, too, are also as easy to move as flags on a map.
Then comes the sonnet's elegant "turn", and its conclusion:
But ideas can be true although men die,
And we can watch a thousand faces
Made active by one lie:
And maps can really point to places
Where life is evil now:
Nanking; Dachau.
Here's the thing: I always thought that Auden revised the poem after the war, to reflect our postwar knowledge of what in fact happened at Dachau. I admired that last line, with its four syllables and two stresses, because it seemed to so expertly compress what was, frankly, unsayable. (I also like the symmetry between "life" and "evil", which was not lost on Auden.)
But in fact, the poem reads exactly this way in its original 1939 edition, published in New York. In fact, it appeared months before the outbreak of war, and months before the November 1939 publication of the famous poem, "September 1, 1939", which so many people quoted in the wake of 9/11.
So how did Auden know about Dachau? Sure, Auden had lived in Germany in the early 1930s, and Dachau was already established as a concentration camp (though not yet a "death camp"). Sure, he had travelled to the Spanish Civil War, and had written eloquently about it.
But the poem, to me, speaks a deeper truth. How did Auden know it in 1939?