Thursday, August 6, 2009

Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 6 & 9, 1945)

Updated

"I can't describe what I witnessed. I don't have the words. It's like when you burn a fish on the grill. That's what they looked like," a survivor recalls. One of the burned fish, a woman now reconstructed by plastic surgery, describes her father peeling her charred face away from her head with scissors. Another recalls looking at a woman whose body had been burned beyond recognition and realizing from the gold tooth that it was her mother. As she and her sister reached out, their mother crumbled to ashes before their eyes. "This happened 60 years ago, but I'll never forget it," she says quietly.

(from "Still Surviving Hiroshima," Hugh Gusterson, 1 August 2007, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Update: Read Greg Mitchell's article on how the press reported the story: "The Day After Hiroshima: How the Press Reported the News -- And the 'Half-Truths' That Emerged," in Editor and Publisher, 7 August, 2009.

1 comment:

Chris said...

This description is almost too much to bear.

I'm reminded of a recent movie that I'll recommend to you, mostly so we might criticize it-----KNOWING, with Nicholas Cage.