CRI听力:"Survivor Testimony" for Nanjing Massacre3: Qiu Xiuying

This coming Saturday, December 13th, is going to mark China's first-ever National Memorial Day for the Nanjing Massacre.

Today, we continue our series of reports, bringing you the stories of some of those people who managed to survive the massacre by the Japanese army.

"When the Japanese army invaded Nanjing, we started to dig a tunnel inside our cellar and hide inside. But my mom left the tunnel followed my brother to go and find some food. We then heard a gunshot fired by Japanese troops, which ripped through my brother's cotton robe. My mom was shot as well. She was rolling on the ground, yelling "I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die"

This is Qiu Xiuying.

When the Japanese army finally over-ran Nanjing in December of 1937, she was only 7 years old.

When the Japanese soldiers who shot Qiu's mother left, her mother was in extreme pain, and rolled into the cellar.

Qiu's brother was later seized by the Japanese military, and forced to do manual labor.

Two days later, Qiu's mother was dead.

"Japanese soldiers randomly came to search for things, and then set fire to the house. My father put out the fire with his bare hands. The skin on his hands was beginning to blister. He dragged me and my sister out from the cellar. He then tried to drag my mom from the cellar, but it was in vain, as she was already dead."

The Qiu family home was completely torched.

With no home to hide in, they eventually found shelter at a foreign company.

Every morning, the company would provide two small steamed buns and a bowl of porridge for every refugee.

But even there, Qiu Xiuying says they still weren't safe.

"The refugees were ordered to stand in a row, and four people deep. The line stretched over a hundred meters long. We then heard shots coming from the front of the line."

A few days later, during a lull in Nanjing Massacre, Qiu's family went back to retrieve the corpse of their dead mother.

Qiu says her father was only able to wrap his wife's body with grass and bury it.

"Every year during the commemoration of the Nanjing Massacre, I'm filled with sadness. We get along with life nowadays. War is awful. We don't want war. We want peace." 　　

Estimates are that around 300-thousand people were killed by the invading Japanese soldiers in Nanjing over a 6-week period beginning on December 13th, 1937.