Behind the showcase glass at the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, rests a 16 mm Bell & Howell camera. Its body bears the marks of time and through its lenses have passed images of the city’s most harrowing hours. 

Wounded civilians, ruined streets, young lives hanging by threads—the images it captured are a testament to both horror and humanity during the Japanese invasion and subsequent massacre between December 1937 and January 1938.

The camera then belonged to John Magee, an American Episcopal missionary who had lived in Nanjing since 1912. When Japanese forces invaded the city in December 1937, John Magee made an unusual choice: he stayed. With other foreign residents of the city, he helped create a safety zone for civilians, and with this camera, he bore witness. The film reels later became the only known surviving moving images of the Nanjing Massacre.

The Japanese troops forbade photography, but John Magee risked everything to capture what the world needed to see: the wounded crowded into makeshift hospitals, the ruins left behind after attacks, and the faces of survivors who had lost everything.

In total, he recorded roughly 105 minutes of film. These reels were later used as evidence when John Magee testified at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal.

“Granddad had sought to replace the fear and horror of that time with support and care and kindness,” Chris Magee, his grandson, now a photographer and videographer, told Beijing Review. “As did the other heroes, Western or Chinese, who stayed to help the people of the fallen city. That’s the legacy and victory that remain to this day.”

Following in the family footsteps 

“When I was a boy of eight living in Hong Kong, my father told me my grandfather was a hero who had protected people in China. As a child, this all seemed to me very far away and very long ago,” said Chris Magee.

In high school in the United States, Chris Magee chose a Chinese history class, hoping to learn more about Nanjing in 1937. “But there was nothing,” he recalled. “It wasn’t until Chinese American author Iris Chang published The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II that our family stories finally found their context.”

Chris Magee visited Nanjing for the first time in 2017. With camera in hand, he retraced his grandfather’s footsteps, photographing the very places that John Magee had once recorded during the war. Eighty years apart, the images recorded by the grandfather and the grandson now tell a story across time—a story of Nanjing’s pain, survival, and renewal.

“It was as if everything that my grandfather did so long ago in Nanjing was completely connected to my heart in the present moment. It was overwhelming,” Chris Magee said.

What touched Chris most during that visit was meeting Xia Shuqin, a survivor of the Nanjing Massacre, who is now 96 years old. On December 13, 1937, Japanese troops stormed her home, killing seven of her nine family members. Xia herself was stabbed three times and lost consciousness. For nearly two weeks, she and her four-year-old sister lived beside the bodies of their family members, enduring hunger, fear, and despair, until a neighbor finally found them.

John Magee and another missionary came upon the sisters, who were in the care of the elderly neighbor. They carefully documented everything they could learn from Xia, her sister, and surviving neighbors, filming them in front of their ruined home to preserve their story for posterity.

Even decades later, when some scholars questioned the Nanjing Massacre and labeled Xia a “fake witness,” the photographs remain vital evidence, bearing witness to the truth and ensuring the world remembers what happened.

During their meeting in 2017, Chris Magee photographed Xia’s granddaughter and great-grandson, capturing a new moment in her story and that of the city. Compared to the images his grandfather recorded, marked by war and loss, this photograph reflects peace and a new life.

“The amazing thing was that it wasn’t the suffering and horror that remained, but the love and connection with the city and people of Nanjing that were so strong,” he said.

Lessons for the present 

During his visit to Nanjing that year, Chris Magee received the International Medal of Peace on behalf of his grandfather, and his photos of Nanjing were shown alongside his grandfather’s in an exhibition on history, peace and development on the following year’s National Memorial Day for the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre, which is on December 13 each year.

John Magee saw the atrocities of war, with unimaginable cruelty and suffering occurring all around him. But he chose to stay in Nanjing, defying both his government’s and his employer’s instructions, and risking his own safety. His decision to stay and help people who were in great danger was extremely personal based on his consistent ethics, Chris Magee said.

This year is the 80th anniversary of the victory in Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War. On August 29, Chris Magee attended a symphony concert celebrating the friendship between China and the U.S. in New York. There, he shared some of John Magee’s stories and reflected on the deep ties between his family, China and the Chinese.

Chris Magee said he believes that, if his grandfather were alive today, he would want to convey a simple but profound message: to put the needs of others before our own, to show kindness, and to offer help wherever it is needed.

He emphasizes that while most people live in relative safety, it is still possible to choose to help others.

“In this way, we can build a better overall society and peace that spreads from within,” he said.

(Through the Lens of History) 

Copyedited by G.P. Wilson 

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