On the 81st anniversary of the USA’s worst war crimes ever – the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – we present to our readers an extraordinary first-person account by Fr. Pedro Arrupe of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) of the US nuclear attack on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that his account of the horrors of that day and the days and weeks that followed has been published in full in the English language. This account comes from a Croatian-language book published in Zagreb, Yugoslavia in 1978; we used the excellent DeepL translation engine to produce this English version.
At the time of the US attack on Hiroshima, Fr. Arrupe was a missionary of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) working in Hiroshima. A small hill that stood between the house where he and his fellow missionaries were living and the epicenter of the explosion was all that protected them from the most serious effects of the bomb; after saying a quick prayer asking for God’s help, Fr. Arrupe (who had some medical training) and his comrades immediately set to work providing basic medical assistance to the hundreds of seriously injured and dying people who made their way to the Jesuits’ makeshift field hospital.
At this time in world history, when all the principal political “leaders” of the capitalist world seem to have completely lost their fear of nuclear war and openly plan for the use of “tactical” nuclear weapons as if they were no big deal, we publish this deeply moving account of the horrors of nuclear war to alert the workin class – once again – to the imperative need for the organization of revolutionary socialist (i.e. Trotskyist) workers parties to wrest the weapons of war out of the clutches of the mass-murdering capitalist classes of the world. Unless we of the working class overthrow the capitalists and take power into our own hands, it is only a matter of time before the greed-maddened capitalists of the world – led by the world’s #1 terrorist threat, the US capitalist class – plunge the world into a nuclear holocaust.
— IWPCHI
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https://archive.org/details/taj_nevjerojatni_japan_1978-pedro_arrupe
Taj nevjerojatni Japan – Uspomene iz misionarskog života (Zagreb, 1978) [That Incredible Japan –
Memories from a Missionary Life] by Pedro Arrupe
[From page 148 to 172; translated by DeepL, copy-pasted into the translation engine from the Croatian by IWPCHI]
THE ATOM BOMB SCENE
To picture the scene on which the atomic bomb tragedy unfolded, we must add a few more details to what we have already said about Hiroshima.
In 1945, Hiroshima had about four hundred thousand inhabitants. If we compare it to a European city with the same number of inhabitants, we must say that it was much more spacious. In fact, apart from a small number of skyscrapers, which rose magnificently and dominated the plain, the city was made up of typical Japanese one-story houses. They were all wooden structures clad on the outside with mud, cardboard, and strong paper.
From a military standpoint, the importance of the city could not be denied. It was not, to be sure, a city where the smoke from war factories darkened the sky with soot, but troops came and went from its military port. Hiroshima was perhaps the most important port in the south of the country. Every week we witnessed a double parade of new uniforms—those of the men going to the front and those marked by the hardships of battle and the hope of victory.
We Jesuits had two houses in Hiroshima at the time: one in the city center—it was the parish—and another outside the city, in Nagatsuki, seven kilometers from the center. Our novitiate was there. I had been working there for several years with thirty-five young Jesuits. Throughout the entire war, we wondered why American bombers completely spared our city, while they heavily bombed other cities, such as Kure and Osaka.
The residents of Hiroshima initially retreated to sleep in caves that had been dug into the nearby hills, but when they saw that time was passing and the peace was being shattered by the sirens’ wailing, confidence returned to the world. People, at last, preferred to die in their own homes rather than live in cobwebs and waste away from rheumatism and pneumonia. This is understandable. One young man told me how during the Spanish War there were many soldiers who discarded their gas masks, using the canisters for other things, and occasionally for water. When I asked him if they weren’t afraid of chemical poisoning, he answered:
“A little, of course, but it’s still better to die comfortably than to live uncomfortably.”
Such a view prevailed in Hiroshima as well.
Life began to proceed without unusual events. Every day at half past five in the morning, a B-29 would cruise over the city, and only once did a bomb fall. Such was the persistence of that machine that they quite naturally and with a fine irony nicknamed it the “American Messenger.”
The Atomic Explosion
August 6, 1945, was the first and last day to have a different course. At about 7:55, a second alarm signaled danger. A B-29 flew high overhead, and no one paid any attention to it. We had seen flights of two hundred planes or more pass over the city many times before. At 8:10, the all-clear sounded, and the world went back to work.
