Hiroshima summary

1.

It was exactly 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, and the chance movements of six Hiroshima residents – which way they were walking, where they were sitting, the precise way they were leaning over in their chair – happened to mean they survived.

When the atomic bomb dropped, the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto was helping a friend move his belongings to the edge of the city in case an air raid came. It was a still, quiet morning.

A huge flash of light appeared, and the two men ducked for cover. Mr. Tanimoto dove between some rocks. Like others, he heard no noise.

For Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a war widow, the flash was an intense white. She’d followed official advice to evacuate the city center, and was on the outskirts with her three young children, watching a neighbor reluctantly tear his house down – a measure taken to prevent the spread of fire, in case of an attack.

The intense white blast hurled her across the room. She was buried in debris, but unhurt. She heard a cry, “Mother!” How lucky they were: all three children survived and she was able to pull them free.

Dr. Masakazu Fujii, a jovial lover of middle-aged prosperity, was sitting on the porch in his underwear, reading the newspaper. At 8:15, before he knew it, he found himself suspended in the river, trapped fortuitously between two timbers – parts of the now submerged private hospital in which he’d been living.

Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German Jesuit, was in the mission house, also reading in his underwear. The next thing he remembered, he was wandering around the vegetable garden, surveying a scene of utter devastation.

The only unhurt doctor at the Red Cross Hospital, the young Terufumi Sasaki, had come into work earlier than usual as he hadn’t slept well. He was walking down a corridor holding a blood specimen when the flash came. He ducked down, saying to himself, “Be brave!” His glasses and slippers flew off and the blood smashed on a wall.

Miss Toshinki Sasaki, a clerk at a tin works – not a relation of the doctor’s despite their shared surname – was at her desk in a room lined with books. She was turning her head away from a window when the entire building collapsed around her, trapping her under a mound of books and bookcases. Her leg hurt horribly.

But, by chance, she was alive.