Nanjing museum hunts pawnbroker over 'unseen' massacre photos
Authorities from the Nanjing Massacre memorial are trying to contact a pawnbroker in the United States who claimed to have received on consignment an old book of photos from World War II that included more than 30 rare color prints depicting Japanese atrocities in Nanjing.
The broker, Evan Kail, also known by @Pawn.Man on social media, owns a gold and silver business in Minneapolis, Minnesota, according to his profile.
He described the photos in a recent TikTok video as "the most disturbing thing" he had ever seen in his career and "desperately" asked netizens to help him get in touch with the proper channels.
Images of some of the black and white photos included in the book.
Authorities in Nanjing, capital of east China's Jiangsu Province, told the Global Times on Thursday they had seen the information posted by Kail and tried to contact him through multiple channels, including his social media. So far, they haven't been able to reach him.
The museum has strict procedures for the collection of cultural relics, with professional appraisal as an important step. There is an annual collection and donation of relics.
Its top priority now is making contact with Kail to arrange verification so a decision can be made about adding the photo album to the collection.
According to his video, the book, handed down from a family, recorded life in China and southeast Asia around 1937. As some of the pages showed, the photographer was present at Nanjing Massacre activity and took photos so far "unknown to history." Kail continued to say those photos were "worse than anything I've seen in the Internet." Also, they are "in color."
Kail claims to have majored in Japanese studies in college and said the photos recorded what he read about in books but he didn't realize anybody had ever documented it in photos.
He believed he should turn the book over to a museum instead of selling it to a private collector. He also didn't want to return the book to its original owner as the content needed to "be preserved and studied and known to everyone."
He noted, "History is doomed to repeat itself and the only thing that we can do is to learn from our mistakes by preserving the past and studying and talking about it."
The Nanjing Massacre took place when Japanese troops captured the then Chinese capital on December 13, 1937. Over a period of six weeks, they killed approximately 300,000 Chinese civilians and unarmed soldiers in one of the most barbaric episodes of World War II.
The Chinese government has preserved survivors' testimonies, recorded in both written documents and video footage. These records of the massacre were listed by UNESCO on the Memory of the World Register in 2015.
