No one knows the hour when great courage will be demanded.  How could a
girl from rural Secor, Illinois, ever have anticipated the bravery that
would be needed 50 years after her birth?  Wilhelmina (Minnie) Vautrin,
raised by an impoverished Illinois family near Bloomington-Normal in the
late 1800s, became a heroine to thousands of Chinese people in December
1937, when Nanking -- then capital of China -- fell to the Japanese army.
     Vautrin's story is told in Iris Chang's new book "The Rape of Nanking -
the Forgotten Holocaust of World War II." (Basic Books, 1997).  As the
daughter of University of Illinois professors, Chang grew up in
Champaign-Urbana, graduating herself from the UI's journalism school in
1989.  Her grandparents barely escaped from Nanking in 1937, and Chang's
parents insisted that she never forget the horrific massacre the Japanese
soldiers wrought upon Nanking and its people.
          Chang's book honors her parents' wish.  Based on interviews with
survivors, Chinese documents never published in English and many documents
never before made public at all, Chang carefully chronicles how as many as
300,000 Chinese, many of them women and elderly noncombatants, were brutally
raped and murdered in late 1937 and early 1938.
     Chang recounts that Vautrin, after being reared in poverty, graduated
in 1912 with honors from the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana.
Tall, pretty and vivacious, Vautrin decided to forego marriage to become a
missionary with the United Christian Missionary Association.
     For many years, Vautrin taught at a girls' school in Anheun province in
China. At the time of the 1937 Japanese invasion of Nanking, Vautrin, 51,
was a professor at Ginling Women's Arts and Science College in Nanking.
     When Nanking fell to the Japanese on December 13, 1937, a rampage of
rape, murder and looting ensued.  In the midst of this human atrocity, a
small band of Americans and Europeans, about 20 (including Vautrin), created
the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone.  They established a
neutral area where foreigners and Chinese civilians would be safe from the
pillaging of the oncoming Japanese. 
     Western missionaries, teachers, surgeons and business people who had
every opportunity to flee Nanking before it fell, stayed in Nanking as
safety zone leaders, risking their lives to defy the Japanese soldiers and
rescue tens of thousands of Chinese refugees from almost certain
extermination.  Their extensive diaries tell story after story of the
horrors perpetrated upon innocent Chinese people. 
     The safety zone, a two-and-a-half square mile area, included the
Ginling Women's Arts and Science College where Vautrin taught.  The week
prior to Christmas in 1937, Vautrin worked tirelessly, welcoming thousands
of female refugees to the college, sometimes as many as 1,000 a day, and
negotiating with recalcitrant Japanese officers.
     Food was scarce, and Chang reports that Vautrin even would give her own
bowl of rice to hungry refugees.  Vautrin negotiated with Japanese officers,
even as Japanese soldiers forced their way into Ginling College to look for
fleeing Chinese soldiers and prostitutes for Japanese troops.  "The request
was that they be allowed to pick out the prostitute women from our ten
thousand refugees," Vautrin wrote in her diary of a meeting she had with
Japanese officers.
     Horrified by the requests and brazenness of the Japanese officers,
Vautrin spent days pleading for the lives of innocent Chinese people, often
successfully.  But on the night of December 17, 1937, Vautrin was tricked by
Japanese soldiers to go to another part of the Ginling campus to deal with a
"problem."
     In fact, this was a ploy to allow other Japanese soldiers to look for
women to rape.  Suddenly Vautrin heard screams and saw Japanese soldiers
dragging women away from the side gate at Ginling college.  "Never shall I
forget the scene," wrote Vautrin in her diary.  "The dried leaves rattling,
the moaning of the wind, the cry of women being led out .... Oh, God,
control the cruel beastliness of the soldiers in Nanking tonight ... how
ashamed the women of Japan would be if they knew these tales of horror."
     Unhappily, the Nanking massacre took a huge toll on Vautrin, greater
than other zone leaders or refugees had realized at the time.  A nervous
breakdown forced her to return to the United States in May 1940.  She
endured electroshock treatments before being released to work in the home
office of her missions agency in Indianapolis.
     Vautrin's family in Michigan wanted to visit her, but Vautrin
discouraged them by writing that she would be coming to see them soon.  Two
weeks later, Vautrin was dead.  A year to the day from leaving Nanking,
Vautrin sealed her house tightly, turned on the gas and committed suicide.  
     Even today, 60 years later, Vautrin is remembered by a few elderly
Chinese in Nanking as the "goddess of Nanking."  In truth, she was a rural
Illinois girl who greatly respected human life.  And during the Christmas
season of 1937, missionary-teacher Minnie Vautrin repeatedly risked her own
life to save the lives of thousands of Chinese refugees.  - end -

Don Follis is a campus minister at the University of Illinois.  His column
appears on Fridays.