Hiroshima

A detailed Summary of Hiroshima

Hiroshima is a story of six people who lived through the greatest single man made disaster in history. In this story each of the six people relive their own story on August 6, 1945, at exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning Japanese time. Each person's view of the first ever war to use an atomic bomb is a devastating sight. Through their eyes, the reality of the magnitude this bomb brought is reasonably understood by the graphical details that are given. Through reading this book and these people's accounts of this great disaster I have come to realize what a nuclear war could result into if precautions are not taken not only by the civilians but also more importantly by the head of our country.

Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a twenty- year old clerk, had just sat down in her office when the atomic bomb had hit Hiroshima. She had just finished putting some things away in her drawers and shifting through some papers. As she turned her head to say something to a girl, the room was filled with a blinding light. Being paralyzed by fear and still fixed in her chair for a long moment, everything fell and Miss Sasaki lost consciousness. The ceiling had dropped and the floor above had collapsed heaving the people above down with

the roof. All of the bookcases behind her swooped forward and threw her down twisting her left leg while pinning it down as well as her body up to her breasts. Miss Sasaki ended up living through this finally being released from the hospital over a year later with a crippled leg.

Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest of the Society of Jesus, had reclined on his cot on the top floor of his mission house reading a Jesuit magazine when the atomic bomb had hit. He recollects a terrible flash reminding him of something he had read as a boy about a large meteor colliding with the earth. His one thought was that a bomb had fallen on him. Then for a few seconds or even minutes he went out of his mind. The next thing that he remembers is that he was wandering around in his underwear in his garden bleeding slightly from small cuts. Building from all around had fallen except the Jesuit mission house. Dr. Kleinsorge had luckily survived the bomb. He also went on to save hundreds to thousands of people. He did fall victim to the radiation disease and was ill in bed for quite a time. He did manage to recuperate pretty quickly.

One year after the bomb was dropped, Miss Sasaki was crippled; Mrs. Nakamura was destitute; Father Kleinsorge was back in the hospital; Dr. Sasaki was not capable of the work he once could do; Dr. Fujii had lost the thirty-room hospital that took him many years to acquire, and had no prospects to rebuild it; Mr. Tanimoto's church had been ruined and he no longer had his exceptional livelihood. The lives of these six people, who were among the luckiest in Hiroshima, would never be the same. The experiences that they witnessed are those of ones that we can never comprehend unless we experience it. What they thought of their experiences and of the use of the atomic bomb was not unanimous. One feeling that they did share was a curious kind of elated community

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Approximate Word count = 1282
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: History