Mark Gagnon

They murdered her parents, her four siblings in front of her.

They stabbed her and her younger sister and just left them in a pile of bodies.

Jia survived, but her one-year-old sister was less fortunate.

She crawled out from under her family's corpses and

continued to carry that memory for the next 80 years.

Inside the safety zone, Minnie Vautrin fought desperately to hold back this nightmare.

Ginling College was built for a few hundred people at most, and it ended up sheltering 10,000 women and children.

Vautrin stood at the gates day after day, blocking soldiers who came looking for women to take.

She knew exactly what would happen if they forced their way inside.

She was threatening, and she would slap and shove, doing everything she could, and ended up saving thousands.

and the ones she couldn't save haunted her for the rest of her life.

One entry from her diary captured a moment that never left her.

She writes, I'll never forget the scene of people kneeling by the roadside, the whining wind and the miserable cries of women who were being taken away.

For the women who survived, the suffering didn't end when the soldiers left.

They carried that trauma they couldn't speak about in a society where shame fell on the victim and on the family, not on the attackers.

Some took their own lives.

Others buried the memory so deeply that even their children never really heard the full story.

For decades, silence became its own kind of wound that was just fully hidden but never healed.

Now, inside the safety zones, it also was never truly safe.

At best, it was a fragile, foreign, guarded island of relative refuge.