CRI听力:Massacre survivors still wait for official apology from Japan

Xie Xiuying survived the Nanjing Massacre. She died last week at the age of 94, without receiving any official apology from Japan.

During the atrocity, Xie Xiuying's elder sister was dragged away by Japanese soldiers and never came back.

Her son, Ran Hongsheng, spent the past two years recording his mother's experience during the massacre on paper, and using a video camera.

"The right-wing forces in Japan denied the history of Nanjing Massacre. My mother was just an ordinary woman, living a hard life. But what she experienced was part of Chinese history, the history of Japanese aggression in Nanjing. So I had to record my mother's experience."

Ran Hongshen's parents-in-law were also survivors of the massacre. One died in 2011 and the other last year.

His wife Liu Chunxia said her parents, while they were alive, both expressed their indignation that the terrible history had not been treated correctly yet.

"My parents always said, 'it was you Japanese aggressors who came to our country, rather than we go to Japan. You created a massacre in our country, aren't you bandits'?"

The six-week long massacre left more than 300,000 Chinese people dead.

Today, the number of surviving witnesses to the massacre is just above 100 and continues to dwindle.

This has made it all the more important to record their memories about the bloody moment in history.

Xia Shuqin was only eight years old when Nanjing, then capital of the country, fell into the Japanese hands.

She was bayoneted three times, and passed out the first day of the massacre but luckily, she survived.

However, seven other members of her family were not so lucky.

In October, the grandmother was invited to the United States to film a documentary about the massacre.

In five days, she recorded more than 10-hours of testimony to the atrocity. But for herself, the recording process was not easy.

"It was very miserable to think about my family. I couldn't help asking 'why did they kill so many people?' Seven out of the nine family members were murdered in just a moment."

Xia Yuan went with her grandmother all the way to the US.

"We were very worried about her. We were thinking whether we should let her go, because it takes more than ten hours on the plane. Even for us, it's a bit...you know? But she said she wanted to tell everyone, to tell the whole world. Since you want to go, we'll go with you to do this together, because this is of special importance."

Like the 106 other living witnesses in China, Xia Shuqin has been striving to get her voice heard.

In August 1994, she became the first living Nanjing Massacre witness to visit Japan since the war to join local protests against Japan's war-time atrocities.

Since then, she has been back to Japan on several other occasions.

With failing hearing and eye-sight, Xia has been on medication to keep herself up and about, and hoping for a Japanese government apology.

As more witnesses succumb to age and ailment, Xia Shuqin is hoping she will still see the day when the Japanese government makes that much belated apology, not just to herself, but to all the victims.