Nanjing: Air-raid alarms pierced the morning air yesterday in this capital city of East China's Jiangsu Province to commemorate the victims killed by invading Japanese soldiers during the notorious Nanjing Massacre.

The event marked the 69th anniversary of that dark period.

"The alarms were sounded to remember the victims of the Japanese brutality and to remind the younger generations not to forget history," said Wu Jing, an official from the publicity department of Nanjing municipal government.

In December 1937, Japanese troops fought their way into Nanjing and began a one-month slaughter that claimed the lives of more than 300,000 civilians and unarmed Chinese soldiers.

The Nanjing Massacre was one of the most brutal crimes carried out by the invading Japanese against the Chinese people, yet for many years few people outside of China knew that it had taken place.

In recent years, some ultra-rightists in Japan have attempted to deny that the massacre happened despite the overwhelming evidence showing that it did.

Over the past decade, local government officials, scholars and residents have undertaken a massive effort to inform the rest of the world about the horror of the massacre.

Exhibitions about the Nanjing Massacre have toured around the world, visiting countries like the United States, Denmark and Japan.

The Jiangsu provincial government organized the first exhibition to visit Italy yesterday. The four-part show contains photographic, audio-visual and written materials documenting the massacre.

Many of the 500-odd photos and files were provided by descendants of European and American expatriates then working in Nanjing.

"The photos clearly show the cruelty of the Japanese soldiers and what the foreign expatriates did to help the local people who went to seek refuge in foreign communities," said Zhu Chengshan, curator of the Memorial Hall of Victims of the Nanjing Massacre, who has organized many exhibitions on the massacre both at home and abroad.

He added that it was hoped that the Italian exhibition would expose more European people to what some people consider to be the holocaust of the East.

Over 300,000 people were killed in the massacre, but only a portion of the victims' names are known.

To commemorate the people who died during the massacre, Zhu has been working with scholars from Nanjing University and Nanjing Normal University to search for possible clues that might allow some of the victims to be identified.

The researchers have gone through piles of files in different museums and visited many survivors throughout the mainland and Taiwan. Their research has also brought them to several European countries, the United States and Japan.

The effort has paid off. "Though this is a difficult job, we have identified a few thousand more victims because of our joint efforts," said Zhang Sheng, a professor of history at Nanjing University and a researcher on the Nanjing Massacre.

Source: China Daily