Bearing Witness to the Nanjing Atrocities

About this Lesson

The purpose of this lesson is to introduce students to the enormity of the crimes committed during the Nanjing atrocities, and to help them bear witness to the experiences of those directly affected by the Japanese invasion and occupation of China. In this lesson, students will be introduced to some historical background about the march of Japanese troops into the city of Nanjing and the outbreak of the atrocities. They will then hear two testimonies from survivors—firsthand accounts from individuals who lived through the Nanjing atrocities—to help them more deeply appreciate and empathize with the human and inhumane dimensions of this important moment in history.

Essential Questions

How do nations create their identities by separating “us” from “them”? How might a sense of nationalism built around such ideas contribute to the outbreak of war, the dehumanization of enemies, and the perpetration of atrocities?

Guiding Questions

• What were the Nanjing atrocities? Why is it important to confront the brutality of this history?
• What can we learn from hearing the testimonies of people who experienced or witnessed wartime atrocities like those perpetrated in Nanjing?

Learning Objectives

• Students will understand some of the factors that contributed to the war crimes committed by the Japanese Imperial Army in Nanjing.
• Students will bear witness to the atrocities committed by the Japanese during this historical moment in Nanjing.

Lesson Plan

Activity 1: Understand the Steps Leading to the Nanjing Atrocities

• While the primary goal of this lesson is to provide students with the opportunity to bear witness to personal stories and primary sources from people who experienced the Nanjing atrocities firsthand, it is first necessary to briefly give students a framework to understand what happened.
• Show students a clip from the video The Nanjing Atrocities: Crimes of War (5:08–11:55). Apply the Two-Column Note-Taking strategy. On the left side of a piece of binder paper, students should record information about the Japanese invasion of Nanjing. On the right side, students should record their reactions to this information: a question, a comment, a feeling, or a connection to something they know about or have experienced. You may want to watch the video clip twice so that students have enough time to process the material.
• Once students have watched the video, ask volunteers to share from their notes. Be sure that students take away the following key points from the video:
  • Nanjing was a strategic city for the Japanese to capture because it was the capital of the nationalist government in China, led by Chiang Kai-shek.
  • Historians have speculated that Japanese soldiers were particularly brutal during the occupation of Nanjing because they had endured long battles in other parts of China before entering the city.
  • Japanese commanders did not give any explicit instructions about how the Japanese army should conduct itself, which in turn gave Japanese soldiers license to do whatever they wanted.
  • The atrocities in Nanjing lasted six weeks and exceeded anything that could be considered within the bounds of acceptable wartime conduct.
• Once students have shared their ideas, ask them to reflect on the following question in their journals and then as a class, connecting the material in the video to what they have learned in the past two lessons: How did an attitude of "us" versus "them" contribute to the conditions that made these atrocities possible?
• Make sure that students are connecting to the previous lessons’ themes of racism, imperialism, and militarism.

Activity 2: Hear Survivors’ Accounts of the Atrocities

• Tell students that they will now watch two clips of video testimony from survivors of the Nanjing atrocities. Show the clip of Guixiang Liu's Oral Testimony from the USC Shoah Foundation. The clip recalls the day that seven-year-old Liu witnessed Japanese soldiers raiding his family’s home and the feelings of helplessness he experienced in response. Liu’s father and two-month-old baby brother were both killed by Japanese soldiers, who also burned down the family’s home.
• After students have watched the clip, give them a few minutes to write a response to his testimony in their journals, using the S-I-T: Surprising, Interesting, Troubling teaching strategy.
• Then show the clip of Shuqin Xia's Oral Testimony from the USC Shoah Foundation, ,in which she describes the events of December 13, 1937, the day that Japanese troops entered the city of Nanjing. On that day, Japanese troops killed her father, her mother, three of her sisters, and her grandparents, leaving eight-year-old Xia alone with her four-year-old sister.
• After they watch the testimony, ask students to write a response in their journals using the S-I-T teaching strategy.
• Once students have finished journaling, hold a class discussion on the following questions:
  • What about Guixiang Liu’s or Shuqin Xia’s testimony (or both) is most striking to you? What did it make you think about or feel?
  • What is the value of hearing this kind of firsthand account? How does it change the way you understand the atrocities in Nanjing?

Activity 3: Reflect on the Power of Survivors’ Stories

• To close the lesson, ask students to respond in their journals or on an exit ticket to the following quotation from Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Elie Wiesel about the purpose of hearing survivor testimony:

[T]he idea of telling [survivor] stories is to sensitize people—that you should become more sensitive: to yourselves, to your friends, even to strangers . . . become sensitive not only to the story of what we try to tell, but about what happens even today—because what happens even today is always related to what happened then.

Have students reflect on this quote. You may choose to prompt them with one or more of the queries below:

• What is Wiesel’s message?
• What does it mean to “become sensitive”? How can we become sensitive to the stories of people who experienced the Nanjing atrocities—and extend that sensitivity to our lives outside the classroom?
   

• Students can share their responses in a brief Think, Pair, Share discussion. If they wrote their answers on exit cards, you can collect and review them to gauge how students are responding to the troubling stories in this lesson.