Hiroshima [With Photos of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermath]

by John Hersey

A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one street-car instead of the next that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time none of them knew anything.

(Almost no one in Hiroshima recalls hearing any noise of the bomb. But a fisherman in his sampan on the Inland Sea near Tsuzu, the man with whom Mr. Tanimoto's mother-in- law and sister-in-law were living, saw the flash and heard a tremendous explosion; he was nearly twenty miles from Hiroshima, but the thunder was greater than when the B-29s hit Iwakuni, only five miles away.)

the soldiers were coming out of the hole, where they should have been safe, and blood was running from their heads, chests and backs. They were silent and dazed.

according to Japanese custom, when a person falls sick and goes to a hospital, one or more members of his family go and live there with him, to cook for him, bathe, massage, and read to him, and to offer incessant familial sympathy, without which a Japanese patient would be miserable indeed.

He ducked down on one knee and said to himself, as only a Japanese would, "Sasaki, gambare! Be brave

By this solicitous behavior, Mr. Tanimoto at once got rid of his terror.

white repelled the heat from the bomb and dark clothes absorbed it and conducted it to the skin),

survivors that day assisted only their relatives or immediate neighbors, for they could not comprehend or tolerate a wider circle of misery.

he was just part of the general blur of misery through which they moved.

there were so many people shouting for help that they could not hear him separately.

"It's funny, but things don't matter any more. Yesterday, my shoes were my most important possessions. To-day, I don't care. One pair is enough."

I started to bring my books along, and then I thought, 'This is no time for books.'

even if they had known the truth, most of them were too busy or too weary or too badly hurt to care that they were the objects of the first great experiment in the use of atomic power, which (as the voices on the short wave shouted) no country except the United States, with its industrial know-how, its willingness to throw two billion gold dollars into an important wartime gamble, could possibly have developed.

Disposal of the dead, by decent cremation and enshrinement, is a greater moral responsibility to the Japanese than adequate care of the living.

"Yes, people of Hiroshima died manly in the atomic bombing, believing that it was for Emperor's sake."