But that was wrong! It had been barely five minutes when a blue sky was split by a fiery lightning bolt like a magnesium ray. I was in my room with another priest. I immediately got up and went to the window. At that moment I heard a continuous, muffled noise, more like the roar of a waterfall than a bomb explosion. The house trembled and began to sway. The windowpanes shattered, the doors were blown from their hinges, and the Japanese walls splintered into pieces as if struck by a giant’s fist.
That terrible force, which we thought would lift the house from its foundations, knocked us to the ground as if struck by a fist. Instinctively, we raised our hands in front of our heads to protect ourselves, when a rain of dust and debris began to fall on us without stopping.
When that tremor was over, we both got up, fearing we would see each other injured. Fortunately, we were both uninjured. We immediately went through the house. My great concern was for the thirty-five young Jesuits who had been entrusted to me, but I found none of them injured. The explosion had caused only material damage.
With the natural curiosity that arises when danger has passed, we all went into the garden to see where the bomb that had shaken us had fallen. But our efforts to find it were in vain. There were no visible changes in the garden.
In stark contrast to the powerful nature of that summer day, the house had been struck, its roof torn off so that it no longer bore the elegant symmetry that had made it stand out. All the windows were shattered. Through the doors, blown off their hinges, you could see cracked walls lying in dust on the ground.
We climbed the hill, from where we had a better view. To the east, we saw what had once been Hiroshima burning in flames. It burned like a new Pompeii. The atomic bomb unleashed a blast of intense white fire upon the city. Everything flammable that came into contact with it burned like matches thrown into a red-hot furnace.
And as if that were not enough: the tremors caused wooden houses to collapse into the fire, so the entire city looked like one, huge blaze.
Watching this scene, which we could not even imagine, we stood as if petrified. Only later, through information from others and based on our own experience, were we able to reconstruct what had happened.
At around 8:15 a.m., an American B-29 bomber dropped a bomb that exploded at an altitude of 1,560 meters. The explosion was completely inaudible, but it was accompanied by a fiery beam that gave us the impression of a magnesium flame.
A few moments later something fell again, accompanied by a red flame, and exploded above the city at an altitude of 570 meters. This time the explosion was powerful.
The force of that second explosion was indescribable. Red and blue flames hissed in all directions. At the same time, a terrible thunderclap erupted, accompanied by unbearable heat waves that, setting everything on fire, descended upon the city.
This was the first moment of the tragedy. After that, a huge cloud formed, covering the sky. A terrifying mushroom cloud rose from the center of the explosion, and a wave of pressure, rushing at 500 miles per hour, swept away everything in its path within a six-kilometer radius. Finally, ten minutes later, black rain fell on the northwestern part of the city.
The Japanese, who did not know that an atomic bomb had exploded here, coined a word for this phenomenon in their mimetic language: “pikadon.” ‘Pika’ means a bright flash of light to them, and “don” is the sound that follows.
For us and for everyone else, it was unexplained. During four years of war we had seen the explosions of many bombs and grenades, but that explosion was something new and could not be compared to anything else. We had heard a lot about secret weapons, too, especially before the German collapse, but since we had never actually experienced one, we were convinced it was mostly propaganda.
Field Hospital
We wanted to go into town right away. It wasn’t some terrible curiosity. It wasn’t about looking for the wounded either, because many came to us, so there was no need We wanted to go into town right away. It wasn’t some terrible curiosity. Nor was it about looking for wounded, since many were coming to us, so there was no need to search for them. Above all, we wanted to find the dead bodies of our fathers and fulfill our brotherly duty to them. But we couldn’t get into the city. The fire blocked our way. The flames leaped from one house to another. Thick black smoke poured from the houses, enveloping everything, while the fire simultaneously destroyed whatever was made of wood.
This terrible disaster could be compared to the earthquake that had devastated Tokyo and Yokohama twenty years earlier. In both cases, there were about two hundred thousand dead.
We could not afford to lose time. We could only pray fervently and work without rest.
How must God feel in a disaster! And how that feeling is intensified when one thinks of the millions of people around them who do not pray to Him because they do not know Him! The entire moral weight of prayer fell upon us, a handful of Jesuits, who knew the One who can tame the waves of the sea and extinguish the flames of fire.
