Nanjing Massacre Museum

Above is a statue outside the entrance to the Nanjing Massacre Museum and memorial. I won't be posting any other photos from it because it was such a disturbing place. Walking in, there are huge letters stating "300,000 VICTIMS": the number of Chinese killed by Japanese soldiers within a six-week period in 1937.

In the year 1937 Japanese soldiers began invading Chinese cities, starting from the northeast and heading south. Among the cities they invaded were Shanghai and Nanjing, but the war crimes committed in Nanjing are infamous. Hundreds of thousands died while tens of thousands more were wounded, and all were impacted in some way.

The museum's architecture was really beautiful and effective, with lots of clean lines. The inside of the museum was dark, with artifacts in glass cases along the wall and videos playing on screens and projected on walls.

It was truly heartbreaking and unbelievable to see some of the pictures they had posted. Decapitated victims, brutal murders, dead children... The area devoted to crimes against women were sickening. I wanted to vomit.

And the craziest part of the museum was a mass grave, where there were hundreds of victims' bones in a pit in a building separate from the main exhibit. I couldn't believe it. There was another section with a pile of skulls, and yet another with only a few bodies , just mere feet away from me. I was in rooms with more dead bodies in the museum than I ever wanted to be in my entire life.

I'm really glad and grateful that I was able to visit the museum. It was a very sobering and educational experience-- I really didn't know all that much about the Nanjing Massacre, or Rape of Nanjing, when walking in the doors. I definitely left changed. It's hard for me, as a sheltered American girl who has grown up in relative peacetime, to imagine the atrocities of any war, let alone the war crimes of such gravity as commited in 1937.

I did take issue with some of the statements in the museum which seemed slanted and possibly untrue, and the fact that instead of moving forward to forgiveness, understanding, or even compassion, the country instead looks ahead to "socialism with Chinese characteristics"--direct quote-- as its future.

But above all it was a beautiful memorial to such a horrible period in history, and well worth a visit. But maybe just one.