THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, September 23, 1995 TAG: 9509230256
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KERRY DEROCHI, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 132 lines
For months, the soldiers came to the village in east China, looting the poor farmers and killing the scarce, sacred livestock.
Day after day, Pei Qi Zhou ran to the fields, hoping to hide from the uniformed men, their long rifles, their pointed bayonets. She'd wait there for hours sometimes, trying to stay invisible, trying to blend in to the grass and the trees.
On a cool summer morning, Zhou got caught.
The soldiers, members of the Japanese Army that had invaded the region, outran the 9-year-old girl and marched her into the village courtyard. Laughing, they forced her at gunpoint to look at the mutilated body of an old man who had been her friend.
The horror of the dank bedroom, the bloodied bedclothes, the still, frozen grimace of the old man have stayed with her, in childhood nightmares and, now, in the tearful, pained stories she tells as an adult.
For Zhou, who lives in Virginia Beach, the past has remained a dark, silent secret for far too long.
She was the victim of what has been described as a brutal and deliberate campaign to maim and kill Chinese civilians during World War II.
Yet, even now, 50 years after the end of the war, few have acknowledged the atrocities that were committed in the Chinese countryside, the horrors inflicted on the families.
The silence has angered Chinese nationals living in the United States, prompting some to speak out for the first time about what happened during their country's 14-year occupation by Japan.
``We just want to set the record straight,'' said Ping Tcheng, president of the Alliance for Preserving History of World War II in Asia.
The alliance, a locally based group, has sponsored an exhibit this week at Old Dominion University, hoping to draw attention to the Asians who died at the hands of the Japanese.
Called ``The Forgotten Holocaust,'' the exhibit focuses attention on Zhou and others like her, using black and white photographs and first-hand accounts of what happened.
``It was pretty gruesome what they did,'' Tcheng said. ``Our hope is through this educational display we can learn from it. We have to remember the people who died.''
The exhibit caps a two-year struggle by Tcheng and members of the alliance to show the public the atrocities they say have been ignored by the Western world.
Working with similar groups around the country, the organizers hope to force Japan to apologize for the massacre and make reparations to the victims' families. They claim as many as 30 million Chinese were killed during the time.
``Even though it's been 50 years, people don't appreciate it when you turn around and say you did not do it,'' said Betty Lu. ``That's an insult to the people who died.
``That's just not right.''
The exhibit, which has been shown in Seattle and Chicago and soon will go to Atlanta, also depicts the suffering of American POWs at the hands of the Japanese as well as the treatment of Korean women who were forced to work as prostitutes for the Japanese soldiers.
The photographs are grainy and, in some cases, blurred. The subjects are difficult to look at for very long.
Taken together, the exhibit is a painful reminder of what man can do to man.
There are photographs of mass graves, where human skulls are piled in large mounds. There's the young boy who stands blindfolded, his hands tied to a tree, a bayonet poised a few feet from his head.
Also included are newly discovered photographs from infamous Unit 731, a laboratory established in northeast China where Japanese scientists used humans as guinea pigs. The unit, established in 1931, received attention earlier this year when documents were found detailing the extent of the operations.
Prisoners taken to Unit 731, in Harbin, were injected with the plague and then cut open while alive to see how fast the disease had moved through the body. Others were hung upside down to see how long it would take them to die. Limbs were amputated and re-attached on the wrong side.
``The evidence is here,'' said Tcheng. ``It happened. It is not disputable.''
Lien Chen Liu has seen it.
Liu is a native of the Hunan region of China, a fertile region known for its rice and its magnesium. In 1938, Liu graduated from the military academy and was commissioned as an officer.
He was sent to the southeast corner of China to fight an ever-widening Japanese line. He served there four years.
In 1944, when the fighting had stalemated, he decided to take a leave and go home to see his mother. He disguised himself as a poor farmer to cross enemy lines, walking along country roads to avoid being picked up by passing Japanese soldiers.
Skulls and bones covered the ditches on the side of the road. The only people left were old men and women. The young men were gone.
Liu found his mother and took her to another province, away from the front. A relative helped carry her across the hills.
``All the village houses were burned down,'' said Liu, through an interpreter. ``The ponds were filled with dead bodies. They had no time, not enough manpower to bury the bodies. I will always remember this.''
When the war ended, Liu retired from the service and moved to Taiwan where he taught Chinese literature. He came to the United States in 1978 and lives in a two-story home in Norfolk, a home replete with Oriental furnishings and lush flower gardens.
Neither Liu or Pei Qi Zhou speaks English but their emotions are clear. Their voices rise in anger as explain what happened, using their native tongue.
As a child Zhou was too scared to look at the bodies of villagers who were taken into the fields and beaten by the Japanese invaders. She couldn't look up at the human heads which were hung outside of gates as trophies.
But she remembers the laughter as the soldiers sliced through the neck of a cow.
And, the screams of the old man as soldiers slit open his belly.
Zhou tries to replay the incident in the living room of the Virginia Beach home she shares with her son and granddaughters.
She stands, waving her arms wildly about her head, as she describes to Betty Lu, the interpreter, what happened.
When Zhou finishes, she sits down on the floor and cries.
``She didn't get what she would have had, her family was broken,'' explains Lu. ``She thought all the time what if, what if the Japanese hadn't come in and done this to her, to her family.
``Her life would have been different.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photos by VICKI CRONIS, Staff
Ping Tcheng, president of the Alliance for Preserving History of
World War II in Asia, with part of the Asian Holocaust Exhibit at
ODU. Pictured on these panels are ``comfort women'' who were forced
into prostitution by Japanese soldiers.
Pei Qi Zhou, a survivor of Japan's occupation of China, now lives in
Virginia Beach.
KEYWORDS: WORLD WAR II ATROCITIES by CNB