I remember that I first went to the chapel, one side of which had been torn to pieces, to pray to the Lord for light in that terrible darkness. Death and destruction everywhere, and we condemned to helplessness!
I came out of the chapel with a firm decision: we would turn our house into a hospital. Everyone accepted the idea with great enthusiasm. With much painful enthusiasm, they got to work. I remembered that I had once studied medicine. That was a very long time ago. Besides, I no longer had any practice. Yet in those moments I became a doctor and a surgeon.
First, I searched for my medical cabinet and found it in the ruins. I could only use a little iodine, aspirin, and the like. And there were more than two hundred thousand wounded. Where do we begin?
In that difficult war, all the natural resources had been exhausted. Food had long since been rationed to the extreme. There were many cases of tuberculosis among the people, so, accordingly, the world needed to be given a lot of food… And we ourselves had nothing! We lived like all the other Japanese on the little rice we received daily. We couldn’t save any of it.
I gathered all the young Jesuits around me and, in a few words, explained what needed to be done.
“Go,” I said to them, “wherever the Lord leads you and bring some food. Don’t ask me anything! I don’t care how, whether it’s borrowed, bought, or given. The only important thing is that all these people have food and that they get well.”
No one said anything more because in such circumstances, any comment is superfluous.
Everyone left, and a few of the fathers and I set out for Hiroshima, gathering up the wounded we came across. Before long, our house was full.
Much that we had not seen during the past four years now came to light: the selfless love that God has placed by nature in human souls. The poor local peasants, who had witnessed the bomb and fire from a safe distance, gave generously of everything they had, even offering us their last. None of our wounded ever complained of hunger, because we were always able to give them the bare necessities.
Those precautionary measures crowned our efforts with success. Not knowing how, but only because God willed it, we prevented leukemia and anemia in an unknown way, which afflict the majority of those struck by radioactive rays. The success was so great that only one child died among us.
While the young Jesuits took care of the food, I devoted myself to helping the world with my medical knowledge. First of all, the wounds had to be cleaned. The causes of these injuries were varied. Many were caused simply by excitement. There were broken bones and lacerations, but not the kind caused by a sword or a shovel, where the wound opening remains clean; rather, these were injuries that originated from the collapse of houses, when beams fall from the ceiling, creating a cloud of dust from bricks turned to powder. Sawdust, shards of broken glass, and often crushed bone enter the torn flesh. Other wounds were clean, like, for example, those that came from shattered bones. Those wounds are easier to clean and carry a lower risk of infection. But perhaps the most dangerous were the cases we received a few hours after the explosion, with blisters on the chest, abdomen, and back.
All of this was the understandable effect of an atomic bomb in a city that was almost entirely built of wood. The only unusual thing was that those who claimed they hadn’t been burned were also scorched.
To the question, “What happened to you?”—the answer was always the same:
“I don’t know. I saw a light, heard a terrible explosion, but nothing happened to me. However, after half an hour, I started to feel little blisters forming on my skin. Four to five hours later, they already looked like severe burns, and the next day they started to get infected.”
Today we know that these were the effects of infrared rays, which penetrate tissue and destroy not only the epidermis and endodermis but also the muscle tissue. The immediate consequence was widespread suppuration and then often an unexpected death, which at the time was completely incomprehensible to us.
We had to disinfect the wounds without chloroform or morphine because at that time we didn’t have a single narcotic. This procedure caused unbearable agony for those who often had more than a third of their skin exposed, writhing them in pain, yet not a single cry ever escaped their lips. This is further proof of Japanese self-control and patience. It is difficult to find another people on Earth that can endure so much.
Dantean Visions
The evaporation caused by that immense fire turned into a heavy rain around four o’clock, and it extinguished the fire on the ground. It continued, however, to burn beneath the charred beams and collapsed houses, but the downpour prevented new fires from breaking out. It was the moment when one could break through the ring of fire and enter the ruined city.
Before our eyes, a Dantean vision was unfolding. It is impossible to convey or describe. The dead and wounded lay mixed together, with no compassionate Neapolitan rescuer to spare a thought for them. We will never forget any of those we saw then. A heart-rending scream could be heard, its echo piercing the air like a dreadful howl. From throats already hoarse from the strain of hours of calling came sounds that had nothing human about them. But more poignant than any other sight was that of the abandoned children writhing in death, or the poor creature who had been writhing in agony for eight hours from a splinter of glass in its left eye. A terrible pain, for there was no one there to soothe its suffering with a kind word.
