Iris Chang - Author.

Iris Chang grew up in Champaign-Urbana, Ill., the daughter of an academic physicist and a microbiologist. But the family stories she heard around the dinner table were of another place and time. Her great-grandfather was a Chinese warlord who died mysteriously in the 1920s among his several concubines. Her grandmother escaped to Hong Kong in 1949 by convincing China's new Communist rulers that her husband was being held captive there by a fictional mistress and needed rescue.

What happened in between -- to her family and to China -- was a little vague to her as a girl. Now it's her obsession.

At its core is that firestorm of World War II savagery known as the Rape of Nanking. Her grandparents barely escaped it. China did not. Chang, 29, wants to remind the world what that means.

It's not an easy obsession. She's just published the first narrative history in English of the event -- "The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II" -- and after two years of hearing stories and looking at pictures of bayoneted babies, headless bodies and disemboweled women she discovered her hair falling out.

"I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. Even my editor lost 10 pounds just from the stress of dealing with all this, even secondhand," she says.

So horrific was the bloodbath that one sickened Nazi diplomat pleaded directly -- and vainly -- to Adolf Hitler for intercession.

"You think you know what evil is," Chang said, "how bad things can be. But nothing prepared me for what I found. Even stories and films of the Holocaust."

Unlike the Holocaust, the Rape of Nanking is barely mentioned in most histories of World War II and is absent from almost every textbook. Few non-Chinese other than scholars and specialists remember that 60 years ago this month -- four years before Pearl Harbor -- the Japanese Imperial Army ran riot in the then-capital of China, now known as Nanjing, hacking apart in eight weeks between 260,000 and 350,000 people -- far more than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Chang finds the global amnesia obscene.

An estimated 80,000 Chinese were raped during those eight weeks, including young children, most of whom were then grotesquely mutilated or killed. Unlike the Nazis, who tried to hide or at least obscure the scope of their atrocities on civilians, the Japanese flaunted theirs in full view of horrified foreigners with cameras, most of whom tried futilely to stem the slaughter, even as they recorded it on film.

And unlike modern Germans, who have based their society on the bitter lessons of the Third Reich, the Japanese today still have shrines to some of their war criminals. Their failure to acknowledge and apologize for many of their atrocities in World War II still stains their relations with the rest of Asia.

Only a handful of Japanese were ever tried for the Rape of Nanking, for example, and "the Japanese government today has done its best to erase it from history," Chang says. Officials try "to deny all this ever happened, or say reports like mine are exaggerations." But she found such "appalling and overwhelming documentation" that she faced a peculiar problem.

"The Japanese took souvenir pictures of what they did, particularly to the women. Many were forced into pornographic poses before, after or during mutilation and death. I had to omit the worst pictures from my book because I feared they might cause it to be banned from school libraries. And school libraries are where I want it most to be."

One of the pictures she omitted, but which appears in another recent book, shows a handsome young Japanese soldier with an appealing smile, standing relaxed and happy in a field covered with the bodies of dead Chinese. In his right hand he holds his samurai sword. In his left, by the ear, he holds a freshly lopped-off head.

Though her grandparents managed a hairbreadth escape before the Japanese entered Nanking, Chang has found herself consumed with documenting the massacre before the last of the survivors passes away.

"I feel it's almost like my moral responsibility," she says, ". . . To rescue my heritage from oblivion. And to ask how an atrocity of this magnitude could just disappear."

In Nanjing, using her fluent Chinese, she located 10 survivors. One was a pregnant teenager when the city was sacked. "She actually fought off the Japanese soldiers who tried to rape her. They bayoneted her 37 times. She was photographed afterward at the hospital. She lost the baby, of course, but somehow lived through it. She's nearly 80 now . . . Obviously a very strong woman."

If Chang sounds angry in print, she doesn't appear so in person. Passionate, yes -- she's a rapid-fire talk machine -- but also professionally detached.

She started out as a journalist with the Chicago Tribune and the Associated Press. "But I knew I wanted to write bigger stories. I wanted to write books." She got a research grant from the MacArthur Foundation to write "Thread of the Silkworm," her 1995 study of Tsien Hsue-shen, father of the People's Republic of China's missile program, and while writing that came in contact with some Chinese American activists, one of whom was producing a TV documentary about Nanking. They invited her to a 1994 conference in Cupertino, Calif., held by the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia. There she saw her first photographs from what the Chinese know as the Nanjing Datusha, or Great Nanking Massacre.

"From the time I was a child I'd heard stories around the dinner table about how terrible those weeks had been," she said. But "I wondered if my parents and grandparents hadn't been exaggerating. If the Nanjing Datusha was as bad as they said, why hadn't we learned about it in school?"

Cupertino, she says, changed her life.

"Nothing prepared me for those photographs. They had been blown up poster-size. It wasn't just the hacked-up bodies, the breasts cut off, even the ones disemboweled. It was the expressions of terror and fear and degradation on the faces of the victims, especially the women, at their moment of death. I knew then I had to write a book about it."

She thought other evidence might be hard to come by. She found it in masses. Much was in China, where she found the present government distinctly ambiguous toward any historical issue like Nanking that might draw attention to its own spotty record on human rights, or endanger its trading partnership with modern-day Japan. A surprising wealth lies in the archives of the Yale Divinity School, which tracked the American missionary presence in China before and after World War II. But her most surprising discovery was in Germany. There she located the diary and papers of John Rabe, an improbable hero whom she calls "the Oskar Schindler of China."

Rabe, the son of a German sea captain, had lived in Nanking selling telephones and electrical equipment to the Chinese since 1908. Bald and bespectacled, he was a pillar of the German community. He was also a passionate Nazi, but, from his surviving writings, one more interested in socialism than ethnic cleansing.

When Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Chinese Army withdrew from Nanking late in 1937, Rabe headed the international committee that negotiated the Nanking Safety Zone -- a neutral area of the city where foreigners and Chinese civilians would be safe from the pillaging of the oncoming Japanese.

As a prominent Nazi, he theoretically had leverage with Germany's Axis allies, but once the slaughter started, his protests had little sway with the Japanese. The army intended to so terrorize the former Nationalist capital that no village in China would resist occupation.

Rabe saved thousands of Chinese by sheltering them in the safety zone, but it proved far from an impenetrable area. "Yesterday," he protested to the Japanese embassy in one note, "several women at the Seminary were raped right in the middle of a large room filled with men, women and children!" He wrote of finding the mutilated bodies of Chinese women beneath Japanese posters that proclaimed: "Trust Our Japanese Army -- They Will Protect and Feed You."

Rabe wrote Hitler in a vain effort to halt the sack of Nanking and so impressed other foreigners with his humane efforts that even those repulsed by Nazism wrote that they would "almost wear a Nazi badge" in his honor.

But when he was recalled to Germany in February 1938 and persisted in his efforts to publicize the Japanese atrocities, he was arrested by the Gestapo.

Rabe survived the war and died in 1950. But not before the people of Nanking, learning that he was near starvation in postwar Berlin, collected thousands of dollars to help him. The mayor of Nanking even flew to Switzerland to collect food and deliver it to Rabe.

Chang was heartened to learn Rabe's story. She was far less pleased to discover that the Rape of Nanking was no single wartime aberration but part of a policy of deliberate occupational terrorism that came straight from Tokyo: Emperor Hirohito's uncle was in charge of the Nanking occupation.

"We know about Nanking because foreigners were there to witness it," she says. "One of them risked his life smuggling movie film of the atrocities out of China in the lining of his overcoat.

"But even more terrifying is what happened later in areas of northern China. There most of the population were rural peasants, and thousands of villages simply disappeared under the Japanese." Scholarly estimates place the toll from that orgy of death somewhere between 19 million and 35 million people. "The Japanese government has never acknowledged that. But it was a policy of extermination, pure and simple. And Nanking was the world's first real look of what was coming."

Chang realizes the world is numb to such atrocities these days, particularly those of a war half a century ago. "It is certainly true," she writes, ". . . That Hitler killed about 6 million Jews and Stalin more than 40 million Russians. But these deaths were brought about over some few years. The Rape of Nanking took place in just a few weeks."

And though exactly how many thousands died is still debated -- and minimized by the Japanese government -- Chang found the most convincing estimate in the National Archives. There a Jan. 17, 1938, message, relayed by Foreign Minister Hirota Koki in Tokyo to his contacts in Washington and intercepted by U.S. Cryptographers, states:

Since return to Shanghai a few days ago I investigated reported atrocities committed by Japanese army in Nanking and elsewhere. Verbal accounts of reliable eye-witnesses and letters from individuals whose credibility is beyond question afford convincing proof that Japanese Army behaved and is continuing to behave in fashion reminiscent of Attila and his Huns. Not less than 300,000 Chinese civilians slaughtered, many cases in cold blood.

That is more civilian deaths in one Chinese city in one month than Great Britain, France, Belgium or the Netherlands lost in all of World War II.

Chang found former Japanese soldiers who spoke candidly of tossing babies alive into boiling water, gang-raping women and then beheading them or burning them alive. One former soldier, now a doctor in Tokyo, has built a shrine of remorse in his waiting room for the more than 200 deaths on his conscience from the Rape of Nanking.

But unlike Germany, which has come to terms with its role in the Holocaust and paid millions in reparations to its former victims, Japan itself "has never acknowledged the brutality of its war in Asia," Chang says.

"There are a few very courageous Japanese historians who believe the country must come to terms with its past and pay reparations to survivors of the Rape of Nanking, many of whom live in incredible poverty, and most of whose lives were absolutely shattered by what they experienced. But those historians live under death threats. And textbooks in Japan continue to dismiss `the Nanking incident' in a sentence or two. The Japanese refuse to see themselves as aggressors in the war. They speak of it as some sort of typhoon that swept over Asia, in which they suffered like everybody else -- something for which they bear no responsibility."

That may become more and more difficult. Dec. 13 will mark the 60th anniversary of the start of the Rape of Nanking, and already it's been the subject of conferences at Johns Hopkins and Princeton and Harvard as well as on the West Coast. Chang herself has been a frequent speaker. Newsweek excerpted her book and more TV appearances and interviews are planned. Dozens of Rape of Nanking Web sites are currently trading information on the Internet, and there's a bill in Congress to condemn Japan for World War II atrocities like Nanking and demand reparation for the victims.

That might sound to some like "Japan-bashing," but Chang bristles at any such suggestion. "No one would describe a book on the Holocaust as Germany-bashing," she says. "It's incredibly racist to suggest we should judge the Japanese by standards different than we use for the Germans or any other people."

She points out that she's far from alone in her efforts to force remembrance of Nanking. Last year "The Rape of Nanking: An Undeniable History in Photographs," by James Yin and Shi Young, reproduced even the most gruesome photographic evidence of what happened. And New York filmmaker Nancy Tong has produced a television documentary, "In the Name of the Emperor," that has been shown in a number of countries and at colleges throughout the United States.

San Francisco, she says, recently became the first U.S. locality to mandate that its public schools teach about World War II in Asia.

"The lesson in all this is about the concentration of power," she said. "Atrocities like the Holocaust and the Rape of Nanking occur when absolute power becomes concentrated in the hands of a very few people. . . . This is not just about the Japanese. I want people to be aware that we as human beings are capable of such atrocities. Until we understand how they happen, we can't be certain they won't happen again."