English: December, 1937. Chinese women on Shanghai Road, inside the Nanking Safety Zone, kneeling and begging Japanese soldiers for the lives of their sons and husbands when they were being collected at random on the suspicion of being ex-soldiers [1]. Thousands of civilians were taken in this way, bound with ropes, carried to the river bank in Hsiakwan, to the edges of ponds, and to vacant spaces where they were killed by machine-guns, bayonets, rifles, and even hand grenades [2]. (Film #2 by John Magee)
This photo was taken by John Magee behind a window during Nanking Massacre. John Rabe, a German merchant who served then as chairman of the Nanking International Committee of the Nanking Safety Zone, kept one copy and preserved it with his diaries written during the horrible massacre. The photo was published along with the diaries in 1998.