Even more terrifying was the sight of a man writhing in a pool of blood because a sharp splinter of wood was stuck in his ribs. He, too, had been like that for eight hours, the entire time with the wood piercing his chest. How he must have looked at us as we approached him! He seemed no longer alive. The lines of his face had turned ashen with pain. His half-open mouth trembled in a deathly struggle. His half-open mouth trembled in a death struggle. His hands, in desperate motions, kept reaching for his chest, but they didn’t have enough strength to pull out the axe that was killing him.
And his eyes came to life for a moment, as with his clenched lips he whispered that plea in a struggle—it was hard to say—of despair or hope.
Like him, there were many thousands more such creatures here who had not deserved to become victims of war and who were thus atoning for the sins of others.
How terrible a martyrdom that child must have endured whom we found between two beams with his legs burned to the knees! A house had collapsed on him, which was not merciful enough to have spared him unhurt, but not so merciless as to kill him. No, the child remained alive in the forks formed by two beams that had squeezed him, but did not kill him, in order to prolong his martyrdom. How terrifying it must have been for him, hanging there with no hope that anyone would remember him, and above all certain that the fire would soon reach him.
The house on the opposite side began to burn. The wind slowly but relentlessly drove the flames toward the child, who had to watch for several hours, unable to move, as the flames drew closer, ready to burn his legs first, and then his entire body. How much he must have suffered, how much he must have cried in his utter helplessness! For although Japanese stoicism can endure much, we cannot expect a ten-year-old child to do what many adults could not.
And the flame reached his legs, and the child began to feel the torture of the slow fire. Anyone who has read Menéndez Pelayo’s description of the death of Miguel Servet, burned alive, with the fire being applied from a distance to prolong his agony and delay his death, might be able to form an idea of what his suffering meant.
When we found the child, his legs were already burned. He was still alive, but it was no longer human life, but a rag that was not yet dead so that it could suffer more. In a similar way, many others died in a gentle, dying struggle, and I don’t understand how they didn’t give in to endless despair. We had to watch hundreds die before our very eyes without being able to call out to them—because they wouldn’t have heard that there is a God who could ease their transition from this world to eternity.
Ah, if only we could have given those souls even a single word of Christian comfort! But that was not possible. It was not possible for them to make a 180-degree turn in a single second. And we could not even stop, because our fathers were in the city center, which we had feared was completely lost.
Drowning in the River Delta
It took us five hours to reach our five fathers. They were all injured, but alive. Together with them, we set off back on a journey that lasted seven hours.
It was already a grim enough sight when we first passed through the city. That impression was heightened by the night-time reflections of the half-drawn blinds.
When we had to rest for a bit along the way, we heard moans somewhere very close to us, which were fading away. But they were so piercing that we decided to search for the victim of such agony. But it was all in vain. However, we kept hearing the moans as if they were coming from the ground, but our search always ended without success. Finally, we decided to continue on our way, when suddenly one of the fathers cried out loudly:
“It’s under us, Father! We’re stepping on it!”
We set to work removing the beams and parts of the houses. After a few minutes, we uncovered an old woman, who was barely breathing. Death rattle was coming from her mouth, the same sounds we had heard moments before. We pulled her out. Should we carry her with us? Absolutely impossible! A few moments later, she stopped breathing. The sight of her half-burnt body was horrifying.
Through the dead city streets, we reached the riverbank with our procession, which ran not far from the center of the explosion. And again, another indelible memory in the series of those endless, Dantean scenes!
In the moment of the tragedy and in the hours that followed, when the burns began to show their painful effects, many of the wounded sought refuge from the fire on the riverbank, and it became the cause of death for many thousands of unfortunate people.
In the mud of the delta they waited during the first hours of their misfortune, and in that time they lost blood and vital energy. When, at the start of night, the tide began to rise slowly but steadily, the water level rose in all the delta’s channels.
What misery for those who, completely weakened, had crawled into the mud and had to watch with their own eyes as the water closed in. Soon the final wave would come to cover them. Their mouths were full of water, but they could still breathe—until the new wave came, which finally covered them. It was horrible to listen to the wailing of all those who watched as death slowly but surely approached.
