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Remembering those who didn’t come back
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Gu Zhicai, who lives in Jiangchuan, and his brother Gu Fugen from Maqiao have spent several years interviewing war survivors and collecting old newspaper accounts of the Japanese occupation in Minhang.
Gu Zhicai, 62, participating in a war survey group organized by his local neighborhood committee, found about 40 war survivors and their children and asked them to record their stories.
Some of the survivors were old and their memories frail. It took repeated trips to their homes to get complete accounts of their experiences.
“I remember I once visited an old man on his sickbed, and he said he needed to double check something with others,” Gu Zhicai said. “He asked me to come back in three days, but when I returned, he had died. It made me realize how urgent it was to complete my work as quickly as possible before these experiences were lost forever.”
Gu Zhicai said the oldest survivor he interviewed was 101-year-old Wang Aijuan. She told him a sad story about a Japanese army raid in her area.
It occurred while her brother-in-law was attending a show with children at a local orphanage. The building collapsed, and a beam fell on him, killing him.
Apart from survivors’ interviews, Gu Zhicai also collected more than 20 newspaper stories from August 1937 to November 1938.
“When the Japanese army occupied Minhang, it established headquarters in several factories and set up an army hospital in a Buddhist nunnery,” he said. “All of these events were reported in the newspapers.”
On August 28, 1937, the Shanghai News (Shen Bao) reported: “Yesterday at around 7am, enemy planes bombed Minhang Town. Along the Huangpu River, 90 percent of the houses were destroyed, with large civilian casualties.”
Gu said it was heart-wrenching to collect all the wartime stories. Yet he said he is proud that the information is being saved for future generations.
His brother, Gu Fugen, 71, worked for the Maqiao Culture Station for nearly three decades after retiring from the army. His work on the local history of the war started in 2006.
“In Maqiao, there were old stories circulating among seniors about the Anti-Japanese Patriotic Association, the Yushan Temple Block Battle and a women’s medical team,” said Gu Fugen. “I tried to trace these stories in local chronicles, but the information was spotty.”
In 2006, the district government organized several forums to survey casualties and property losses during the war. Several survivors came forth to tell their stories.
Maqiao is not a big area, so finding war survivors was not difficult for Gu, who was well-known in the vicinity.
One story that sticks in his mind involved local students who rebelled against having the Japanese language taught at their school.
A former Shuqiang Senior High School student named Dong Jianshen told him that Japanese lessons began in 1942. Students found all kinds of excuses to skip classes, and when it came to examination time, the students handed in blank papers.
“The stories were not as bloody and cruel as those on the frontiers of the war,” Gu said, “but they reflected the real lives of common people under the pressure of war.”
The brothers often help one another with war research.
“We are glad that we shared the same family goal,” said Gu Zhicai. “And we believe what we are doing is significant.”
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