Hiroshima Book Report

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorHigh School, 10th grade August 2001

download word file, 6 pages 3.0

At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6th, 1945, a flash of light spread out across Hiroshima. At that same moment Miss Toshiko Sasaki just sat down at her desk; Dr. Masakazu Fujii sat down to read the"Osaka Asahi " on the porch of his private hospital; Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor's widow, stood by her window of her kitchen; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest of the Society of Jesus relaxed in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his three-story mission house; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young member of the surgical staff of the city's large and modern Red Cross Hospital, walked down a hospital corridor with a blood specimen for a Wasserman test in his hand; and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, paused for a minute at the door of a rich man's house in Koi, the city's western suburb, and prepared to unload a basket full of junk.

Over a hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were some of the survivors. It probably still lurks in their mind as to why they lived when so many others died. Every one of them counts many small steps made in time that spared him or her. And then each knew that in the "act of survival" they lived a few dozen lives and saw more death than they ever planned for. At the time before the bomb, none of them knew what was to happen.

Rev. Tanimoto, a small man who moved nervously and fast, was alone at the time of the bombing because his wife and their one year old baby had been commuting to Ushida, a suburb to the north. Of all of the important cities...