It was August 1937. Frank Rawlinson got out of his car as Japanese and Chinese planes fought in the skies above Shanghai. Bombs from a disabled Chinese plane were accidentally dropped, killing him and 'about 1,000 Chinese'.
Rawlinson's son, John, related this story as he searched for the spot, 67 years later, on Xizang Road near the Nanjing Theatre. John's mother and 13-year-old sister, who were in the car, found him on a curb with a hole in his heart. With the help of a policeman, they dragged his body back into the vehicle and away from the chaos that followed, to a morgue.
Reverend Mimi Hollister told how her mother moved her and her siblings up into the mountains above Fuzhou.
'The Japanese occupied the coast and we wanted to get away from the bombing,' she said. 'From there, in 1943, for two weeks, we took mail trucks to Guilin and then flew to Kunming by US military transport. We flew over 'The Hump' to India and home by ship in 43 days to Boston, via Australia and the Panama Canal. This was a lark for us kids, but hard on our mother,' said Reverend Hollister. But by 1945, they were back in Fuzhou with other westerners.
'My father was one of the nine westerners who organised and ran Nanking's Safety Zones during the Rape of Nanking in 1937-38,' said Angie Mills. The international group argued with Japanese soldiers for the lives of Chinese civilians, many of whom they sheltered in their own homes.
'My father became leader after John Rabe was ordered back to Germany,' Ms Mills said. 'They saved thousands of Chinese lives.'