I would have remained silent even now if it had not been for the fact that I see another kind of one-sidedness being introduced into the thinking of our time, as dangerous as the other one-sidedness that I feared in ourselves at the end of the war. This one-sidedness results from the facts that more and more people see the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki out of context. They tend to see it increasingly as an act of history in which we alone were the villains. I have been amazed to observe how in some extraordinary way my own Japanese friends do not seem to feel that they had done anything themselves to provoke us into inflicting Hiroshima and Nagasaki on them and how strangely incurious they are about their own part in the war. I felt that it was extremely important for them as well as for us to maintain a view of this cataclysmic event as steady as it was whole. I had a feeling almost as if I had been placed in a special position by life to contribute in a small way to what should be the final wholeness of the concept of the history of that moment. Perhaps no particular event in history is fully accounted for until it has been seen also from the point of view of the persons who had a special relationship with it. It is precisely because I am convinced that the thousands of people who were in prison with me, and I in particular, had a special relationship with this terrible moment in time that I felt I had a duty to put my share of it on record.
This sense of duty has become more acute as the time left for me to do so has become less. There was, too, the obvious danger that something essential of the experience would be forgotten. The physical facts and the statistics of what happened to us, were perhaps not imperilled. But what seemed to me to be increasingly in danger were the great imponderables of those years that conceived our experience, gave it its own unique life and clothed the bare bones of facts and statistics of our existence with something precious and irrevocable out of our perishable flesh and blood.
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Published by Vintage 2002
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Copyright © Laurens van der Post 1970
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First published in Great Britain by The Hogarth Press 1970
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Table of Contents
Prologue
Cover
About the Author
Also by Laurens Van Der Post
Dedication
Title Page
Illustrations
Story
‘A Remarkable Thought’
Postscript
Copyright