Hiroshima by John Hersey

This past August 6th marked the 65th anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.  I had known of John Hersey's famous account of that event for many years, but I only just read it this summer.  John Hersey wrote his account 25 years ago, focusing on the lives of six individuals who lived through the bombing.  By telling these people's individual stories---where they were at 8:15 in the morning on the morning of August 6, 1945 when the bomb dropped; what their lives were like at that time; how they dealt with the immediate aftermath of the horror that ensued with the bombing; and how they managed to carry on in the years after the attack---Hersey succeeds in telling a very human story about a supremely inhuman event.  He doesn't weigh the merits of the arguments on whether the bomb should have been dropped, and he avoids any sort of polemic one way or the other.   I was struck, in fact, by how succinctly Hersey deals with any mention of the events and people, such as President Truman of the United States and Emperor Hirohito of Japan, outside the world of the six individuals whose lives he chronicles.  By sticking to details of the lives of these individuals, he tells a great and very important story about our common humanity.

I was struck by the important role that several Jesuit priests played in Hersey's story and in the events on the ground at the time of the bombing.  The Jesuits had several religious houses in Hiroshima, one of which was within a mile of the site of the bomb drop.  Incredibly enough, this house remained standing while almost all its surroundings were obliterated, and all of the Jesuits in residence survived.  Fr. Pedro Arrupe is mentioned in the story but not by name.  Fr. Arrupe was the rector of the Jesuit novitiate about three miles from the site of the attack.  A few days after the attack, the Jesuits from the residence closer to the attack made their way to Fr. Arrupe's residence.  Hersey writes: "The rector of the Novitiate, who had been a doctor before he entered the religious order, cleaned the wounds of the two priests and put them to bed between clean sheets, and they thanked God for the care they had received."  (48)

I highly recommend this book for all readers over 13.  

Here are some interesting related sites:
Read more about the Hiroshima Peace Media Center and its efforts to work for a world free of nuclear weapons: http://www.hiroshimapeacemedia.jp/mediacenter/peace-movement/index.html


Read the story of a young survivor of the bombing, Sadakon Sasaki, who died a few years later, but left an important legacy with her paper cranes for peace: http://www.hiroshima-is.ac.jp/index.php?id=64