It was just another normal day for me, for everyone. I can still remember this day like if it were yesterday. I woke up and did my daily morning routine. Instead of going to work, I happened to take the day off. That day I stayed at home with my brother. We were the only ones that survived from our family.
It all happened in the morning. I was at my house reading the newspaper by the window besides my younger brother. My brother pointed at this blue flash of light in the horizon, and that’s when the bomb was dropped. It felt like it had all happened in slow motion. When my brother points at the sky I slowly turn my head to where he was pointing. I then feel this very hot wave of heat coming my way. The blast of the bomb was brutal; it had blown us away to the other side of the room and before I knew it, I was lying on the floor all injured. I felt really, really hot and a horrendous pain crept throughout my body. I could barely move and even though I was in pain, I did my best to help my brother.
At first I thought something had happened in our neighborhood because I could hear my neighbors suffering, screaming for help. Maybe someone had thrown a small bomb. As I went outside I realized everything was dark. I was wrong something big had occurred. I couldn’t see the sky; it was pitch black. The day turned out from being a sunny summer day to a nightmare. You could hear everyone screaming, crying out loud for help.
My brother and I went to look for some water near the river bridge. The river was full of dead bodies. The water was black and muddy. We were both real thirsty so we took some water with our hands and drank it. At that time, we didn’t know about radiation. Everyone was drinking water, black water full of radiation.
While in the bridge, we saw this little girl who was probably 7 years old. She was crying for help. Her mom had got stuck when a part of the building collapsed; a beam had fallen on top of her lower body. The bottom part of her body was paralyzed; she couldn’t move at all. My brother and I along with other people tried helping her by lifting the beam though it was nearly impossible. We needed some machinery to get the beam off her. Everyone was weak and no matter how many people helped, we couldn’t get her out. Then a fire broke out putting our lives at risk so we, feeling very sorry for her, had to move on along with her daughter to some other place.
Everything was dark and the city was in fire. It was like my worst nightmare had come true. We were walking because we didn’t know where to go, and as I said before, everyone was crying for help, we could hear all the people suffer. It was horrible hearing and watching all those things. Some peoples’ skin was peeling off and hanging, others had no clothes at all because their clothes had been burned. You could see dead bodies everywhere, and there was this lady who had her eyeballs sticking out. It’s like we were living in hell.
After what seemed like years, it started raining. It wasn’t normal rain, it was black rain. I guess the rain was black due to all the dust and smoke on the air. Everyone started drinking and dancing in the rain, happy that there was water. After all that had happened in the morning, rain was like a miracle since water was nowhere to be found at the moment in the city. People didn’t know about radioactivity and all the things that could happen in the future, so everyone was just drinking it. Little did we know that in the future this would cause lots of problems. The rain kept on going for like seven or eight hours. And even after all the rain, the fires didn’t go off.
After this event had occurred, I went into medical treatment. My brother died later on his fifty’s for radiation activity on his body. From my whole family, my brother and I were the only survivors. Sadly, we never found our parents which means they died right away when the bomb made a blast.
I am now one of the Directors of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Being one of the lucky survivors of this unexpected, horrendous event, we want other generations of adults, teens and children around the world to learn about this, to learn about Hiroshima. We all want to hand our message to everybody to stop nuclear weapons and that violence is not the answer. We want for those children to hand out the message to the next generation. I really hope we won’t never, ever encounter a similar event like this. If we educate our children about what occurred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hopefully, they won’t make the same decisions as adults and know that millions of lives are in play.
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