NANJING, July 22 (Xinhua) -- A pair of sisters, both in their 90s, from central China's Hunan Province, have come forward and spoke out their experiences as comfort women and their sufferings at the hand of Japanese soldiers during WWII.
According to The Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders on Sunday, their staff came across the sisters when visiting Yueyang city in Hunan.
The elder sister Peng Renshou, 94, told them she was captured and taken to a comfort station in the autumn of 1939 when she was only 14. After being raped repeatedly, a Japanese soldier cut open her belly. She survived but was unable to have children.
The other sister, Peng Zhuying, 90, said she lost her eyesight as a victim of Japanese germ warfare at the age of nine in 1938. She was then abducted to become a comfort woman and was abused regularly. She is also unable to have children.
Some 400,000 women across Asia were forced to become sex slaves for the Japanese army during WWII. Nearly half of them were Chinese, according to the Research Center for Comfort Women.
Su Zhiliang, an expert on the studies of comfort women issues, said there were only 14 "comfort women" still alive on Chinese mainland before the two sisters came forward.
Memorial hall staff said both sisters are in good health but had kept the nightmare to themselves for too long. "When they finally found the courage to speak of their past, the elder sister couldn't help sobbing the whole time."
