The Story of Mitsou Tomosawa

 At 8:15, one August morning  50 years ago, the Doomsday Clock struck midnight. The United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. The bomb killed more than 75,000 and injured nearly 100,000 of the 245,000 residents. The city was destroyed.

There was a great flash of light, as if millions of flashbulbs were ignited at the same time. It was so bright that we couldn’t see anything. And instinctively, I started to run toward the air raid shelter.

Seconds after the bright light, there was a tremendous flash and explosion, and after that I didn’t know what happened …

All through that day, morning to evening, people came walking, and all these people, most of them were naked, some of them you couldn’t even recognize whether they were a man or  a woman; practically all of them were walking with their arms extended, their hands hanging down, and their knees slightly bent, almost on tiptoes. Large blisters were on their bodies, with some fluid moving in the blisters. They were staring ahead.

And during the night we couldn’t sleep because of the moaning and crying of these victims. These people crying for their mothers, for water; and that evening I climbed up a chimney at a factory near our home. And I looked toward the city, and the city was burning.

The next morning I went up again, and then I saw that the city was no more  …

I also noted that during the day when I went to the city that I came across a streetcar and saw people sitting and standing in the streetcar, and I felt strange that people would be resting in a streetcar at a time like this. As I came by, I realized that all these people were dead. They were burned beyond recognition. They were standing up with their hands on the crossbar. And there were people sticking their heads in the water tanks that were prepare in case of air raid fires. They were dead with their heads in those water tanks.
People were lined up – many, many hundreds or thousands were lined up on the river bank that ran through Hiroshima, and they were dead. Hundreds of bodies were under the bridges, piled up. And I also noted that on the bridge that I always walked over to my school there were footprints of people who were probably standing at that time.
During the days and weeks that followed, I saw many people in our neighborhood with burns. There was very little medication, and even at the army hospital there were few doctors and nurses available. There were very few medicines. So the only thing they could use was the type of medicine like Mercurochrome or some sort of oil or ointment ot put on their bodies. And soon their burns became infested with maggots; you could see the maggots crawling all over their bodies.

I can still remember the peculiar odor that these people had. I shall never forget the odor …

I have seen people who didn’t have their bodies. They were wearing helmet, no bodies, just their skull. And hundreds of thousands of people continued to flow towards the section of the city that I was leaving, because there was a post there, and they evacuated there.

And [as for] people who died at the hospital, at their home, there were no facilities to cremate them or bury them, so they were just piled up in a huge pile of bodies, and burned close by.

And I still remember the looks in my friends’ faces that had lost their parents and brothers and sisters. They just didn’t know what happened. They knew it was some kind of a bomb. They didn’t know what kind of bomb it was. And we really realized that, and we thought that Hiroshima would never be rebuilt, and it looked just like hell, hell on this earth; the city just turned into a desert of death.

(Mitsou Tomosawa, Hiroshima survivor, translated from Japanese, Common Cause Magazine)