The next morning, the delta’s mud was covered in corpses. No one had escaped death.
All the voices we had heard during that hellish night concert fell silent.
Without Doctors and Medicine
It was already five in the morning when we were celebrating Mass. The chapel was packed with wounded men. Each tatami mat was a bed on which lay a single wounded man, in the first throes of his pain.
When I turned for the “The Lord be with you,” I saw a group of about fifty wounded men, who fixed their eyes on me with a look of wonder, but without the light of faith.
They were not believers. They did not believe that God was in the white Host I raised aloft with my own hands. Their ignorance was not due to any ill will. They had never heard anything about the mysteries hidden in Christ’s sacrifice.
They could not honor God with their faith, but they offered Him at least the gift of their silence. They would have done much more if only they had known these secrets. Many, in fact, of those who ended up in our makeshift hospital exchanged their Buddhist faith for Christ’s, but they were neither better nor worse than the others; they had simply met the great Unknown of the Cross and the Tabernacle.
When we fathers sat down after Mass to devise an effective remedy for treating the sick, God intervened again—in a miraculous way. In the morning around eight o’clock, a simple man, our neighbor, came and showed us a large sack he was holding in his hand.
“I would like to help those poor people, too,” he said. “I’ve been looking everywhere for something, and in the process, I found this bag full of white powder, which looks to me like a medicine. You can see for yourselves if it will be of any use to you.”
There were five kilograms of boric acid in the bag. That was exactly how we solved the problem. We made bandages from our own clothes and the household sheets, and with them we set to work, which was crowned with great success.
Our job consisted of applying dressings to the wounds, which we kept moist at all times with boric acid. In this way, we managed to reduce the pain somewhat and keep the wounds relatively clean and exposed to the air. The pus thus remained on the dressing. We changed the dressings several times a day, and in this way, we managed to keep the wounds free of germs.
During the healing process, we could observe that after about five days, the first signs of scabs began to appear. A slow process, admittedly, but a normal one, so that among the many who recovered, not a single case of recurrence could be established. When later, in scientific studies on the effects of the atomic bomb on the human body, a group from the A.B.C.C. (Atomic Bomb Casualty Center), contrary to us, expressed doubt that the bomb could adversely affect the healing process. We were able to prove with several hundred wounded that this was not true. We were more inclined to believe that poor wound care, rather than the explosion itself, was the cause of the poor healing.
We who were in Hiroshima and saw those original methods of treatment could very well explain why the wounds were getting worse instead of healing. The main reason for the general chaos was the shortage of doctors. Of the two hundred sixty doctors in the city, two hundred were killed by the explosion. Most of the sixty who remained were wounded.
For example, the director of the Red Cross hospital was trapped under the rubble of his house with six broken bones and was unable to provide any effective assistance. And so most of the victims fell into the hands of emergency aides and half-trained orderlies. Countless times we watched as hundreds of wounded waited patiently in front of the half-ruined building.
Often, they would come to the front after many hours of waiting. They would pass by the nurse, who, with the help of tweezers, would touch the wound with the mercurial bromide she had in a box with her, even though both the patient and the nurse knew that the mercurial bromide destroys tissue.
But these treatment procedures could still be called professional to some extent. But treatment at home was much worse.
The most common treatment was to apply the pulp of white turnips to the burn. The effect was an initial cooling sensation, but after half an hour, due to the Japanese summer sun and the pus oozing from the wound, a hard crust would form, causing indescribable pain. This was attempted to be prevented by placing mashed potatoes on the scab, but this only made it worse. It did, admittedly, make the whole thing look like a scab, but in reality, the wound had only closed badly. The infection remained beneath that crust.
Therefore, one of our main tasks was to run from house to house where the wounded were housed and to try to convince people that such a procedure brought certain death. When we succeeded, we would bring them to the point where they accepted simpler and much more effective methods. It was an extremely demanding job, and it went on for weeks. We had barely any time to sleep. We knew, after all, that even a quarter of an hour could be crucial in saving a human life—so who had time for rest?
Individual Cases
I could present many individual cases, but I will limit myself to just a few.
Two days after the explosion, just as I was tending to a wounded man, someone said to me:
“Look, Father, through the window!”
