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Children of the A-bomb: Testament of the boys and girls of Hiroshima

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"Why wasn't even a mamma or a daddy left for me ?" - Keiko Sasaki, 6 years old in 1945.

"Children of the A-Bomb" is a collection of 67 testimonies of Hiroshima survivors culled from a total of more than two thousand, detailing the experiences of these innocent victims on August 6th, 1945, as painfully remembered six years later, on what in the Japanese way of counting was the seventh anniversary of the event.

The book is divided into four sections, according to the grade of the writers in 1961 : from grammar to junior, senior and high school, including three undergraduate college students. The length of the testimonies varies from one to ten pages, the longer ones of course being concentrated in the latter half of the book. And though much of the material focuses on the immediate aftermath of the bombing, some of the writers also cover the days and sometimes weeks that followed, insofar as they were affected by the bomb, or perpetuated the victims' misery with their litany of typhoons, starvation, and radiation sickness and death.

As one reads statement after gruelling statement, one starts noticing constants. It was 8:15, so many were at their breakfasts, putting rice into their mouths. Sad things sometimes do happen when little children put rice into their mouths. Others were already at work, often on the Clearance Project to make Hiroshima ready for the incendiary bombing that was bound to occur some day, as the city had remained untouched by the aerial waves of American fury.

Virtually all saw the flash, which one hibakusha, Hashizume Bun, whom I was recently privileged to listen to, described as being "like the sun falling down." For most it seems to have appeared yellow, sometimes greenish-white. And then a period of unconsciousness, from which they woke up in an alternate universe. Some had been blown by the blast more than a hundred yards away from their original position. Many were covered in debris, under which they were soon to burn alive. Others had been standing by windows and were lacerated by dozens of glass shards still planted in their flesh.

Those who were not stuck under tons of rubble then got moving, some walking zombie-like so that the skin of their arms dangling from their nails would not touch the ground, some barely seeing anything through their bloated eyelids and the darkness that followed the flash. But move they must, for a tide of fire was swallowing up the flattened Japanese houses and soon consummated whoever stood still.

The world around you is peopled with monsters, burned over one half of their bodies, their heads swollen to twice their normal size, blood seeping from their eyeballs, entrails hanging out, skin burned away, covered in the bright red of blood. And then you too realize that this is exactly what you look like.

Looking for relatives in the devastation, many will merely salvage a few bones, probable remnants of the family they will never see again. The luckiest manage to find a sister or a brother, a mother or a father, unrecognizable, though these too often will not survive "the poison." Their hair will fall off, brown spots will appear all over their bodies, and they will just die, vomiting blood, vomiting yellow.

Most of them, of course, will be psychologically, if not physically scarred for life. Even today, six years later, some can only speak of themselves, both before and after the bomb, in the third person. One girl, who was five years old on that fateful 6th of August, reports : "I had a terrible lonely feeling that everybody in the world was dead and only we were still alive. Ever since that time I haven't liked to go outside." Another survivor dare not look at the sky again because that is where evil comes from.

As a companion to this invaluable book, I also recommend Keiji Nakazawa's ten-volume manga, "Gen of Hiroshima", written by another survivor ; and, for the moral case against the bomb, John Finnis, Joseph Boyle and Germain Grisez's "Nuclear Deterrence : Morality and Realism".

I am 56. I found this book on our school library shelf when I was 12. When I finished reading it I felt as bereft as the children whose stories I had read. When I think of it now, I feel the same way. These children's stories expanded my awareness of what it means to be human, to suffer and to cause suffering. Every citizen of a country with military power should have to read this book, preferably as a child or teenager when simple truths (moral truths) can still be internalized. No book has had a greater impact on me.

I am now 55 years old. I read this book as a young child - maybe 9 or 10 years old. To this day, I remember, vividly, the story of each child set forth in this remarkable work. The imagery is visceral. You will never forget.