Sadao Hirano

The morning of August 6^th was clear and without any clouds.  My classmates and I were preparing for the demolition work in the schoolgrounds which was scheduled to start at nine.   The teacher started to call the roll, and all the students faced the platform in the grounds.  All of a sudden, there was an orange flash.  We had no preliminary alert or air-raid alarm.  I felt as if I were burned for a few seconds, but strangely I didn’t feel hot.  I thought, 　“What is this light?” And then I covered my ears, eyes and nose with my hands as we had been taught and lay face down on the ground. 

Then the powerful blast came.  It whirled up the sand and dust and everything became cloudy although the sky was clear.  It was hard to breathe.  Looking at the school building while I was lying on the ground, it rose lightly.

When it became lighter, I could see my classmates, whose lips were swollen red and whose clothes were burned and tattered.  At that time, they started to say things like, “It hurts!” “It’s hot!” “Mother!” and “I lost my hat!”   We were about 150 students, three classes of first graders in the schoolgrounds.  We decided to leave the school, and most students went out to the streetcar street in the west and walked in the direction of Ujina along the streetcar line.  As my house was in the north, I headed for Hijiyama Hill which was close to my school.

The Army Telegraph Corps was located north of our school and there were brick walls between the Corps and our school.  When I climbed over the wall, I noticed that my gaiters were smoldering.  Other students’ gaiters were also smoldering, so we put each other’s out by hand.  Our clothes were all tattered and our skin was severely burned and hurt.  When we climbed the wall, there were wetlands with reeds.  Moreover, the midsummer sun was blazing down, making it feel as if we were being fried, and it was driving us nearly insane.  We walked with our arms sticking out like ghosts.

When I finally arrived at Hijiyama Hill, the air-raid shelter at the foot of the hill was full of people and I could not go in.  Groans like “It hurts!” and “It’s hot!” echoed in the shelter.  I saw a man who had a broken stick stuck in his belly.  A few soldiers tried to pull it out, but they couldn’t.  Outside the shelter, I found two classmates who also lived in Funakoshi.  The three of us went to a stream nearby to drink water, but I could not squat because the tight skin on my legs burned severely.  I asked a soldier nearby to cut the blister in the back of my knee with a knife.  I was so severely burned that it was hard to stand.  I tried to lean against the hillside to rest, but sand came into my wounds, and I could not even lean.

It was said that if you give water to burned people, they would die soon.  Outside, the shelter, I heard a soldier carried on a stretcher saying, “Give me water,” and another soldier asked him, “Do you have anything to say before you die?”  Immediately after the soldier on the stretcher drank water, he really did die.

After a while, we decided to go home.  We went down the east side of Hijiyma Hill and went to Danbara, which had escaped the spreading flames because it was located behind the hill.  We could only walk slowly with our heads down and our hands stretched out in front of our chests like ghosts.  The midsummer sun beat down on our bodies burned by the A-bomb.

In front of the Danbara Post Office, there were buckets of water and one ladle.  Someone must have put them there for injured people.  We frantically drank water and felt alive again.  Then, we started to walk slowly again with our arms on each other’s shoulders.  When we arrived at Ozu, a relief team and a bus were there, which had just arrived for a rescue operation.  They dropped us off near our houses, and I think I arrived home around six in the evening.

Noticing that I was holding something in my right hand, my mother gently opened my fingers one by one.  I was holding my skin which had been burned, peeled off and hardened black.  She cut the dead skin off using scissors and disinfected my whole body with sake.  Then she poured the rest of the sake into my mouth, and I lost consciousness from the alcohol.

I don’t know how many hours or how many days passed, but I suddenly recovered consciousness at nighttime after I got a camphor injection on my left shoulder.  The person in a white gown who gave me the injection seemed to be a researcher, looking for survivors for research about the A-bombing.  He was a strongly built person and asked me details of how I was A-bombed, like the flash and my burns.  Then he took away my burned trousers, shirt and gaiters which I was wearing at the time of the A-bombing.