The Six Survivors Of Hiroshima By John Hersey

John Hersey’s book Hiroshima (first published in 1946 with only four chapters, later re-published to include a fifth chapter) documents the stories of six different survivors from the August 6, 1945 American atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima, a city with a population of 250,000 located in Japan. This was the first atomic bomb attack in history. After the attack most of the city was destroyed and thousands of the inhabitants lost their lives. Those who were injured or survived suffered the devastating effects of terrible burns, among other damages to their bodies, and radiation, as well as suffering the loss of their loved ones and their properties. This book follows the emotional lives of the six survivors following the bomb attack.
The six survivors who act as the protagonist of the book include Miss Toshinki Sasaki, Dr. Masakazu Fujii, Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, Dr. Terfumi Sasaki (no relation to Miss Sasaki), and the reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto. A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb. These six were among the survivors. John Hersey tells you their stories, and in the new edition of his book, he has returned to find them forty years later to tell you their fates. Just before the time the bomb detonated in Hiroshima, Miss Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just turned her head to chat with the girl at the next desk. Dr. Fujii, a physician, had just sat down to read the paper on the porch of his private hospital. Mrs. Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, was watching a neighbor from her kitchen window. Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest, was lying on a cot in the mission house reading a Jesuit magazine. Dr. Sasaki, a young surgeon, walked along a hos...

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...nfluenced the way I think about the world and war. You feel like you witness those poor people’s emotions and can’t help but feel empathetic towards them. So many innocent lives were taken, ruined, and changed forever on and after that horrible day. Even if people could move past that tragic day it would never be far from their minds. The book is told through the memories of the survivors, which has now made it a powerful classic documentary, John Hersey took the time to meet with several of the survivors and turned their stories into a book for everyone to read. He described the events that occurred to real people as well as he described the real raw effects that those who survived endured. The book definitely speaks for itself in an unforgettable way. It is a serious and captivating book, one that I would truly recommend to those who enjoy reading about history.