Hiroshima by John Hersey

Hiroshima by John Hersey follows the stories of six survivors from about an hour before the bombing until a year after. As an aside, I’d recommend Isao Takahata’s film Grave of the Fireflies as a companion piece. It goes without saying that the accounts of what happened that day are horrific. The scale of the devastation was so great and survivors unarmed enough to help were so few that they had no choice but to ignore the countless cries for help from people who were buried alive, being slowly crushed or suffocating because they simply couldn’t get to them all. There were so many devastating moments in the story, like how after a few days, the Reverend Tanimoto became so used to the carnage and trying to move living bodies from one place to another that he had to keep repeating aloud, “these are human beings” just so he could keep going. There is another moment when Reverend Tanimoto had helped drag dozens of the injured to lie by the side of the river only to find when he had come back that the waters had risen and the wounded were so weak that they couldn’t crawl even a few feet to safety, so they had all drowned, helpless. And while the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were appalling acts, what struck me when reading this was how Hersey refuses to make any overt moral judgments or political statements. He simply lets the narrative do its work. This is a very important book. It should be read by everybody, no matter what you think about whether dropping the bomb was the right thing to do or not. Even if action must be taken, no matter how justified one is in using deadly force, we should always be reminding ourselves, like Reverend Tanimoto that “these are human beings.”