>>17479821
4 hrs ago
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/nanjing-massacre-tiktok-history-1234585609/
Evan Kail collects rare items and historical memorabilia and shares his finds on social media. PAWN.MAN/TIKTOK; BETTMANN ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
THE THUMBNAIL CAPTION for Evan Kail’s latest TikTok video has three words: “Please Help Me.”
While his moniker on social media is Pawn Man, the collector actually runs a gold and silver bullion business. It’s on the side that he collects rare items and historical memorabilia, sharing the most interesting finds with his 100,000 followers, a count that’s now grown to half a million. After Kail found a book he believed contained never-before-seen photos of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, he reached out to his followers for help.
For the first 20 pages, the photos appear to be from a U.S Navy service member sent to China during the Allied Nation’s proxy war in Southeast Asia around 1938. But when Kail flipped the next page, instead of finding more photos of monuments and military maneuvers, he found at least 20 pages of pure chaos.
“When I got that book… and I opened it and I got beyond that page, I screamed,” he said in a TikTok video that now has been liked over 1.9 million times and has over 40,000 comments and shares. “Somehow that guy who took those photos was present for the Rape of Nanjing. And he took about 30 photographs that are unknown to history that are worse than anything I’ve ever seen on the internet. “
The disturbing black and white photos show piles of bodies, beheadings, and other tortures captured in the book’s photographs and annotated, all of which were so graphic Kail could not post them on TikTok without risking his account getting banned. He did end up posting several on Twitter — along with his reasoning: he was sharing the video to get the attention of the research community.
“How he took these photos and got away and nobody did anything,” he says in his video. “The simple fact is: a museum needs to take that.”
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