I went to the window and saw two young people, struggling with all their might to approach our house. She looked to be about twenty years old, while he looked much older. In fact, he was no older than twenty-three, but he was in the throes of death. He was literally crawling on his hands and knees, his every movement accompanied by a look of pain and exhaustion. The woman was dragging him, having tied a rope around his hips to ease his agonizing progress.
God, what a sight! The woman was biting her lip to keep from crying, and he to keep from screaming. From his hips to his head, his body was one single, open wound. It was the most severe case we had ever encountered. At the time, I believed there was no talk of recovery. I could not believe that this young man could be granted life once more.
I stood before him in doubt, but it only lasted a moment, for they both took my hand and began to plead for help.
“Help me, Father!” said the husband.
“We only got married a month ago, save my husband!” she added.
“It’s going to hurt a lot… I’ll see what can be done,” I replied.
But how wonderfully that man reacted! He looked at me firmly and then—I don’t know if he was being serious or cocky—said to me:
“Just get to work, I’ll hold out.”
And he kept his word. We placed him carefully on the operating table—my desk—and I began to clean him.
The pus, which had congealed deep in the wounds and was covered with a hard crust, wouldn’t come out. There was no chloroform, there was no ether, nothing to ease the pain. I set to work in a way that would bring him healing in the future, but also pain in the present. Without mercy, I dug into those pus-filled holes.
The poor man writhed in a cold sweat. He clenched his teeth with all his strength, and when he opened his eyes, he stared at me like a madman or a corpse. In the agony of those hours, during which I was his torturer, he repeated, to our astonishment, with a strain of will and in a broken, trembling voice:
“Go ahead! Do whatever you must! I can endure it! Just save me!”
In the end, we were both exhausted—he from the pain, and I from having to be the cause of it. But a human life was at stake, and no mercy that would have brought certain death was in order.
Eight months later, they both walked out of our house. One morning, I watched them as they came down the small hill on their way. They were walking happily, smiling… and… baptized. I felt the full depth of their happiness. I suffered greatly from the barbaric operation, but the joy of watching them be baptized made up for everything. God’s Providence had guided them and brought them to our house. If they had been just twenty-four hours late, it would have been fatal, as the first signs of poisoning were already beginning to appear.
I would not wish to end this painful enumeration of all those maimed lives without also briefly mentioning the fate of that Nakamurasan we have already spoken of.
She moved to Hiroshima. After the disaster, I heard nothing from her. When I was informed two weeks later that she had been injured and was in the ruins of her house, I immediately went to Hiroshima. The house ruins, however, offered no way to pinpoint a specific location. After I had been searching for her for four hours, several girls said to me:
“Father, over there, in that corner…”
I asked them to take me there. A Japanese person will never say “no” to a stranger, but those girls just replied:
“Yes… it’s just around the corner…”
I went there alone. Where they had told me, I found several beams supporting a collapsed tin roof. A half-meter-high wooden wall enclosed an open space inside. I wanted to go in, but the unbearable stench pushed me back. Nakamurasan was lying on the ground. She was one giant wound, oozing pus.
She had been lying like that for almost two weeks, with no care and no one to clean her. She ate only the little rice her father brought her, who was wounded himself. Her entire back was burned. When I tried to clean the wounds on her hips, I found a wide hole in the muscle mass, so large a hand could have been placed inside. Worms were already crawling inside.
When I cast my eyes on those horrors, my mind and my ability to comprehend failed me. But when Nakamurasan opened her eyes, I realized I was with her, and she spoke words I will never forget:
“Father Arrupe, are you bringing me Holy Communion?”
We brought her to Nagatsuka as best we could. The treatment was, once again, horrible. In a fever, the poor girl would hallucinate that some specter was going to slit her throat. I tried to calm her, and when I thought she was asleep, I went outside, but she noticed and became agitated again. So I had to spend many nights as a sentinel over her sleep.
After two months, she began to get better, but a heart attack took her life. Her father burned her. However, in the middle of the burning, the fire went out, so her father came to me. Thus, I had to see Nakamurasan’s dead body once again at midnight. Her face was still twitching in the flames.
A second incident occurred near our house, one that moved me deeply. I stopped—I don’t even know why—in front of a house. Inside was a dying boy. They let me in. The boy lay on the floor. His shoulders, half of his chest, and his arms were one continuous wound.
