I've been noticing that people just don't think about Hiroshima very much anymore. If they could mark August 6th on their calendar each year, just to be aware and remember Hiroshima and what it meant to the human race. It has to do with the whole question of death.
These are the words of Tammy Snider, psychiatric social worker at the University of Chicago hospital, and hibakusha--survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. She has written a memoir recounting the moment, One Sunny Day.
The preceding and following are excerpts from an interview with Tammy Snider, performed by renowned oral historian Studs Terkel. It can be found in Terkel's wonderful book, Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith.
I was ten, going on eleven. I had just come home the night before, so I was catching up on reading that my cousin gave me which had something to do with a Samurai duel--a boy's book. Then I had a little stomach trouble. My mother left me a little porridge to have. There was this simultaneous flash preceding the humongous sound of explosion, the kind of intensity that I had never heard before or heard since. And then there was the breaking down with the force of the wind and the shaking of the earth and the house breaking up. And then being covered with debris. The thing lasted for, I thought, an unending, infinite period of time. It was pitch-dark and I was just getting hit with all kinds of objects falling down on me. Even as a child it was the very first time in this midst of abyss, I said to myself, 'I'm going to die.' When I said that, something very quiet came through, and I wasn't completely falling apart--that was sort of curious to remember. It didn't end, the thermal wind and the force. It just went on and on and I thought it would never end. The words coming into my mind saying: 'So this is dying in a war. I'm going to die.' I was the one who was most surprised when it all ended finally. Everything became still, I found myself still alive and living and breathing...
Whether you agree or disagree with the necessity of the atomic bombing of Japan--and there is evidence to support either conclusion--I think it's important to remember August 6th, when the most powerful nation in the world pioneered a new frontier of death and destruction. In terms of human life, Hiroshima was actually roughly equivalent to the horrors that had already been wrought by the Allies in Dresden, and other cities. World War II represented many things, not the least of which was a near-total breakdown in the rules of war. The original 'gentleman's game' had changed irrevocably in the first World War, during which trench warfare combined with mechanized slaughter and chemical weapons, but World War II went even further.
It took some effort to get out because I couldn't really move. Somehow, after I managed to get out, I saw the total changed scenery outside. First I thought there should be a great big crater in the middle of my grandfather's garden because I thought it was a direct hit by a huge bomb of some kind. There was no crater. So I stepped outside. Our house was raised up like a castle. So I stepped down to find people who were injured and the houses had collapsed and everything. Everything inside was just rubble. The first people I saw were two women and they were on the ground. Their clothes were bloodstained, and they were asking for help. There were others in the house trying to get out. They were covered with soot and hair all messed up, and later on I started to see en masse people who were hurt and burned.
All of us were raised in a culture that valued perseverance, not calling out with one's discomfort--that was frowned upon. So you persevere, and virtue is to try to cope with whatever comes along. You're not supposed to cry out with pain. Some people who just couldn't help it would say something, but for the most part people were very silent. They were whispering, like people who couldn't breathe, people who needed to be helped out...(softly) 'Please help me...' And that's much more painful to remember, because you know they were in dire agony...
...But those are the scenes that all hibakusha, the survivors, were subjected to. The powerlessness of not being able to help or participate because we didn't know what dropped. Even those people who didn't have any burns and injuries started to suffer and drop dead because, you know, the radiation, how forceful it was there. It goes into the marrow of your bones and penetrates your brains and then changes your fetus, and malformed children are being born. We had no idea how to help ourselves or help anybody. So that kind of death is annihilation and death without dignity. Complete powerlessness. Not even a person being there, torturing you. It's invisible. Done to people, DNA, plants.
