August 6th 2020
"Duck and Cover"
We were told to get down under our desks and cover our heads with our arms. My classroom had a wall of windows and my desk was near them. Why we were having an atomic bomb drill, I don't recall. It was grade school.
"If I'm going to die, please send me home".
Have you noticed that some memory details get melded together? I mention it because these memories float within shifting landscapes of place and time.
1955
I was eight when I saw this film of the H-bomb test in Nevada; there was a set; homes in the desert, with 'dummy' family (mother, father, sister brother) in residence and there were also live pigs in a pen. When the blast went off, everything was blown away.
In Hiroshima, real bodies evaporated,
leaving only shadows on the ground.
I was only two when it happened, but it was strongly present in my childhood and throughout my adolescence - a significant turning point; the moment when I understood 'the grownups' were crazy.
1945
August 6th at 8:16 in the morning, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The American B-29 bomber Enola Gay released the bomb, which was nicknamed “Little Boy”. Sixty two thousand buildings were destroyed by the blast, which was equivalent to more than 12,000 tons of TNT. Eighty thousand people were killed on impact, and 35,000 died over the next week of their injuries or radiation poisoning. Sixty thousand more died over the next year. The bomb exploded over a hospital, and 90 percent of the city’s doctors were killed in the blast. It was the beginning of the end of World War II; Germany had already surrendered and Japan would follow after the U.S. dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki three days later. A year later, The New Yorker devoted an entire issue to the publication of an article by John Hersey. The article, called simply “Hiroshima,” followed the lives of six survivors of the blast.
READ
"Hiroshima"
by John Hersey
(will open in a new window)
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