Nilanjana S Roy: Speakers for the Dead

SPEAKING VOLUMES

In the late 1930s, Iris Chang's Chinese grandparents fled the small city to the northwest of Shanghai where they'd lived all their lives, fearing what advancing Japanese troops might do. They settled eventually in America.

Chang's parents were both scientists; she grew up listening to the stories"""almost mythical"""of a massacre that turned the waters of the Yangtze river red with blood, in a place called Nanking.

The local libraries had books by the hundreds on the Holocaust, but nothing aside from the odd scholarly monograph on Nanking. In her mid-twenties, Iris Chang wrote the book she'd wanted to read as a child.

The Rape of Nanking came out in 1997 and became one of the most controversial, most feted bestsellers of its kind. Chang was the first historian writing for the lay public to bring what she called "the forgotten Holocaust" of Nanking to light.

The process of writing the book was grim, demanding, exhausting. Japanese troops had marched into Nanking, also called Nanjing, in late November 1937. Of its million-odd inhabitants, 300,000 were slaughtered and approximately 80,000 women raped in the most vicious ways imaginable over the next month.

And until Iris Chang excavated the skeletons of Nanking, it had been all but forgotten. (She called it the second-worst massacre after the Holocaust of the century""the first, as she often reminded interviewers, was the rape and massacre of the citizens of Bangladesh by Pakistani troops.)

In an interview she gave in 1997, Iris described the toll the book took of her. The stories she'd heard as a child were so horrific that they were beyond imagination; they had the same resonance as Biblical, epic massacres, and they were seen by the child Iris through a similar lens of distance.

But there were no barriers when she started researching what happened in Nanking. She lost weight; she was physically ill; she broke down several times and had to be treated for depression.

The Japanese troops in Nanking experimented with the most efficient methods of mass killing; bayoneting serried lines of men was faster than beheading, they discovered. Women were raped until they literally bled to death; those who survived the assault were slaughtered anyway.

They were disembowelled, dismembered; some had their breasts cut off and nailed to walls. A former Japanese soldier attempted to explain: "Perhaps when we were raping her, we looked at her as a woman, but when we killed her, we just thought of her as something like a pig."

And Iris recorded all their stories. She listened. She tracked down a man called "the living Buddha of Nanking"""John Rabe, a Nazi who became something of a saviour to the Chinese""and persuaded his descendants to let her go public with his diary, a chilling chronicle of the worst days of the Nanking massacre.

Her husband, Brett Douglas, says that the process of researching The Rape of Nanking was almost unbearable for Iris. On a wall of her study, she'd put up a map of the city, covered with photographs of torture and killing, pinned to the locations in which they'd occurred.

Those disturbing images haunted Iris; only her anger, her relentless determination not to let Nanking remain another forgotten crime against humanity, saw her through. After The Rape of Nanking came out, to be denounced by many Japanese and to be hailed by many historians, Iris Chang's next book focused on the history of Chinese-Americans.

A short while ago, Iris began researching the subject of her next book""the Bataan Death March.

She was delving into similar material: the lives of survivors, stories of unspeakable, unbelievable cruelty, trying to make sense, as she had tried with the Nanking massacres, of what might make monsters of perfectly ordinary people. Many of the soldiers who had inflicted terrible violence on innocent citizens had gone on to lead normal, respectable, even decent lives.

No one knows what sent Iris Chang over the edge. Her husband and her literary agent were aware of the intensity and the depth of her depressions, but they had also witnessed the energy she imparted to her work, the ferocity of her belief that some things must not be allowed to fester in darkness.

But no one who knew Iris could have predicted that she would return from a research trip, go for a drive, and shoot herself. She was found this weekend in her car. It appears that she fired a single bullet into her brain.

Survivors of the Holocaust often struggled with the terrible guilt of being alive when so many around them had died. Though some have contested Primo Levi's suicide, many feel that the author had reached the end of his limits when he died of a fall from his staircase.

Others remember Paul Celan, whose "Death Fugue" was the single most unforgettable poem of the Holocaust: "Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown/we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night", it begins.

Celan, whose parents were Jewish, survived a labour camp, but not for long. In 1970, he drowned himself in the Seine; his calendar carried a simple note. "Depart Paul", it said.

In Elizabeth Costello, J M Coetzee asked how far one should go in order to plumb the heart of darkness. He made Elizabeth argue that perhaps it was dangerous to explore the nature of evil beyond a certain point, that we could not undertake such an exploration without being tainted ourselves, being changed in fundamental and terrifying ways.

It remains unclear whether the blackness that drove Iris Chang to suicide stemmed from just this cause, or whether there were other unfathomable reasons""beyond a point, all humans, even writers, remain opaque.

A few months before Iris Chang shot herself, an extraordinary book created a sensation in France. Irene Nemirovsky had been an acclaimed author in wartime France; until the Germans invaded and her Jewishness became an insurmountable handicap.

Nemirovsky was arrested in 1942 and sent to Auschwitz, where she died at the age of 39. She left behind a battered, leatherbound notebook that her daughters were too distraught and too angry to read until the 1970s.

It was only recently, though, that Denise Epstein came to terms with her mother's death and decided to allow Suite Francaise to be published. Sixty years after Nemirovsky's death, her book has spoken so eloquently from beyond the grave that it is being compared to Anne Frank's diary.

The stories Iris Chang uncovered demanded too much from her; the story Nemirovsky wrote was too painful for her daughter to read for decades. But these stories are the necessary ones.

Iris Chang spoke for the dead when she wrote The Rape of Nanking; Irene Nemirovsky's dead voice has been brought back to life with Suite Francaise. We cannot afford to forget their stories. Or the price they paid in order to tell them.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com