People often ask: What does the Nanjing Massacre have to do with me? In fact, this history is more than just the suffering of a city; it is a link to our past and future. It tells us how we can move from yesterday to today and how we can head for the future by seizing the moment.On the occasion of the 85th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre, the Memorial Hall launched the interview series “What the Nanjing Massacre Has To Do With Me”.Until now, the first two episodes have been released.

The first episode tells the story of Yang Xiaoyan, a Nanjing-born writer and English teacher at Changjiang Road Primary School in Nanjing, who writes about the changed lives of her grandparents and two unseen uncles in the Nanjing Massacre-themed children's novel, Smile Among the ThornBushes(《荆棘丛中的微笑》).

In August 1937, Japanese planes started air raid on Nanjing. Yang Xiaoyan's grandfather decided to take his wife and children with him, closed the shop and locked the house, and fled to Chongqing.Chongqing was bombed by the Japanese on June 5, 1941.Two of Yang Xiaoyan's uncles were trampled to death in the June 5th Chongqing Tunnel Tragedy(On 5 June 1941, 24 Japanese planes bombed Chongqing in three batches for five hours, dropping 82 bombs and setting the city on fire in several places. A tragic case of asphyxiation occurred in the crowded air-raid shelter of the large tunnel at the city centre. 1115 people was killed and 813 was injured).

On August 15, 1945, Japan declared its unconditional surrender. At the end of that year, Yang Xiaoyan's grandparents returned to the city of Nanjing.

The family's life slowly got better until the founding of New China. Yang Xiaoyan described her grandparents as people who would have lived a very decent life if the war had not occurred.Their wedding photoshows that the grandma was with the latest hair style of the time and her skin snowy white; the grandpa was a high-nosed, dark-eyed young man wearing a long shirt and a copper basin cap. Her grandfather died of gastric cancer in 1991 at the age of 76. Her grandmother passed away in 2005.

When Yang Xiaoyan's son was in the fifth grade and moving up to the sixth grade, she sent him to a tutoring class and came across a number of Local Histories in the semi-basement of a city bookstore in the Gulou district of Nanjing, which contained a full set of The History of the Nanjing Massacre.When she saw the book The History of the Nanjing Massacre（《被改变的人生》）, an oral history of the survivors of the Nanjing Massacre, she felt particularly shocked.Thinking of the personal experiences of her own grandparents, she wanted to write a book.

Yang Xiaoyan said, "I have to do something, even only by openinga book and read it. We writers should write books left to future generations."She has visited the Memorial Hall several times, searched for historical materials and published the book series Smiles Among the Thorn Bushes(《荆棘丛中的微笑》) in 2020 after six years of documentary research. Currently, she is revising another children's novel on the Nanjing Massacre,Nanjing-Born (《宁生》), inspired by a poster on the official Weibo account of the Memorial Hall on December 13th,  2017. The novel is expected to be released on the eve of the National Memorial Day for Nanjing Massacre Victims this year.

The second episode tells the story of Yang Jinrong, editor-in-chief of the Academic branch of Nanjing University Press, who spent more than ten years promoting the multilingual publishing and dissemination of Nanjing Massacre History overseas. With his persistence and efforts, the book was translated into English, Korean, Kazakh, Hebrew, Hindi and Polish, and published overseas to let the Western society know the historical truth of the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese invaders on the Eastern battlefield of World War II.

This year, two books produced in collaboration with the Memorial Hall, Nanjing Massacre History in Spanish and Thai, will soon be published before the National Memorial Day for Nanjing Massacre Victims this year. The Arabic, Russian and Albanian editions are also in production .

 In addition, Yang Jinrong plans to apply for the German edition this year. He said that since the Archives of Nanjing Massacre was successfully listedinto UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in October 2015, more and more overseas people would start to pay attention to China and learn about its history. Nanjing Massacre History would gain more attention. He will continually lead his team to manage it step by step.

Yang Jinrong (second from right) signs a contract for the publication of the Nanjing Massacre History in Arabic in Cairo, Egypt

Top from left: Hindi, Hebrew, Polish,Korean, Kazakh, Englisheditions