In desperation, I cared for my burned mother.

 

Sadako Suemasa

 

I was exposed to A-bomb radiation in a stationery store near Oshiba Elementary School when I was in the 6th grade.

It was 74 years ago, on August 6, at 8:15 am, that the first atomic bomb in the world, dropped by the United States of America, burned and killed the people of Hiroshima.

Three B 29 aircraft arrived, over 10,000 meters above the city. One to take photographs, one filled with observation equipment to report the post-bomb situation back to the US mainland, and one loaded with the atomic bomb. They came without sound. The atomic bombing on August 6 had been predicted, but the public was not informed about it.

When the warning was given, men and women were all on their way to work in Hiroshima City. The B 29 loaded with the atomic bomb was planned for a time when everyone would be out of their houses.

My eldest brother and the second brother had already been killed in the war. At that time, school children from the 3rd to 6th grades of elementary school had been evacuated to the countryside, but my mother said, " If we are going to die anyway, we’ll die together" and she did not let me go. Even though I was young, I understood that "There will be no tomorrow. We will eventually die." From the radio news came that “Japan is winning, winning. Many of their battleships and planes have been destroyed.” But the reality was that there was no food and we just struggled on day by day. I’d pull out grass and weeds from the river bank and take it back for my mother to boil, and we ate it. We planted sesame seeds in our little patch of garden, and put the seedlings mixed with miso, soy sauce, and a little salt (the salt was distributed at that time) on our rice gruel ( in fact it was more like just a few grains of rice floating in the water), and ate it. Or we cooked and ate shredded radish and pumpkin. With such a poor diet, we couldn't even think properly.

Blue-white light and explosions seemed to break up the world. After, I heard that a B29, over 10,000 meters above us, had dropped an atomic bomb to explode about 600 meters above the ground. By the nuclear explosion, a burning flame of 3000 to 4000 degrees C capped Hiroshima City for about three seconds. 100,000 people in the blink of an eye, and 147,000 people by the end of the year, suffered agony. Burned down like insects, and dragged into hell.

That morning, I was practicing hand flag signals in the school grounds of Oshiba National School, about 2.4 km from the hypocenter. At break time, I went to the stationery shop in front of the school. I liked drawing and I went there to look for some crayons. As I was talking to the man in the stationery store, a bright blue line flew past, with bright yellow lightning.

The blast blew me about four meters – up to the landing on the way to the second floor, then down a few steps, and I was left hanging on the handrail. The red wall was splattered by the blast, and for some minutes I could hardly breathe and couldn't speak.

After a while, a fire broke out. The stationery shop man told me, “Run away!” so, escaping from the fire, I went outside. In front of the shop the road was full of injured people. I didn't know which way to run, but then I remembered my mother saying, "If something happens to our family, we’ll go to Oshiba Park and wait for everyone”, so I headed for Oshiba Park, scraping past all the people. It wouldn’t usually take me five minutes to get there, but that day it took about 20 minutes. On the way, I passed Oshiba National School. There were six or seven classmates there, slumped down, their flag signals lying on the ground. Hit by that burning blast, they had died instantly. No one answered when I called out.

When I got to Oshiba Park, my mother, my grandmother, and my younger brother were there. My mother laughed as I hugged her. Well, rather than an actual laugh, it was like the little smile of someone in pain. My mother’s hair was messed up, her eyes were full of blood, and her head was pierced with glass fragments. I was also wearing a skirt, so the glass had stabbed me. I saw my mother’s ghost-like face for the first time in my life. Even now I can't forget it. Her hands were peeled and a bag of bloody skin was hanging down. Every time I see raw tuna, my mother's burns come to mind.

That morning, my mother had been standing in the kitchen, washing what few red beans we had for everyone to eat. The flash of the bomb through the skylight burned her really badly. She was a kind mother, but I was really scared when I saw those googly eyes. My younger brother, in the second grade of elementary school, had heard the sound of the plane, but our mother stopped him when he tried to go out through the front door.

My mother groaned, “Water, water”, so I picked up a can from the ground and ran to get some water from the Ota River. There were many people there. Pulling at my skirt, they asked me to give them some water too. When I gave them water to drink, one by one, someone said, "If you give them water to drink, they will die. What are you doing?" But I thought, if they’re going to die anyway, I might as well give them something to drink. For about 20 minutes I kept making that round trip of about 50 meters. Not just people, even dogs and horses were jumping into the river. Looking at all that, I felt I couldn't go to get water anymore. They seemed okay right after jumping in, but with the tide flowing out at about five kilometers an hour, they were swept away.

On my way to draw water, I saw some horses rampaging. They had been ridden by army officers, and were resting in the grounds of Sotoku Junior High School, about 500 meters from Oshiba Park. The bomb had got them, too, so they fled, untethered, and rampaged at Oshiba Park. You could see the bones on their backs. Their organs had been torn off, and blood flowed and squirted out from their wounds.