I knelt beside him. His big, innocent eyes looked at me sadly. He could barely speak. I wanted to turn him over to see the wounds on his back. He didn’t resist. But when I placed my hand on him and he felt my fingers on his festering wound, his silent, earnest plea grew stronger in his eyes, for it was the only way he could express himself. I lifted him and noticed that his entire back was oozing. Lying in one position for several days without being moved had restricted blood circulation, causing a scab to form.
How he must have endured the pain of his treatment at only thirteen years old! He behaved like a grown Japanese man. He writhed and breathed quickly, but he didn’t scream. He just stared at me more and more intently, holding back tears.
And so day after day went by, and his condition began to improve. I was prevented by an urgent matter, so I hadn’t set foot in that house for twenty-eight hours. When I was finally able to, I went in without asking permission, as custom otherwise requires.
But my mother stopped me and said mysteriously:
“Don’t go in to see him today, Father!”
I was greatly surprised.
“Why not?”
“He’s sleeping,” she said, but the tone of her reply made it clear that it was just an excuse.
“It’s alright! I’ll go in very slowly so I don’t wake him.”
I took off my shoes, determined to see the boy. When [the] mother saw my resolve, she didn’t dare to oppose me. I went in and turned pale as a corpse. From head to toe, they had smeared the boy with something red. Then I understood why his mother hadn’t wanted to let me near him.
“What have you done to him? What kind of ointment have you smeared him with?”
“I’m sorry,” the mother said very sadly. “A cousin of ours from the country brought us that medicine, and since it was completely red, we thought it would be good.”
I had given them a colorless medicine, so they probably thought it wouldn’t do any good.
I didn’t know what this home remedy was made of, but from the way it looked, it could have contained chromic acid, which was widely used at the time and had caused the death of many wounded men. I immediately set about removing the ointment and forbade them from doing anything without my knowledge. I then resumed the treatment, which had been completely successful for many, and it yielded good results for this boy as well.
This unusual interference delayed the boy’s recovery by a few days. Finally, he was able to get up, with large scabs, but without any serious damage. Not a single member of that family resented me for my strictness. Had they, in fact, prevented my method of treatment, I would not have been able to feel that inner joy of one day seeing them all baptized.
Radiation Belt
In the midst of the excitement of those days, something happened that greatly confused all of us. There were, in fact, many people who had been in the city at the time of the explosion but were not injured; however, after a few days they began to weaken and felt as if they were burning on the inside, and after a while they died.
I first encountered such a case while operating on an old woman. In the middle of the surgery, a man appeared in the room and said to me, terrified:
“Father, please, come to my son. His neck hurts terribly.”
Since I was just busy with a very difficult case, I was forced to give him a negative answer:
“If it’s just his throat, then it won’t be dangerous. Maybe it’s a bad cold or strep throat. Give him an aspirin and you’ll see he gets better.”
But I was wrong. A short time later, the young man died. What happened?
A little later, a girl came to me and said, crying:
“Look what this is.”
She opened her mouth, and I noticed that the flesh around her teeth was bleeding. Her entire inner mouth was full of small injuries—it resembled pharyngitis in an aggravated state. Then she took a handful of her hair: she could pull it out with no difficulty. Two days later, she was dead.
We examined various cases and discovered these symptoms: the dissolution of the blood-forming organs in the lymph glands, bone marrow, and spleen.
This was a specific case of radioactive disintegration. Once we understood the cause, we were able to help these poor victims with blood transfusions and thus save some lives.
Today, we know the radiation produced by an atomic explosion. The bomb produces three different types of waves:
1. An explosive wave that spreads out in a radius of six kilometers. In this belt, all Japanese houses were destroyed, while concrete structures and solidly built houses would remain, provided they were not later engulfed by fire.
These effects are not actually specific to the atomic bomb. As with any other powerful explosion, the bronchial system abnormally expands, the retina detaches, intracranial pressure increases, and so on.
2. The second wave (thermal), with a radius of three kilometers, develops a heat of ten million degrees and in that 2. The second wave (thermal), with a radius of three kilometers, generates heat of ten million degrees and creates infrared rays in that area, which destroy tissue. To protect oneself from them, a simple cloth, a wall, or any object will suffice.
