The Forgotten Holocaust by Sharon Noguchi San Jose Mercury News Editorial Board Member LEO CHEN was a college student on summer vacation in Chungking, China's wartime capital, when he responded to a civic plea. It was 1939. Japanese bombs had extinguished the ventilation to a cavernous bomb shelter, suffocating 20,000 people. The government sought volunteers to extract the bodies. "It was a nightmare.... Across the street from the entrance was a movie theater. They took out the seats and asked us to move in the bodies." Death had captured the victims' terrible desperation: corpses grimaced in pain, embraced each other, clutched their chests. Tongues were hanging out; fingers were clawing futilely for escape. It is a memory that causes Chen, now 75, to break out in tears. He apologizes for losing his composure. The awful war, overshadowed in the West by Europe's disintegration, lives vividly in the memories of Chinese emigres like Chen. A retired San Francisco State language professor and president of KCNS, Channel 38, Chen still sees his mission as teaching--and yet seldom speaks about the eight-year war. "The past is the past," he says. The Cupertino-based Alliance to Preserve the Truth of Sino-Japanese War hopes to record wartime memories, before they vanish with the aging survivors. Alarmed by Japanese efforts to rewrite history and whitewash atrocities, the alliance is raising funds to support two documentary films--anticipating renewed public interest as the 50th anniversary of the war's end approaches. It hopes to build a museum dedicated to the estimated 13 million who died in the Chinese holocaust, and to pressure Japan to apologize and to pay reparations. One sentiment heard at alliance gatherings-- 'We can forgive, but not forget"--is echoed by Wunian Chen, 80, of Sunnyvale (no relation to Leo Chen). Chen lived in occupied China, and was detained and interrogated by Japanese forces in Tientsin. His classmates and teachers perished in the Rape of Nanjing. The six-week sacking of Nanjing became a metaphor for Japan's brutal invasion of China. It was an orgy of rape, mutilation and torture. Soldiers held decapitation contests. Babies were bayoneted. About Nanjing, Chen says simply: "It was beyond description. It was inhuman." Japan also waged chemical and germ warfare, and conducted gruesome experiments on live subjects. Wherever the Japanese army invaded in China, it thoroughly looted, burned and killed. Today, underneath Japan's transformation, Wunian Chen sees in some of its people the same old philosophy and ambition and aggressiveness, particularly toward fellow Asians. Chinese people harbor fear and suspicion, he says, despite the cozy political and economic ties between Japan and both Taiwan and China. It may seem curious that the movement to preserve memory of this awful war is swelling in this country. But embracing history is not an unusual effort among immigrant groups. Perhaps it is because we fear that our acculturated children will grow up ignorant of their heritage. Perhaps it is because, once established here, people fleeing war and repression have the freedom to rescue the truth. Americans, short on historical memory, are sympathetic to quests for justice. Although a humbled nation of peace converts, postwar Japan has neglected to teach its children about its terrible legacy, one enabled by a racism that still taints Japanese attitudes toward fellow Asians. Instead, when viewing the war, all participants, soldier and civilian alike, are cast as victims. Without honest public accounting and discourse, Japanese people have never come to terms with their collective wartime experience. In the five years I worked in Japan, I heard many stories of wartime suffering, but none of the evil Japan inflicted on its neighbors. Such vagueness enables a warping of the truth, a distortion that assaults the memory of Japan's many victims. Film makers David Bolt and David Kaplan hope to confront the past in their proposed documentary, "The Forgotten Holocaust." Bolt believes that it is significant that Americans, not Japanese or Chinese, produce a film that can't be labeled propaganda. The eight-year war, he said, is "a play with no heroes. It is a very difficult story to tell." Leo Chen left China in 1948. After the communists took over, Chen quit as a secretary in the Chinese U.N. delegation, studied ceramics in New York, and later became a Mandarin instructor at the Army Language School (now the Defense Language Institute) in Monterey. After he settled in California, "I started to get the hatred out of my system." Perhaps it is because he could talk about his experiences of war to his soldier-students at the school. Perhaps because he had a Japanese-American boss who was a decent person. Perhaps because he believes in a Chinese saying, "Repay evil with virtue." So now, for Chen, the war stays put in the past. It is not uncommon to find in older generations the determination to spare their children not only suffering, but also the painful stories of hardship. It's all part of the story of Americanization: promoting yet lamenting the here-and-now perspective of today's children. Chen has spoken to his three sons about his wartime experience, but not to their children. Some of his grandchildren are part Japanese-American. He's afraid that he might speak too strongly, that they might misunderstand.