A six-year-old boy pushes his two baby brothers in a wooden cart looking for food and water. Now the city has seven thousand A-bomb orphans.
Of the city’s forty-five hospitals and clinics, only three can still be used. Of the two hundred or so doctors in the city, only about a tenth remain.
Once a proud educational center, Hiroshima’s stocks of books, documents, journals and records have been turned into ash as if there’s been a gigantic Nazi bonfire of all literature. The libraries, too, are gone.
The shock of the bomb stopped most clocks. Communications are down – both radio and telephone. Everything seems suspended, a world of the dead, dying and barely living. A survivor struggles to crawl out of a mass grave into which he was tossed after being mistaken for a dead person.
A pitch-black, swollen figure, with a face hardly recognizable as human, has walked three miles away from the atomic cloud. It shudders, then it collapses.
Somehow, all the corpses look diminutive. When they were roasted, they shrank in size.
A horse lies crushed under a collapsed wagon.
A small group of survivors trek down an empty railway line.
A man lies on his back under a dripping tap, the drops reviving him and cleaning some of his blood away.
There’s little food anywhere, just some scraps and some rice. A team of soldiers has made some rice balls to give to people.
Though the people of Hiroshima came into the world at different times, tens of thousands now share the same day of death.
The B-29 bomber has escaped through the clouds. When the plane is 363 miles away, its crewmen finally lose sight of the mushroom cloud.
Many bomb victims don’t know it yet but they have disease “x”, not yet called by its name: atomic bomb sickness. Purple marks will soon break out over their skin to indicate a strange kind of poisoning. It can bring symptoms like vomiting, bleeding, diarrhea and retinal hemorrhages, inflamed throat and mouth, gum bleeds, hair loss, ulcerations of genitalia and of the bowels, and fever. The radiation will also cause secondary infections. At its most severe, it’ll destroy DNA molecules in the victim’s cells. Their processes of life and organs will start to shut down. The loss of hair will come to be viewed as a kind of “halo of death” over a person.
Fifteen percent of the eventual total of Hiroshima’s casualties will die from this radiation sickness. Deaths will begin within a week after exposure and will reach a peak in a month’s time.
A father cremates his child, weeping. A middle-aged man, his face blue and his eyes red, walks around, some of his intestines hanging out of his belly after the super high pressure of the explosion ruptured his stomach.
“Please let me die!” pleads one old woman, with a bald and scorched head, at a makeshift first-aid station. “Let me go to Buddha.”
Further up, a man has removed the saddle and reins from his stricken horse, and lies against the animal, trying to comfort his beloved creature. Birds have deserted the atomized city.
Alongside the bare trees, telephone wires hanging from broken and bent poles, sag over the streets which are covered in eaves tiles, wrecked furniture, glass fragments and rubbish. Trucks loaded with the dead speed towards the funeral pyres.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
IN A RUINED TEMPLE, dead bodies are lined across the floor, covered with straw mats. A father has tied his dead son to the rear carrier rack of his bicycle and is taking him to a funeral pyre.
Another man is escorting his wife, whose eyelids have been so damaged they can no longer close, to a relief station. She’s badly cut from glass fragments. She cannot smell, taste, touch or hear. It would have been better had she died. She was too close to the epicenter. Her husband clings to her because she’s all he has left in the world.
The Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, with its distinctive domed tower, has imploded. Overlooking the river next to the Aioi Bridge, it resembles a medieval ruin, the only structure left standing near the bomb’s hypocenter. Even though everyone inside the building was killed in an instant, the tower still stands, empty but proud among the naked tree trunks, a guardian of the past which the invaders could not quite obliterate.
A government employee who escaped from a burning streetcar on the outskirts of the city immediately made his way, after the atomic explosion, towards the Telephone Bureau. He was on a mission to find the Emperor’s portrait which was displayed there. It was this man’s job to protect the painting in any emergency.
The sacred picture was kept behind an iron door. It was still intact when he got there. He smiled broadly when he saw it. After discussions with some officials, it was decided to take the portrait to the remains of the Hiroshima Castle. Their reasoning was that the fires and smoke had died down at the Castle compared to other parts of the city.
However, when the entourage carrying the picture got there, a sentry said there was too much danger of fire damage. The officials changed their plans and took their valuable work of art down to the river with the intention of transporting it by boat to a place of safety. Throughout their journey, many survivors saluted, bowed or prayed in the presence of the Emperor’s picture. Just seeing it gave them some hope.
People are seeking out fire cisterns. Sometimes, though, the water has blood in it, as well as ash and dirt. They still drink it and splash it over their bodies. They’ll use it to cleanse their wounds.
Above, the bomb cloud is slowly, finally, running out of energy and colour.
A naked, deranged young woman wanders around mumbling and calling out. A baby on its mother’s chest waits for her to open her eyes or to make some movement, any movement of flickering life.
Two little girls fan their dying mother on a mat in a hall.
A relief post has been set up in the army barracks on Ninoshima island, about four kilometers offshore. This area was largely unaffected by the bomb. Tin sheets have been laid down for the rows of corpses brought there. A pile of cadavers is stuffed with some firewood and straw, doused with coal tar and the pile is lit – more black smoke, more humanity turned into specks of charcoal. Sometimes, the piles are stacked high in blocks of about fifty bodies.
Then black rain begins to fall. The droplets are laced with radioactive soot and dust. They cover survivors and surfaces in a black slime, like petroleum. Air currents have carried the residual radioactivity for several miles, spreading contamination. Fear as to why the sky was pouring out what looked and smelled like diluted gasoline was uncanny. But those who think they’re dying of thirst open up their mouths to catch the rain anyway. The air is dripping with black poison.
Some victims, unable to get to their feet, are begging. But passersby have nothing left to give them.
One beautiful girl was burnt across much of her body but her lovely face has been spared. She’s filthy. Her hair is tousled and dusty. She’s lying in a pool of pus, a mixture of body juices and white blood cells, which had oozed from several third-degree burns. Yet when she smiled to a passer-by who came over to help her, her face still looked radiant, her teeth white, her eyes sparkling with gratitude. The stranger gave her water and smeared what little ointment he had in his possession on the worst of her wounds.
Someone who had been on his way to Hiroshima earlier this morning had been stung by a bee, which had delayed his journey, thus saving his life.
In the evening, the sky above the dark ground seems to turn red as if filled with blood of all those who died on this day. The ground is still grimy with the black drizzle.
Kilometers away, from the summit of Hijiyama Hill, survivors watch the last fires burn out over the atomic bomb field.