Dr. Sasaki, surgeon, hears the cries around him, too. And he tells himself to be brave. "'Sasaki, gambare! '"
That morning, he's running errands. He now carries some blood samples to the Red Cross hospital. He's now in the corridor. "He was one step beyond an open window" when the light the bomb was reflecting seemed to him like one "gigantic photographic flash." Ducking down on one knee, the hospital, he sees, is one big mess of crumbled partitions and fallen ceilings. Blown-out windows and walls asunder. And underneath if all, dead patients.
At 1, 650 yards from the center, Dr. Sasaki recalls he was missing his eye glasses.
A Ms. Sasaki (no relation) sitting at her desk at the East Asia Tin Works is in charge of the personnel department. There is to be a meeting soon. She's prepped for the meeting , of course. So she's talking to the girl in the next seat over when the window becomes filled with light. "Blinding light."
She's 1,600 yards from the center.
Ms. Sasaki losses consciousness only to awake again to find that "in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age," she is may be the one or first human being ever "crushed by books."
In Hersey's Hiroshima , August 6 th becomes August 7 th and then 8 th and then 9 th and then 10 th and then 11 th and then 12 th and then 14 th " ( Hiroshima deserves to be read again on this 75 th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing).
August 15 th , word reaches the dazed, maimed, almost dead. The survivors.
"'What news?'"
"'The war is over.'"
"'Don't say such a foolish thing, sister.'"
The war is over. We, Japan, are defeated.
So we are told, the war is over. Th at war and the wars we have witnessed and witness. Over. Only we have come to know better.
Hersey ever the journalist and witness to the catastrophe that is human and a bit of our diabolical heartlessness, asks the following question in Hiroshima: Is any war justifiable? "Even when it serves a just purpose." Is it justifiable?
"Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequence which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us a clear answer to this question?"
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