"Minnie spent most of her time running from one end of the campus to another, trying to stay one step ahead of the raping, looting soldiers. Her commanding presence was enough to make some of them quit, but others, she wrote, would look at her “with a dagger in their eyes and some times a dagger in their hands.” One Japanese soldier became so angry with Minnie when she tried to prevent a looting, he pointed a gun at her. Another slapped her.
Meanwhile, the refugees continued to flood into Ginling, “with horror written on their faces,” wrote Minnie, and relating “stories of tragedies such as I have never heard before.”
Minnie was desperate. She decided to visit the Japanese embassy in Nanking to see if anyone there would help her.
A sympathetic embassy clerk wrote two official letters ordering the soldiers to leave the women of Ginling alone. He also gave Minnie some official “proclamations” to post on the outside of Ginling’s walls, declaring the campus off-limits to Japanese soldiers.
He even arranged for Minnie to be driven home in the embassy car. The driver told Minnie, “the only thing that had saved the Chinese people from utter destruction” were the “handful of foreigners” running Nanking’s safety zone. Minnie was glad to be making a difference, of course, but the driver’s words filled her with a certain despair: “What would it be like,” she wrote, “if there were no check on this terrible devastation and cruelty?”
On the following day, she tested the power of the letters..."
From "Minnie Vautrin: American Hero at the Nanking Massacre" from Women Heroes of World War II: The Pacific Theater.
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