Hiroshima by John Hersey

A year after the bomb was dropped, Miss Sasaki was a cripple; Mrs. Nakamura was destitute; Father Kleinsorge was back in the hospital; Dr. Sasaki was not capable of the work he could once do; Dr. Fujii had lost the thirty-room hospital it took him many years to acquire, and no prospects of rebuilding it; Mr. Tanimoto's church had been ruined and he no longer had his exceptional vitality. The lives of these six people, who were among the luckiest in Hiroshima, would never be the same.

John Hersey's Hiroshima tells the story of six ordinary Japanese citizens who lived through the bombing of Hiroshima. They are "among the luckiest," because those who were unlucky--nearly 100,000 of them--died in the blast, and many more died of radiation sickness shortly thereafter and were unable to be interviewed. But these "lucky" six had their lives transformed, physically, mentally, utterly, and Hersey's book traces their experiences from the moments of the blast to a year later; an added section provides updates totaling decades, and brings the book, if not the experience, to a close.

In his choice of subjects, Hersey provides an odd symmetry: two priests, two doctors, and two women. The subjects seem to be connected socially or professionally, and the choice of priests seems strange; it makes you wonder whether Hersey thought the Japanese Catholics would be more sympathetic to a Western audience, or whether they were the people who were easiest to talk to. One of the priests, Father Kleinsorge, is a German who loves the Japanese so much he ultimately takes Japanese citizenship and a Japanese name. The priests and the doctors, in the wake of the blast, find themselves in similar roles, compelled to the aid of the survivors in ways that exceed by many degrees their capacity for help. I was moved by the bitter irony of Dr. Sasaki, toiling away to bind the wounds of the patients in his hospital for days, not aware that the rest of the city, too, had been leveled. Dr. Fujii and the other priests make their way to Hiroshima's public garden with hundreds of thousands of others, and the sheer scope of the death and suffering they find there is even more shocking in Hersey's plain and unadorned language.

Hersey seems to make a point of keeping his voice simple, just the facts, bare of anger or despair. Images speak for themselves: "He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glovelike pieces." Another image: six nude, dead men, fallen in unison where they had been trying to push a boat into the water. Another: a group of air defense soldiers, huddled together in blind desperation because they had been looking up at the sky when the blast happened, melting their eyes. The details, Hersey knows, speak for themselves, and they tell a story of monstrous cruelty and human devastation that casts judgment better than judgment can. It was surprising, then, to read about how many of the Japanese survivors expressed indifference toward the ethics of the bomb, or who believed that their suffering was ennobled by their sacrifice for the Emperor. For a long time, the Japanese resisted commemoration or financial support for the hibakusha, the survivors, and resentment laid dormant until the American hydrogen bomb irradiated a Japanese fishing boat a decade later. For me, Hiroshima strengthened a conviction that those involved in the bombs' use should have been put in prison, or, since it's too late for that, hell.