Hell On Earth

"By the time I crawled free, the building was on fire. I saw two other girls come out. All the other girls were burned alive. Although it was morning it was so dark, like twilight. It was spooky. And in the darkness, as my eyes got used to it, I could see everything was destroyed."
"A soldier told us to head to the hillside, outside town. I could see objects moving in the dark. As they drew nearer I could see figures, supposedly human beings, but they didn't look like human beings to me. They looked like ghosts."
"Their hair was standing on end -- I don't know why -- and their eyes were swollen shut from the burns. Some peoples' eyeballs were hanging out of the sockets. Some were holding their own eyes in their hands. Nobody was running. Nobody was yelling. It was totally silent, totally still. All you could hear were the whispers for 'water, water'."
"How do you describe a hell on earth?" 
Setsuko Thurlow, Hiroshima survivor, Toronto

Peace educator and atomic bomb survivor Setsuko Thurlow shakes hands

with Japanese Ambassador Kaoru Ishikawa at a reception held

in his honour at Queen's Park on April 7, 2011. Consulate General of Japan in Toronto

In actual fact, Setsuko Thurlow, a survivor of the August 6, 1945 attack on Hiroshima has quite aptly dredged her memory at age 83 to describe Hell on Earth. Of course those memories live within her and with her. And she has dedicated her life to ensuring that she describes that Hell on Earth whenever she can so that others may have a hint of what it was like for a 13-year-old girl to experience an atomic bomb attack.

Of course, anyone interested in reading a riveting book about the atrocity could pick up John Hersey's acclaimed Hiroshima and read his descriptive account. But Setsuko Thurlow's description is that of someone who was there, who 69 years ago was at Ground Zero at 8:15 a.m. about 1.8 kilometres from the bomb's epicenter when 140,000 civilians were killed, some of them vaporized; human beings there one moment, nowhere the next.

"This was at 8:00 a.m. At 8:15 a.m. I saw a bluish light flash through the window, like a thousand camera flashes. Then my body started floating through the air. There was a total stillness and, later, I could hear my girlfriends whispering, 'God help me. Mother help me'." When she came to consciousness she heard a soldier's voice begging her to hurry, to move through the debris toward the light.

"By the time I crawled free, the building was on fire. I saw two other girls come out. All the other girls were burned alive." And then, later she was reunited with her parents, unscathed, because she had been separated from them, sent to an all-girls school in Hiroshima to decode messages from the front at Hiroshima's Japanese army headquarters. Her older sister Ayako, and her four-year-old nephew Eiji, had been burned. She recalls the heat "like an oven" radiating from her sister's body.

"It was awful. It is not easy to carry these memories. And as the anniversary gets nearer, it becomes harder. I get agitated. I cry, especially late at night, I cry. We Hibakusha [atomic bomb survivors] lead a double life. You can't constantly be thinking about it. But there are moments when you have to deal with your own memories and do something constructive with them And what does that mean? It means you have to never let what happened happen again. This is why I talk about it. 

"This is why I tell my story. This is what I saw."

Thanks to Joe O'Connor, National Post