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"A dragonfly flitted in
front of me and stopped on a fence. I stood up, took my cap in my hands, and was
about to catch the dragonfly when . . . . when there was a flash of white
light in the blue sky above Hiroshima. This was at 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945.
Then followed a new kind of thunder and a new kind of hellfire. A minute later
those who were still alive, those whose flesh was not falling off their bodies,
blinked into a changed world, like a traveler waking and finding himself on a
different planet. Through the glare of flames and the darkness of smoke, they
saw that their city had vanished and been replaced by a blackened desert, empty
of everything except fire, charcoal, corpses and the concrete skeletons of
buildings".
Melted Sake Bottles
Melted image of the
Buddha
Voice of Hibakusha
Eye-witness accounts of the bombing of Hiroshima,
from the video HIROSHIMA WITNESS produced by Hiroshima Peace Cultural Center and
NHK
Introduction
The first atomic bomb actually used in
war time was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945 killing between 130,000
and 150,000 people by the end of that year. Those who survived the bombing are
rapidly aging now after struggling for many years. The Hiroshima Peace and
Culture Foundation has decided to newly videotape the testimonies of 100 A-bomb
victims to commemorate the International Year of Peace 1986 to record the
precious experiences of these survivors to be handed down to the future
generations.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons
License.
