The Hibakusha

I had nowhere to go. A soldier took pity on me, gave me some money and told me to take the train to his grandmother’s house. But on the train a woman stole all my belongings. Then someone else offered to take me to my elementary school. There I met one of one my teachers. He’d returned to the school to look for missing students. It was the first time since the A-bomb had hit that I had come across anyone I knew. When I saw him, I felt as if I met a Buddha in Hell.
-- Sueko Hada, hibakusha

All this week I've been listening to The World's series about the hibakusha¹, the survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sixty years ago.

The series, prepared to mark the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing (which is tomorrow), is deeply moving. I urge you to listen to it from the audio stream available at the website I linked to. It's not always easy to hear (though it's not horribly gross, the hibakusha do talk pretty frankly about the events of that day and the aftermath), but the stories are as much about survival and hope as they are about the horrors themselves. One of my favorite stories was of Sueko Hada, orphaned by the bombing, who was told she'd die by the time she was 40. She's now 67 years old, and the center of a large family. While being interviewed, she was playing with the great-grandaughter she never thought she'd live to see.

Most of the hibakusha were children in 1945, and most are suffering from illness today, often linked to the radiation they were exposed to so long ago. Like our own veterans of WWII and the survivors of the Nazi death camps, these people are slowly disappearing from our world. And like those others, we cannot let their stories and experiences die with them. To lose such stories can only harm our race. They must be preserved, and heard, and we must insure that every generation can learn from the mistakes of our past, and pledge to try their best to prevent such things from ever blighting our people -- or any other -- again.

1 pr. hee-BAWK-sha

Penny Arcade: The CCG

Finally, A collectible card game I want to play.

And I want to be Tycho. Because like him, I am enamored of the Big Word.