stand on end just to remember. This is the way war really looks.
But skin peeled by a flash of light and a gust of air was only a novelty among the miseries of that day, something unusual the survivors could remember to remember. The common lot was random, indiscriminate and universal violence inflicting terrible pain, the physics of hydraulics and leverage and heat run riot. A junior-college girl:
Screaming children who have lost sight of their mothers; voices of mothers searching for their little ones; people who can no longer bear the heat, cooling their bodies in cisterns; every one among the fleeing people is dyed red with blood.
The thermal flash and the blast started fires and very quickly the fires became a firestorm from which those who could ambulate ran away and those who sustained fractures or were pinned under houses could not; two months later Liebow's group found the incidence of fractures among Hiroshima survivors to be less than 4.5 percent. “It was not that injuries were few,” the American physicians note; “rather, almost none who had lost the capacity to move escaped the flames.” A five-year-old girl:
The whole city… was burning. Black smoke was billowing up and we could hear the sound of big things exploding… Those dreadful streets. The fires were burning. There was a strange smell all over. Blue-green balls of fire were drifting around. I had a terrible lonely feeling that everybody else in the world was dead and only we were still alive.
Another girl the same age:
I really have to shudder when I think of that atom bomb which licked away the city of Hiroshima in one or two minutes on the 6th of August, 1945…
We were running for our lives. On the way we saw a soldier floating in the river with his stomach all swollen. In desperation he must have jumped into the river to escape from the sea of fire. A little farther on dead people were lined up in a long row. Al little farther on there was a woman lying with a big log fallen across her legs so that she couldn't get away.
When Father saw that he shouted, “Please come and help!”
But not a single person came to help. They were all too intent on saving themselves.
Finally Father lost his patience, and shouting, “Are you people Japanese or not?” he took a rusty saw and cut off her leg and rescued her.
A little farther on we saw a man who had been burned black as he was walking.
A first-grade girl whose mother was pinned under the wreckage of their house:
I was determined not to escape without my mother. But the flames were steadily spreading and my clothes were already on fire and I couldn't stand it any longer. So screaming, “Mommy, Mommy!” I ran wildly into the middle of the flames. No matter how far I went it was a sea of fire all around and there was no way to escape. So beside myself I jumped into our [civil defense] water tank. The sparks were falling everywhere so I put a piece of tin over my head to keep out the fire. The water in the tank was hot like a bath. Beside me there were four or five other people who were all calling someone's name. While I was in the water tank everything became like a dream and sometime or other I became unconscious… Five days after that [I learned that] Mother had finally died just as I had left her.
Similarly a woman who was thirteen at the time who was still haunted by guilt when Lifton interviewed her two decades later:
I left my mother there and went off… I was later told by a neighbor that my mother had been found dead, face down in a water tank… very close to the spot where I left her… If I had been a little older or stronger I could have rescued her… Even now I still hear my mother's voice calling me to help her.
“Beneath the wreckage of the houses along the way,” recounts the Jesuit priest, “many have been trapped and they scream to be rescued from the oncoming flames.”
“I was completely amazed,” a third-grade boy remembers of the destruction:
While I had been thinking it was only my house that had fallen down, I found that every house in the neighborhood was either completely or half-collapsed. The sky was like twilight. Pieces of paper and cloth were caught on the electric wires… On that street crowds were fleeing toward the west. Among them were many people whose hair was burned, whose clothes were torn and who had burns and injuries… Along the way the road was full to overflowing with victims, some with great wounds, some burned, and some who had lost the strength to move farther… While we were going along the embankment, a muddy rain that was dark and chilly began to fall. Around the houses I noticed automobiles and footballs, and all sorts of household stuff that had been tossed out, but there was no one who stopped to pick up a thing.
But against the background of horror the eye of the survivor persisted in isolating the exceptional. A thirty- five-year-old man:
A woman with her jaw missing and her tongue hanging out of her mouth was wandering around the area of Shinsho-machi in the heavy, black rain. She was heading toward the north crying for help.
A four-year-old boy:
There were a lot of people who were burned to death and among them were some who were burned to a cinder while they were standing up.
A sixth-grade boy:
Nearby, as if he were guarding these people, a policeman was standing, all covered with burns and stark naked except for some scraps of his trousers.
A seventeen-year-old girl:
I walked past Hiroshima Station… and saw people with their bowels and brains coming out… I saw an old lady carrying a suckling infant in her arms… I saw many children… with dead mothers… I just cannot put into words the horror I felt.
At Aioi Bridge:
I was walking among dead people… It was like hell. The sight of a living horse burning was very striking.
A schoolgirl saw “a man without feet, walking on his ankles.” A woman remembers:
A man with his eyes sticking out about two inches called me by name and I felt sick… People's bodies were tremendously swollen — you can't imagine how big a human body can swell up.