Hiroshima's 59th anniversary came and went this year without much of a ripple--I guess the media will probably be bringing out the big guns next year. Then again, perhaps not. The dropping of the atomic bomb is not something America has ever really wanted to spend a lot of time talking about or commemorating. Popular images of the Japanese during the conflict ranged from the animal to the insect--from the treacherous, sneering, bucktoothed Japanese monkey to the bespectacled Japanese louse. Posters and ads routinely bore exhortations such as 'Must be completely exterminated at all costs.' After the war, these images gave way to docile, childlike Japanese chimps and knuckle-dragging, kow-towing men. The dirty Jap went from inhuman threat to housepet.
When I speak of my home, it's closely tied to death. I took my young adult children back to Hiroshima to visit and took them to the markers of my life. Every time I went back I used to be so depressed, feel so upset. This time it was a different kind of experience. And I never really entered the Peace Museum because I didn't want any real things reminding me, but I needed my children to go in to see, so I took them. And then I saw something I had never seen before. It was a life-size screen across the center rotunda area with a black-and-white picture of the Enola Gay, a millisecond movie coming towards us before the bomb was dropped. And I just unthinkingly put my hands out trying to stop it. And then I started to cry. I just started to cry until I was choking. I couldn't stop. 'Oh please stop, please stop.' And yet I knew that it couldn't stop, it kept on going.
Personally, I've never thought much about Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and I didn't even know about Dresden until very recently. Maybe that's why Tammy Snider's words move me, none more powerfully than the final paragraph of her interview with Studs Terkel. I can't say it any better...
In a way it's still up there: as long as we believe in waging wars with the possibilities of using nuclear weapons at some point. Because in all of mankind's history we've never possessed something that was not used. So that's when I found that, until my last breath I draw, I must address the consequences of Hiroshima because it was the very first time an atom weapon was used upon the human race. And that was a part of the family of man that it was used upon, and it was a part of the family of man that used it. So, please, remember August 6th and mark it down as the day of Hiroshima. And know that death and life are so tied together and so precious. And with life you can love, you can be loved; you can respect, you can honor; you can speak, you can sing, and you can celebrate until your last breath. (Close to a whisper) Not the hideous life and the hideous death that the hibakusha had to bear.
8/6
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I've been noticing that people just don't think about Hiroshima very much anymore. If they could mark August 6th on their calendar each year, just to be aware and remember Hiroshima and what it meant to the human race. It has to do with the whole question of death.
These are the words of Tammy Snider, psychiatric social worker at the University of Chicago hospital, and hibakusha--survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. She has written a memoir recounting the moment, One Sunny Day.
The preceding and following are excerpts from an interview with Tammy Snider, performed by renowned oral historian Studs Terkel. It can be found in Terkel's wonderful book, Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith.
I was ten, going on eleven. I had just come home the night before, so I was catching up on reading that my cousin gave me which had something to do with a Samurai duel--a boy's book. Then I had a little stomach trouble. My mother left me a little porridge to have. There was this simultaneous flash preceding the humongous sound of explosion, the kind of intensity that I had never heard before or heard since. And then there was the breaking down with the force of the wind and the shaking of the earth and the house breaking up. And then being covered with debris. The thing lasted for, I thought, an unending, infinite period of time. It was pitch-dark and I was just getting hit with all kinds of objects falling down on me. Even as a child it was the very first time in this midst of abyss, I said to myself, 'I'm going to die.' When I said that, something very quiet came through, and I wasn't completely falling apart--that was sort of curious to remember. It didn't end, the thermal wind and the force. It just went on and on and I thought it would never end. The words coming into my mind saying: 'So this is dying in a war. I'm going to die.' I was the one who was most surprised when it all ended finally. Everything became still, I found myself still alive and living and breathing...
Whether you agree or disagree with the necessity of the atomic bombing of Japan--and there is evidence to support either conclusion--I think it's important to remember August 6th, when the most powerful nation in the world pioneered a new frontier of death and destruction. In terms of human life, Hiroshima was actually roughly equivalent to the horrors that had already been wrought by the Allies in Dresden, and other cities. World War II represented many things, not the least of which was a near-total breakdown in the rules of war. The original 'gentleman's game' had changed irrevocably in the first World War, during which trench warfare combined with mechanized slaughter and chemical weapons, but World War II went even further.
