The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe by Edited by Edwin Wickert; Translated by John E. Woods; Unabridged MP3 Audio Book; Narrator Anna Fields

This unique and gripping document contains the recently discovered diaries of a German businessman, John Rabe, who saved so many lives in the infamous siege of Nanking in 1937 that he is now being honored as the Oskar Schindler of China. As the Japanese army closed in and all foreigners were ordered to evacuate, Rabe mobilized the remaining Westerners in Nanking and organized an “International Safety Zone” which guaranteed safety to all unarmed Chinese by virtue of Germany’s pact with Japan. As hundreds of thousands of Chinese streamed into the city, all that stood between them and certain slaughter were Rabe and his committee, and it is thought that he saved more than 250,000 lives. After the siege, when he was arrested by the Gestapo in Germany, he survived the war and the starvation that followed with help from the Chinese government. His journal is a record of inhuman horror and unpretentious heroism.

John Rabe was born in Hamburg in 1882. He lived in China from 1908 to 1938, where his last position was that of director of the Siemens office in Nanking. He died impoverished and unrecognized in Berlin in 1950.

“The matter-of-fact way that he writes about those extraordinary events serves to underline the horrors experienced by all in Nanking….The book's strength is…the immediacy of the story being told. This is one worth telling.”—Booklist

“Riveting, inspiring, terrifying, and tragically sad.”—New York Times Book Review

“A document of the power of the human will…A quarter-million Chinese survived the horror of Nanking because John Rabe didn't hesitate to act.”—Boston Globe

“The matter-of-fact way that he writes about those extraordinary events serves to underline the horrors experienced by all in Nanking…The book's strength is…the immediacy of the story being told. This is one worth telling.”—Booklist

“Fields’ even-toned, unvoiced performance provides the serious tone that this work deserves.”—KLIATT

“Rabe's dramatic and perhaps, to some, ambiguous tale shows how unremarkable people can sometimes do remarkable things, and how one evil can, sometimes, be used to fight another.”—Kirkus Reviews

“The diary format provides a forum for the extraordinary power and immediacy of John Rabe's words, including his gallows humor, placing the reader there in Nanking as the bombs explode and the Japanese soldiers begin their massacres.”—Amazon.com Review

Anna Fields has received five Audie nominations from the Audio Publishers Association and is proud to have won in 2004 for All Over Creation by Ruth Ozeki. She has also been honored by Audiofile magazine with more than a dozen Earphones Awards. She has voiced over 250 audiobooks.