![]() “But this time because of the pandemic no one could come”. In the past, “at least 10 to 30 came to do live testimonials at the site as well as outside of the United Nation, like churches, schools”, she said. The Japanese art director who designed the exhibition at UN Headquarters, Erico Platt, acknowledged in an interview with UN News, that inevitably, the COVID pandemic had reduced the number of people able to see the exhibition in person, as well as prevented elderly hibakusha from participating. ![]() The spirit of the declaration, in which their own sufferings are linked to the task of preventing the hardship that they continue to carry, resonates still in the movement today. “We have reassured our will to save humanity from its crisis through the lessons learned from our experiences, while at the same time saving ourselves”, they declared at the formation meeting. In August 1956, the survivors of the 1945 atomic bombs in Hiroshima on 6 August and Nagasaki three days later, formed the “Japan Confederation of A and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations”.Įncouraged by the movement to ban the atomic bomb that was triggered by the Daigo Fukuryu Maru disaster – when 23 men in a Japanese tuna fishing boat were contaminated by nuclear fallout from a hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll in 1954 – they have not wavered in their efforts to prevent others from becoming nuclear victims. The steadfast conviction of the Hidankyo remains: “Nuclear weapons are absolute evil that cannot coexist with humans. It was hell…I found my neighbour trapped under a fallen concrete wall… Only half of his face was showing. Then it got brighter and brighter, and I could see burnt people crying and running about in utter confusion. One man who entered Hiroshima after the bomb recalled in the exhibition, “that dreadful scene – I cannot forget even after may decades”.Ī woman who was 25 years-old at the time, said, “when I went outside, it was dark as night. They fell down with a thud and died one after another”, adding, “still now I often have nightmares about this, and people say, ‘it’s neurosis’”. She was located just two kilometres from the Hiroshima epicentre.įleeing to her relatives in Hesaka, at age 24 another woman remembers that “ people, with the skin dangling down, were stumbling along. ![]() I regained my senses at her cries and found no-one else was on the train”, a 34-year-old woman testifies in the booklet. “On an overcrowded train on the Hakushima line, I fainted for a while, holding in my arms my eldest daughter of one year and six months. ‘Absolute evil’Ī group of elderly hibakusha, called Nihon Hidankyo, have dedicated their lives to achieving a non-proliferation treaty, which they hope will ultimately lead to a total ban on nuclear weapons. These brave survivors testify that peace cannot be achieved ever, through the use of nuclear weapons. “The next morning, we carried their bodies out of the shelter, but their faces were so swollen and black that we couldn’t tell them apart, so laid them out on the ground according to height and decided their identities according to their size”. It vividly brings to life the devastation and havoc wreaked by those first atomic bombs (A-bombs), and their successor weapons, the more powerful hydrogen bombs (H-bombs) which began testing in the 1950s. To highlight the tireless work of the survivors, known in Japanese as the hibakusha, the UN’s Office for Disarmament Affairs, created an exhibition at UN Headquarters in New York which has just come to a close, entitled: Three Quarters of a Century After Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Hibakusha-Brave Survivors Working for a Nuclear-Free World. “This was truly a living hell, I thought, and the cruel sights still stay in my mind”. The death of a human is a solemn and sad thing, but I didn’t have the time to think about it because I had to collect their bones and dispose of their bodies”, a then 25-year-old woman said in a recorded testimony, 1.5 km from Hiroshima’s ground zero. “The Red Cross hospital was full of dead bodies. Those first nuclear weapons deployed by the United States, indiscriminately killed tens of thousands of non-combatants but also left indelible scars for the immediate survivors, that they, their children and grandchildren still carry today.
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