For three months during the terrifying winter of 1937-38, as the Japanese Imperial Army raped and butchered its way through Nanking (Nanjing, as it is now known), Mu Xifu, Li Shizhen and 51 members of their extended family hid in John Rabe's garden, hugging each other against the cutting cold. Squatting on straw mats in shanties made of old doors and sheets of tin, when it rained, they got wet; when it snowed, they froze. It snowed a lot that winter.
Huddled with 600 others around Rabe's handsome grey-brick home in the university district, the 14- and 10-year-old cousins would see a black car come and go, day and night, passing through heavy iron gates that would be shut again immediately to stop soldiers slipping in and dragging away a woman to rape. In the car sat Rabe, not long past his 55th birthday - Siemens representative, Nazi Party member and the saviour of Nanking.
'He took care of us. He gave us rice and beans,' says Mu, remembering the German who welcomed the poor into his home, offering them shelter from the marauding Japanese army for three months after the fall of the Kuomintang capital on December 13, 1937.
Now 84 years old, Mu sits bolt upright on a bed covered with a pink chequered quilt in the modest apartment he shares with his wife in the city's southern suburbs. Dressed in a navy-blue Sun Yat-sen jacket with blue trousers and black cloth shoes, Mu has tanned skin and springy, salt-and-pepper hair, though his eyes are cloudy with age. Mu says his health is poor, but his voice is strong as he remembers the past. Next to Mu is his wife, 80-year-old Li.
First cousins from a large, poor Hui Muslim family, which had scraped a living in Nanking as vegetable sellers since the early 1800s, Ma and Li married after the war. 'We shouldn't have married because we are cousins,' says Mu. 'But we are Muslim and don't eat pork and had different customs than other people.' Li is a small woman. She also sits up straight, as she reaches back into her memory for details of those weeks of horror nearly 70 years ago. 'The Japanese were too cruel, raping women and killing. But Rabe saved our lives,' she says.
Rabe didn't just save the 650 refugees huddled in his garden. Together with Illinoisan Minnie Vautrin, missionary John Magee, YMCA director George Fitch and a dozen other foreigners, he saved a quarter of a million people in the stricken city, protecting them in a two-by-three-kilometre international safety zone, the creation of Presbyterian missionary Wilson Plumer Mills. Established in haste as the Japanese advanced, the foreigners strung up white sheets painted with giant red crosses, the symbol of the International Red Cross, to mark its boundaries. About 250,000 people squashed into it. Roughly 300,000 people - ordinary citizens and unarmed soldiers - stayed outside, becoming the victims of the Nanking Massacre.
'Everyone outside that zone was annihilated,' says William J. MacDonald, producer of big-budget HBO historical drama series Rome, who is currently working on a star-studded film about the Rape of Nanking, as it has come to be known.
