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Wilhelmina (Minnie) Vautrin ( September 27 , 1887 – May 16 , 1941 ) was an American Missionary renowned for saving the lives of many women at the Ginling Girls College in Nanking , China during the Nanjing Massacre . Minnie Vautrin was born in Secor , Illinois . She was hard working and spent much of her childhood and teen years earning money to attend college. At 17, she attended Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois . She then graduated from the University Of Illinois . She began a career in teaching, starting with high school in LeRoy, Illinois. In 1912 , Vautrin made her way to China as a missionary and teacher. During her first few years there she helped found a girls school in Luchowfu . After her first furlough, she returned and helped build and found Ginling Girls College in Nanking, where she eventually took over as Master of Studies. When the Japanese army invaded Nanking in December 1937 , she and the other foreigners in the city, including John Rabe , worked to protect the civilians in a safety zone. Ginling Girls College became a haven of refuge, at times harboring up to 10,000 women in a college designed to support between 200 and 300. With only her wits and the use of an American flag, Vautrin was largely able to repel incursions into her college. Minnie recounted the horrors of the war in her diary in 1937: There probably is no crime that has not been committed in this city today. Thirty girls were taken from language school last night, and today I have heard scores of heartbreaking stories of girls who were taken from their homes last night—one of the girls was but 12 years old. Food, bedding and money have been taken from people. … I suspect every house in the city has been opened, again and yet again, and robbed. Tonight a truck passed in which there were eight or ten girls, and as it passed they called out "Ging ming! Ging ming!"—save our lives. The occasional shots that we hear out on the hills, or on the street, make us realize the sad fate of some man—very probably not a soldier. After the war, Vautrin was awarded the Emblem of the Blue Jade by the Chinese government for her heroic sacrifices during the Nanjing Massacre. In 1940 , weary and stressed, Vautrin took a furlough again from her work. A few months later, haunted by the images she saw and feeling responsible for not being able to save more lives, Vautrin committed suicide by turning on the stove gas in her small apartment in Indianapolis . In recognition of her actions, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich proclaimed 27 September 2002 "Minnie Vautrin Day" in the state of Illinois. Minnie Vautrin has been memorilized further in a novel called NANKING. The novel is a fictionalized account of what happened during that fateful month. A recent review of this novel is available. Written by the New York Times best-selling author, Ellen Tanner Marsh "All too often in the literary world, the horrors of war are made even more grotesque by bad writing about war, from poorly plotted action-adventure tales to cloying melodramas. In contrast, author Kevin A. Kent’s WWII epic, Nanking, is a highly-informed, crisply written novel that, though set in a period of intense conflict, does not rely upon the setting alone to drive the tautly-paced narrative. Nanking is the story of the eponymous city in China that was the target of invading Japanese forces in the late 1930s. More than a historic account of a siege, it is the wrenching drama of the everyday heroes—mostly foreign—who stayed through the city’s occupation in order to help save its beleaguered residents. Kent’s heroine is diminutive Minnie Vautrin, an idealistic American missionary who chooses to remain in the doomed city to safeguard the students of the all-girls school she administers. Yet this is no overblown melodrama; Minnie’s journey is tragic, and Kent knows better than to romanticize even the most inconsequential detail. Yes, the reality is stark, but the tone is never maudlin, while Kent’s carefully executed series of flashbacks, along with deliberate and tautly stylized pacing, allow readers to empathize with the characters and the situation—one that, thankfully, falls outside the bounds of common experience. Nanking is vivid and cinematic, a tale that is evocative of a place and time that, played out on so many ferocious fronts, forever changed the world. Readers will no doubt look forward to future works by this author—although writing a novel as compelling as Nanking would be a feat, indeed. " http://www.NANKINGtheBook.com SOURCES
• Kevin Kent, "NANKING" the Novel based on the life of Minnie Vautrin and American hero. ISBN 1-4196-1602-1, 2006 SEE ALSO |
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