Hiroshima

I had sat aside a whole day to visit the A-bomb dome and the museum. The dome is the remains of a building that was almost directly below the hypercenter when the nuclear bomb exploded 60 years ago and has become a symbol of the tragic event. Because the shock wave came from almost directly above some of the walls of the building remained standing but in a radius of ½ km from the hypercenter almost every building was turned to rubble instantly killing everybody inside. Within 2 km anybody exposed directly to the heat and light rays were either killed instantly or died a few hours later from the severe burns. All wooden buildings caught fire instantly and within hours a 2-3 km circle of the city was simply gone. People exposed to the direct radiation got sick and died within the first week after the bombing while others began to have internal bleedings, lost their hair and died in a few month. Before the year was over more than 140,000 people had died from that one bomb. After that radiation sickness also increased cases of leukaemia, cancer, miscarried and deformed babies.


A-bomb dome
Few things can give me the chills but despite of beautiful weather I was freezing most of the day. The story of Hiroshima city, the bombing and the aftermath was very objectively, but selectively, told at the museum and with these kind of stories there was no need for dramatisation to get the point across. The tour was packed with the remains of clothes, burned lunch boxes and toys from real kids who were burned to death, died from radiation sickness or lost their entire families. But the most scary things I saw was a burned wrist watch stopped at exactly 8:15. The museum advocates the abolition of all nuclear weapons but personally I still think that up until now nuclear bombs have prevented more deaths than they have caused. Amidst all this tragedy we must not forget that this is only one of the horrible things that happened during World War II.