A businessman whose son was killed:
In front of the First Middle School there were… many young boys the same age as my son… and what moved me most to pity was that there was one dead child lying there and another who seemed to be crawling over him in order to run away, both of them burned to blackness.
A thirty-year-old woman:
The corpse lying on its back on the road had been killed immediately… Its hand was lifted to the sky and the fingers were burning with blue flames. The fingers were shortened to one-third and distorted. A dark liquid was running to the ground along the hand.
A third-grade girl:
There was also a person who had a big splinter of wood stuck in his eye — I suppose maybe he couldn't see — and he was running around blindly.
A nineteen-year-old Ujina girl:
I saw for the first time a pile of burned bodies in a water tank by the entrance to the broadcasting station. Then I was suddenly frightened by a terrible sight on the street 40 to 50 meters from Shukkeien Garden. There was a charred body of a woman standing frozen in a running posture with one leg lifted and her baby tightly clutched in her arms. Who on earth could she be?
A first-grade girl:
A streetcar was all burned and just the skeleton of it was left, and inside it all the passengers were burned to a cinder. When I saw that I shuddered all over and started to tremble.
“The more you hear the sadder the stories get,” writes a girl who was five years old at Hiroshima. “Since just in my family there is so much sadness from it,” deduces a boy who was also five, “I wonder how much sadness other people must also be having.”
Eyes watched as well from the other side. A history professor Lifton interviewed:
I went to look for my family. Somehow I became a pitiless person, because if I had pity, I would not have been able to walk through the city, to walk over those dead bodies. The most impressive thing was the expression in people's eyes — bodies badly injured which had turned black — their eyes looking for someone to come and help them. They looked at me and knew that I was stronger than they… I saw disappointment in their eyes. They looked at me with great expectation, staring right through me. It was very hard to be stared at by those eyes.
Massive pain and suffering and horror everywhere the survivors turned was their common lot. A fifth-grade boy:
I and Mother crawled out from under the house. There we found a world such as I had never seen before, a world I'd never even heard of before. I saw human bodies in such a state that you couldn't tell whether they were humans or what… There is already a pile of bodies in the road and people are writhing in death agonies.
A junior-college girl:
At the base of the bridge, inside a big cistern that had been dug out there, was a mother weeping and holding above her head a naked baby that was burned bright red all over its body, and another mother was crying and sobbing as she gave her burned breast to her baby. In the cistern the students stood with only their heads above the water and their two hands, which they clasped as they imploringly cried and screamed, calling their parents. But every single person who passed was wounded, all of them, and there was no one to turn to for help.
A six-year-old boy:
Near the bridge there were a whole lot of dead people. There were some who were burned black and died, and there were others with huge burns who died with their skins bursting, and some others who died all stuck full of broken glass. There were all kinds. Sometimes there were ones who came to us asking for a drink of water. They were bleeding from their faces and from their mouths and they had glass sticking in their bodies. And the bridge itself was burning furiously… The details and the scenes were just like Hell.
Two first-grade girls:
We came out to the Miyuki Bridge. Both sides of the street were piled with burned and injured people. And when we looked back it was a sea of bright red flame.
The fire was spreading furiously from one place to the next and the sky was dark with smoke…
The [emergency aid station] was jammed with people who had terrible wounds, some whose whole body was one big burn… The flames were spreading in all directions and finally the whole city was one sea of fire and sparks came flying over our heads.
A fifth-grade boy:
I had the feeling that all the human beings on the face of the earth had been killed off, and only the five of us [i.e., his family] were left behind in an uncanny world of the dead… I saw several people plunging their heads into a half-broken water tank and drinking the water… When I was close enough to see inside the tank I said “Oh!” out loud and instinctively drew back. What I had seen in the tank were the faces of monsters reflected from the water dyed red with blood. They had clung to the side of the tank and plunged their heads in to drink and there in that position they had died. From their burned and tattered middy blouses I could tell that they were high school girls, but there was not a hair left on their heads; the broken skin of their burned faces was stained bright red with blood. I could hardly believe that these were human faces.
A physician sharing his horror with Hachiya:
Between the [heavily damaged] Red Cross Hospital and the center of the city I saw nothing that wasn't burned to a crisp. Streetcars were standing at Kawaya-cho and Kamiya-cho and inside were dozens of bodies, blackened beyond recognition. I saw fire reservoirs filled to the brim with dead people who looked as though they had been boiled alive. In one reservoir I saw a man, horribly burned, crouching beside another man who was dead. He was drinking blood-stained water out of the reservoir… In one reservoir there were so many dead people there wasn't enough room for them to fall over. They must have died sitting in the water.
A husband helping his wife escape the city:
While taking my severely-wounded wife out to the riverbank by the side of the hill of Nakahiro-machi, I was horrified, indeed, at the sight of a stark naked man standing in the rain with his eyeball in his palm. He looked to be in great pain but there was nothing that I could do for him.
