Remembering The Past

The atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945, and on Nagasaki, Japan, on Aug. 9. Years later, a talk by a survivor to a high school class still resonates with a Friends member.

About 30 years ago, one of the "bomb-affected people," Hibakusha in Japanese, visited my high school in Washington, D.C., to talk to us about her experience surviving one of the atomic blasts in August 1945. 

Cover of the book: The Devil Reached Toward the Sky

Released by Avid Reader Press in 2025

While reading the accounts of many Hibakusha in Garrett M. Graff's searing The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb, the memory of that elderly Japanese woman in our classroom vividly resurfaced.

I tearfully realized this was one of the most profound moments in my life.  I can recall her relating to us through an interpreter, the horror and agony she lived through that day, and afterwards, the many painful surgeries she underwent to help repair the damage her skin suffered from radiation burns.   

One aspect of her story required no understanding of Japanese to grasp─she gesticulated in a manner to make it clear to all of us that the bomb's power was so intense it caused her skin to hang from her arms in shreds.  I can see her face today, a face lined and racked by unspeakable terror but also one in which there was fixed steely determination and purpose. 

I don't remember her name, nor can I recall whether she was in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, it doesn't matter.  She had convinced me with her courage, with the immediacy of her miraculous presence, the depthless look in her eyes that the human costs of nuclear warfare were incalculably too great.  

— Ethan Powe
Friends Member
Communications Committee

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Friends Edgewater LibraryFriends of the Edgewater Library | Edgewater Branch LibraryWW II, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Atomic Bomb, Hibakuska, WWII Pacific, Japan, Japanese Americans, Ethan Powe, Communications Committee, Japanese InternmentComment