This is something the Austrian poet wrote from his love of life, his love of warmth and of light, being used as an adornment for horror. That plaque must have been read by countless eyes as the cadavers were being cast into the ovens, and regardless of who read it—Germans, Jews, homosexuals, or whoever else—the context allows only a single interpretation: the first-person narrator of the verse is begging for cremation. So ironically the last thing left to be taken from the prisoners about to be incinerated was removed: not their voices in life but their voices in death, foisting upon them the desire to be cremated beside the anonymous multitude. Placing these verses above the horror of the ovens was an act of perversion, as if trying to make it seem as though not only did the Jews accept their death, unafraid, but that they were asking for it, even offered justification for it. But as fate would have it, the unsought precedence of this despairing anonymous multitude unwittingly overshadowed another disgrace: the parallel atrocities committed during the Asian holocaust.
ON AUGUST 31, 1946, a little over a year after the first atomic bomb was dropped on my city, The New Yorker published a piece by John Hersey in which he presented the stories of six survivors about what the bomb had done to the city and to the flesh of its citizens. I was too young at that point and hardly knew English yet, so it wasn’t until several years later—maybe ten, give or take a few—that I could actually read the text. When I finally did read it, I became obsessed with victims’ testimonies, whether anonymous accounts or the ones recorded in documentaries. That’s how I first realized that the recurring image I frequently went back to, of unrecognizable lumps of flesh forced to say their name in order to be identified, wasn’t something I had made up on my own. The sharpest, most powerful images, those that I thought were strictly my own, in fact appeared again and again in other people’s testimonies. I tried to explain it in the most logical terms possible. I thought perhaps the survivors were led to share the most effective expressions precisely because of how indescribable it all was, so in this way they forged a new syntax for horror: a brand-new language that was—unlike the ones passed down over the generations from parents to children—learned in one fell swoop and passed instead from one eyewitness to another. In this language, then, “a lump whose head is swollen to three times its size” can be expressed only as “a lump whose head is swollen to three times its size.” There are no equivalent expressions. It’s a language without synonyms.
I was able to glean information from the material published in North American reports about what happened on the plane that dropped the bomb while I was waiting at my desk for the teacher, and in the same way I now hoped to use the other testimonies to help fill in that empty space before I opened my eyes in the hospital. I needed to know what had been going on while I was unconscious. By gathering testimony of the fact that life had continued to move forward, I might recover the days I had spent unconscious—which is to say, dead. All the testimonies seemed to be speaking for me. Once I heard a woman describe how the wounded would wander among the dead asking their forgiveness. That’s how I was brought up, feeling ashamed for having survived. The printing presses and newspapers removed the ideograms for atomic bomb and radioactivity, and the government avoided the use of the word survivor, it said, as a show of respect for the more than two hundred thousand fatalities. In Hersey’s text I read that hibakusha means “explosion-affected persons.” That’s exactly what it meant, a term that skirted not only the pain but also the miracle of having survived. A three-letter word could have made all the difference: “persons affected by the explosion,” not “persons affected by an explosion,” as if it were any old garden-variety bang, like the tempura batter that splatters when the oil’s too hot, or a birthday-party firecracker that explodes in a careless hand. That bomb was no accident. Hiroshima was THE explosion. In my head I conjured up some words that included the definite article the, which could better define what others call hibakusha. I decided that if forced to choose a name for us all, I would prefer “we who carry the bomb inside,” because the morning that a B-29 bomber dropped Little Boy over Hiroshima was only the beginning of the detonation. Ninety percent of the wounds the survivors suffered would come in doses of radiation, minute by minute, month by month, year by year, impregnating us with this evil that could be aborted only if we obliviate ourselves with it. I imagined a backward big bang, where every hour on the hour another little piece of the universe shrunk (shrinks?) into my body, so that on any given day, who knows when, it will finally rupture once and for all.
The Japanese never respected the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war signed on July 27, 1929. It’s not so unusual as history would like us to believe. It’s true that for the Japanese, who exalt suicide over surrender, the value of a prisoner who would want to remain alive was below that of a street rat. But the states that actually respected the convention, despite having signed it, were the exception. Surely you must be perfectly aware of that already. I didn’t yet know when Jim explained the conditions he endured as a prisoner of war that destiny would tug me along by way of a string of fake international organizations to reach the crucial element for concluding this story. As the nursery rhyme goes, these treaties are like a spider’s web on which an elephant balances precariously, and when that elephant sees how it holds up, he asks another elephant to join him until finally the web breaks for the weight of so many overfed, irresponsible elephants/states.
Before arriving in Manila to be boarded on the Oryoku Maru, Jim had already been the victim of noncompliance with the Geneva Convention. He was one of the Allied prisoners of war the Japanese used to build the Burma Railway, which like the Oryoku Maru boasted a well-earned moniker: Death Railway. On June 22, 1942, construction was begun with slave labor: some 190,000 Asian workers and 55,000 Allied POWs. The British had already contemplated a Thailand–Burma railway when they governed Burma, but the terrain was so hard going that it had never gotten under way. When the Japanese invaded Burma in 1942, they decided to tackle this project to strengthen their presence there, meaning they had to secure the supply of matériel, which by sea was extremely dangerous, since it exposed them to Allied submarine attacks. On the other hand, the sheer numbers of Chinese and Allied POWs obliged them to find new ways to keep them under control, and what better solution than to use them as slave labor in this colossal undertaking.