My relatives had a timber yard just near Oshiba Park, and when we went to stay there, there were already some people there, taking a rest. Many people escaped there because it had a roof. We waited there for about 2 hours. It was our relatives’ place, but at a time of disaster like this, we didn’t feel we could just put ourselves first. Bluebottles and other flies came rushing at my mother as they smelled the blood and pus from her burns. They swarmed out of a large cistern about 1.8 meters across in the neighborhood and flocked toward the smell of sick people’s blood. My mother was groaning, unable to express her pain in words. I went and picked some dokudami leaves, spit on the leaves, rubbed them with my hands and warmed them to body temperature and put it on her. After 4 hours, the bright yellow pus came out. If I did this every two hours, the pus would stop. Even so, lots of flies came there and laid eggs straight away, and soon there were maggots crawling out. When I saw the maggots moving, I picked them out with my fingertips.  Mom cried, saying, “It hurts'', so I sucked them out with my tongue and spit them out. She said, "You are good at this. I'm sorry." I did this again and again. And I took some cucumber from a field and put it on her wounds. “You don't need to touch me. It hurts, it hurts,” she cried, but I washed her wounds with the water from the well and took care of her. I took some pieces of glass from her body. They were thin slivers of glass that swayed when the wind blew, and they hurt her. When my mom cried, I it was if I had become her mother. It seemed like her soul and mine had changed places.

Because there was a well, we had water to drink. But since there was no food, when it got dark we went out to look for food. I even ate some leaves that tasted like acid. And there was a time when we hadn't eaten anything for two days and rice balls were distributed. They were only flavored with salt, but those rice balls were really delicious.

When I left my relative's timber yard and went back to see how our house was, it was slanted, at an angle. Everything had been burned up, right up to the house. There was a field in front of our house, and our garden, so maybe that’s what stopped the fire from spreading.

 People escaped to the rescue center of Oshiba National School. The director of Nagasaki Hospital there had brought a nurse with him. But people still died. They just died in a moment. With not a moment of delay the bodies of the people who had died in the rescue center were lined up and burned, with the desks and stools we had studied at used as firewood. People’s bodies at that time were very thin, not with the fat and meat that people have on them nowadays. But the smell as they burned seemed to pinch at my nose. I still hate grilled fish. It smells like the smell there was as I waited our turn to burn a corpse. I buried the bones after the body was burned, digging a hole in one corner of Oshiba School.

When I heard that human bones helped cure burns, I wanted my mother to take the calcium. So I took the bones of someone who had died, ground it into flour in a mortar and, saying, "Here’s some medicine." I had her take it. Looking back, I regret doing that to her, but at the time I was desperate.

My aunt told me that my uncle who worked at the city hall hadn’t come back, so I went with her to look for him. This was four days after the atomic bomb was dropped. On the way, we saw lots of burned people's bodies. It was just like a picture of hell. Most of the bodies were not completely burned up. I was so scared when they tripped me up in the darkness. My uncle came back on the 7th day after the bomb. We heard that the city hall had burnt to the second level basement, but the third level basement was undamaged. There were some documents and food stored there. Even though they wanted to get out of that basement, they couldn't, because it was too hot.

Based in the Ono Army Hospital in Hatsukaichi, 11 professors from Kyoto University who came to investigate the actual situation of the atomic bomb survivors in Hiroshima, together with 156 army officer patients, doctors, and nurses died in a mud slide caused by a typhoon on September 17. These people were also victims of the atomic bomb.

When the Emperor declared Japan’s defeat on August 15, I was so pleased. "Banzai!", I said. Then my mother and everyone around was angry at me. All the adults were sad and empty, their backs rounded in exhaustion.

I did everything to take care of my mother. She and grandmother died of lung cancer 10 years later. My little brother died of cancer after 15 years. I have come to realize what a terrible thing it is die. Now we have peace. I have been allowed to live for more than 70 years now, but I am now giving back and passing on to elementary, junior high, high school and university students. There may be tens of thousands of survivors, but each person has had a different experience. My heart is sad and I shake when I recall those things. I hate this hot, painful feeling as I tell what happened to me, but I do it day after day for the sake of peace. I love peace. Peace really is a treasure.

If the earth is at peace, our world is a wonderful place. We need to reflect on past wars, delight in our coexistence and our shared prosperity on the planet, and Japan needs to lead the world as a country that rejects war. This is because it was in Japan that the first two atomic bombs used in the world were used to kill people, and even 74 years later survivors are still suffering from atomic bomb-related illnesses. Nukes and humankind cannot coexist. We A-bomb survivors cannot die until we pass the baton of peace on to the next generation. As we work toward a peaceful and free society without war, I would like to see Japan's peace movement expanded as we seek to rid our earth of nuclear weapons.