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Sign up todayThe Good Man of Nanking
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Learn moreThis unique and gripping document contains the recently discovered diaries of a German businessman, John Rabe, who saved so many lives in the infamous siege of Nanking in 1937 that he is now being honored as the Oskar Schindler of China. As the Japanese army closed in and all foreigners were ordered to evacuate, Rabe mobilized the remaining Westerners in Nanking and organized an “International Safety Zone” which guaranteed safety to all unarmed Chinese by virtue of Germany’s pact with Japan. As hundreds of thousands of Chinese streamed into the city, all that stood between them and certain slaughter were Rabe and his committee, and it is thought that he saved more than 250,000 lives. After the siege, when he was arrested by the Gestapo in Germany, he survived the war and the starvation that followed with help from the Chinese government. His journal is a record of inhuman horror and unpretentious heroism.
John Rabe was born in Hamburg in 1882. He lived in China from 1908 to 1938, where his last position was that of director of the Siemens office in Nanking. His wartime diaries were published as The Good Man of Nanking. Rabe died impoverished and unrecognized in Berlin in 1950.
Anna Fields (1965–2006), winner of more than a dozen Earphones Awards and the prestigious Audie Award in 2004, was one of the most respected narrators in the industry. Trained at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, she was also a director, producer, and technician at her own studio, Cedar House Audio.
John E. Woods is an American prize-winning translator who has brought great German literature to English speakers for over 30 years. His work includes translations of Arno Schmidt, Ingo Schulze, and the major novels of Thomas Mann. He lives in Berlin.
Reviews
“Riveting, inspiring, terrifying, and tragically sad.”
“A document of the power of the human will…A quarter-million Chinese survived the horror of Nanking because John Rabe didn’t hesitate to act.”
“Fields’ even-toned, unvoiced performance provides the serious tone that this work deserves.”
“The diary format provides a forum for the extraordinary power and immediacy of John Rabe’s words, including his gallows humor, placing the reader there in Nanking as the bombs explode and the Japanese soldiers begin their massacres.”
“The matter-of-fact way that he writes about those extraordinary events serves to underline the horrors experienced by all in Nanking…The book’s strength is…the immediacy of the story being told. This is one worth telling.”
“Rabe’s dramatic and perhaps, to some, ambiguous tale shows how unremarkable people can sometimes do remarkable things, and how one evil can, sometimes, be used to fight another.”
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