Beyond the Multiplex

"Nanking": How a doctor, a Nazi and a few Bible-thumpers saved hundreds of thousands of lives
At first, Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman's documentary "Nanking" (recently short-listed for Oscar consideration) might sound like a hopelessly blinkered approach to one of World War II's worst atrocities. The Japanese military's infamous "rape of Nanking" in 1937 -- which included the massacre of 200,000 civilians and the rape of at least 20,000 women -- is told mostly by actors reading the testimony of a handful of Westerners who remained in China's then-capital when it fell to the invaders.

We also hear devastating first-person accounts from both Chinese and Japanese survivors, but they exist in the film largely to buttress the words delivered by Woody Harrelson ("playing" the real-life American surgeon Bob Wilson), Mariel Hemingway (missionary schoolmistress Minnie Vautrin), Jürgen Prochnow (German businessman John Rabe) and other actors, as they address the camera in a sort of staged reading. There are bits and pieces of other evidence, including the famous newsreel footage of the atrocities shot by an American missionary named John Magee and smuggled out by George Fitch, head of the Nanking YMCA. But even more than most historical documentaries, "Nanking" must try to establish the visceral reality of events we can't see.

I can't quite explain why it works, but by God, it does. Although Harrelson, Hemingway and the other actors are not doing full-on performances -- they're sitting in chairs, wearing neutral, formal clothes that suggest the period without quite being costumes -- they make the horrified witnesses come alive as people who decided for personal or spiritual reasons to take their chances in what was about to become the worst place on the planet. Furthermore, as unlikely and white-man's-burden-ish as it may seem, Wilson, Vautrin, Rabe and Fitch were among the war's greatest heroes (and are remembered as such by the people of Nanking).

These Westerners believed that the Japanese, at least at that point, were anxious to avoid dragging foreign powers into the war, and hence were unlikely to attack neutral outsiders. Rabe, in fact, was no neutral -- he was a Nazi Party member who represented imperial Japan's most powerful ally, and sported his swastika armband prominently. Armed with nothing more than bluster, this motley crew established a special sanctuary zone in the heart of Nanking, where they reportedly housed more than 200,000 of the city's poorest and most vulnerable residents. While the Japanese military never officially recognized the zone and raided it occasionally, they avoided the kind of wholesale slaughter and pillage they inflicted on the rest of the city, and left the Westerners unmolested. Many thousands of people survived who would otherwise have been killed.

Little glory came to these people for their efforts, and they were all but destroyed by what they had seen. Minnie Vautrin, who saved countless Nanking women from being raped and murdered, committed suicide after returning to the United States. John Rabe became an outcast in Nazi Germany for his outspokenness and later a Soviet prisoner and a pauper. (The people of Nanking sent him money.) Wilson and Fitch simply faded gratefully into obscure private lives. But "Nanking" both calls attention to a horrifying set of war crimes that remains little known in the West and crafts an impossible-but-true hymn to the power of the individual conscience.

"Nanking" is now playing at Film Forum in New York, with national release to begin Jan. 11.

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