Children of the A-Bomb: Testament of the Boys and Girls of Hiroshima

“Children of the A-Bomb” is a collection of 67 testimonies of Hiroshima survivors culled from a total of more than 2,000, detailing the experiences of these innocent victims on 6th August 1945, as painfully remembered six years later, on what, in the Japanese way of counting, was the seventh anniversary of the event.

The book is divided into four sections, according to the grade of the writers in 1951: from grammar to junior, senior and high school, including three undergraduate college students. The length of the testimonies varies from one to ten pages, the longer ones of course being concentrated in the latter half of the book. And though much of the material focuses on the immediate aftermath of the bombing, some of the writers also cover the days and sometimes weeks that followed, insofar as they were affected by the bomb, or perpetuated the victims’ misery with their litany of typhoons, starvation, and radiation sickness and death.—Jean-Francois Virey