Massacre

Harrowing.  Absolutely harrowing.  Starting with this giant statue of a woman holding the body of her dead son out front, every single thing at Nanjing’s memorial museum commemorating the Japanese atrocities in World War II (sometimes referred to as “the Rape of Nanking“) — is harrowing.
The giant statue is followed by a series of life-sized statues, each horrific and unbearably poignant.
  
  
  
   Only then do you pass this giant grotesque and enter the actual museum.
You know things are bad when something called the Red Swastika (a philanthropic group modeled on the Red Cross) is one of the good guys. I couldn’t bare to take pictures of all artifacts and personal stories recorded in the museum.  The Epilogue at the end pulled no punches.
Exiting the museum, there was more grotesque statuary. It’s not captured in any of these pictures, but the memorial was quite crowded.  Especially since I was visiting on a national holiday.

After exiting the museum, off to one side, a mere handful of the visitors broke away from the masses to visit the excavation sites:  mass graves unearthed in the 1980s.  The buildings were quiet and dark and solemn and broken into two sections.  The first was just a mound of jumbled human bones.  The second was full of complete skeletons, laid out carefully, heads to one side.  So many children.  So many children.

The last exit of the memorial ends on a hopeful note.  A giant statue of Peace.  I didn’t think of it at the time, but the baby in the woman’s arms echoes the one being held by his mother out front.