Why in the devil did you stay?
When Rabe was asked why he didn’t leave China, he answered that he was “happy and successful” there, that he had “been always treated well by the Chinese people, event during the war”. That was the main reason that he decided to stay, for he felt obliged to help the country that became his home. Rabe’s story is an example of absolute loyalty, responsibility and even compassion. He also proved that ordinary people united with a noble idea could change the world.
Everyone became a demon within three months.
When new soldiers arrived to Nanking, they couldn’t believe their eyes, because “the scene was so appalling”. Gradually, they all learn to kill without a second thought. “Good sons, good daddies, good elder brothers at home were brought to the front to kill each other”. When raping, tortures and murdering became the part of daily routine, people “turned into murdering demons”. The war brought the worst in a human and buried all the good. The war didn’t only take lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, but also proved that a way from a good person to a heartless killer was rather short.
Loyalty is heavier than a mountain, and our life is lighter than a feather.
The Japanese soldiers were taught that “all individual life – even their own - was valueless”. The highest honor a soldier could achieve during the war was “to come back dead”. In such a case, when one’s own life was not important at all, it was easy to kill others, because “an enemy’s life became inevitably less important”. Courtesy of this philosophy, the soldiers started “the mass murder” and were notorious for “ill treatment of the captives”.