It took some effort to get out because I couldn't really move. Somehow, after I managed to get out, I saw the total changed scenery outside. First I thought there should be a great big crater in the middle of my grandfather's garden because I thought it was a direct hit by a huge bomb of some kind. There was no crater. So I stepped outside. Our house was raised up like a castle. So I stepped down to find people who were injured and the houses had collapsed and everything. Everything inside was just rubble. The first people I saw were two women and they were on the ground. Their clothes were bloodstained, and they were asking for help. There were others in the house trying to get out. They were covered with soot and hair all messed up, and later on I started to see en masse people who were hurt and burned.
All of us were raised in a culture that valued perseverance, not calling out with one's discomfort--that was frowned upon. So you persevere, and virtue is to try to cope with whatever comes along. You're not supposed to cry out with pain. Some people who just couldn't help it would say something, but for the most part people were very silent. They were whispering, like people who couldn't breathe, people who needed to be helped out...(softly) 'Please help me...' And that's much more painful to remember, because you know they were in dire agony...
...But those are the scenes that all hibakusha, the survivors, were subjected to. The powerlessness of not being able to help or participate because we didn't know what dropped. Even those people who didn't have any burns and injuries started to suffer and drop dead because, you know, the radiation, how forceful it was there. It goes into the marrow of your bones and penetrates your brains and then changes your fetus, and malformed children are being born. We had no idea how to help ourselves or help anybody. So that kind of death is annihilation and death without dignity. Complete powerlessness. Not even a person being there, torturing you. It's invisible. Done to people, DNA, plants.
Hiroshima's 59th anniversary came and went this year without much of a ripple--I guess the media will probably be bringing out the big guns next year. Then again, perhaps not. The dropping of the atomic bomb is not something America has ever really wanted to spend a lot of time talking about or commemorating. Popular images of the Japanese during the conflict ranged from the animal to the insect--from the treacherous, sneering, bucktoothed Japanese monkey to the bespectacled Japanese louse. Posters and ads routinely bore exhortations such as 'Must be completely exterminated at all costs.' After the war, these images gave way to docile, childlike Japanese chimps and knuckle-dragging, kow-towing men. The dirty Jap went from inhuman threat to housepet.
When I speak of my home, it's closely tied to death. I took my young adult children back to Hiroshima to visit and took them to the markers of my life. Every time I went back I used to be so depressed, feel so upset. This time it was a different kind of experience. And I never really entered the Peace Museum because I didn't want any real things reminding me, but I needed my children to go in to see, so I took them. And then I saw something I had never seen before. It was a life-size screen across the center rotunda area with a black-and-white picture of the Enola Gay, a millisecond movie coming towards us before the bomb was dropped. And I just unthinkingly put my hands out trying to stop it. And then I started to cry. I just started to cry until I was choking. I couldn't stop. 'Oh please stop, please stop.' And yet I knew that it couldn't stop, it kept on going.
Personally, I've never thought much about Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and I didn't even know about Dresden until very recently. Maybe that's why Tammy Snider's words move me, none more powerfully than the final paragraph of her interview with Studs Terkel. I can't say it any better...
In a way it's still up there: as long as we believe in waging wars with the possibilities of using nuclear weapons at some point. Because in all of mankind's history we've never possessed something that was not used. So that's when I found that, until my last breath I draw, I must address the consequences of Hiroshima because it was the very first time an atom weapon was used upon the human race. And that was a part of the family of man that it was used upon, and it was a part of the family of man that used it. So, please, remember August 6th and mark it down as the day of Hiroshima. And know that death and life are so tied together and so precious. And with life you can love, you can be loved; you can respect, you can honor; you can speak, you can sing, and you can celebrate until your last breath. (Close to a whisper) Not the hideous life and the hideous death that the hibakusha had to bear.