3. Finally, the third wave is radioactive, extending in a radius of one and a half kilometers. Its effect is identical to any radioactive exposure; that is, it is like the effects that occur in the human body if it is overexposed to X-rays. It reduces red and white blood cells—blisters and swellings form on the flesh around the teeth, in the mouth, and in the throat, spots appear on the skin, hair falls out, the temperature rises sharply, and there is a urge to vomit frequently.
These, then, are the terrible effects of the atomic bomb. They are terrible, but by no means scientifically inexplorable, as was suggested by newspaper reports.
The reason for the talk of the shadows in Hiroshima, which would appear and then vanish, was simply this: the rise in temperature during the second wave occurred in a single instant. If, therefore, a person or any object were in front of the wall, both the wall and the object would be blackened, so that what we would call the shadow of the object would remain on the background as a glowing silhouette.
For a day after the explosion, we didn’t know it was an atomic bomb and that it had stained the world with blood as a weapon of war. Without electricity, telephones, or radio, we were completely cut off from the outside world. It was twenty-four hours before the first relief trains arrived from Tokyo, Osaka, and Kobe.
The trains stopped at a station outside the city. To our impatient questions, we heard only one answer:
“An atomic bomb has exploded.”
And so, our desire to learn more details about that terrible weapon was stopped by a thick wall of general ignorance. They knew the name; we knew the effects. But neither we nor they understood the reasons and the consequences that could follow. The prospect that this terrible weapon would be cataloged in dictionaries under the heading “atomic bomb” offered us no help in our efforts to rescue the wounded, nor did it provide us with any medical guidance in our bewilderment.
However, the secrets surrounding the entire affair were of great help to us, especially from a missionary standpoint. We were told:
“Do not go into the city because it is covered in a gas that is fatal to people over seventy years of age.”
It was a time when we once again felt our priestly responsibility in its fullness. In the city, there were more than fifty thousand dead bodies that had to be burned to prevent the spread of the terrible epidemic throughout the entire province. In addition, there were one hundred twenty thousand wounded who had not yet received their first medical attention.
From that point of view, we could not stay away from the city, in order to save our own lives. Faced with the certain death that awaited us, by all accounts, we made one of those powerful promises that are made only to God. We went into the city, therefore, and burned entire pyramids of dead bodies, dousing them with kerosene for that purpose.
That’s how we cleared the streets. However, after four days, the stench, which was particularly strong in the scorching heat of the pavement, told us that there were still corpses in the process of decomposition. We lifted beams and walls and found entire families buried in their own homes. How many of them had struggled in their graves for hours, even days!
With the help of passersby, we again burned entire piles of corpses.
Straining every last ounce of strength in this terrible task, we felt completely exhausted at the end of the first day. In addition, a fear of the gas, which was said to have been seeping for over seventy years and whose effects could be fatal, was working in our subconscious.
Today we laugh when we remember how, at the slightest headache or neck pain, we would anxiously ask, “Father, do you feel anything unusual? Could it perhaps be…?” No further words were needed. We all waited resignedly for something that—fortunately—never came.
In the Sign of Peace
The authorities were still asking us to leave the city. After the war, they were no longer afraid of our espionage, but of violence from the population against us foreigners. An hour of unconditional surrender is always dangerous.
We set up a hospital for atomic bomb victims with no benefit to ourselves, but even so, there was a suspicion that the people would take revenge on foreigners for their own defeat.
During those four years of war and their numerous interrogations and examinations, there was something I have not yet mentioned: namely, the demand that we leave the house and move away from Hiroshima.
They ordered us to do this four times a year, but we could always avert the danger by saying we didn’t know where we were supposed to go. It wasn’t an easy matter for us to relocate our community, primarily because our house in Tokyo had burned down in an air raid.
Since we would do anything to avoid complying with the summons, they would leave, but in their naivete, they would reappear in three months as if it were a new matter. After the war, one day a few representatives of the authorities came to me. They demanded that we finally vacate the house.
“Impossible,” I replied. “You see, I don’t know where to put my people. I certainly can’t leave them on the street.”
“We understand that completely,” one of them replied. “We have therefore solved that problem so that you can comply with our order immediately.”
“Then tell us what to do.”
“There is a wonderful hotel on Lake Tai, which you can have from tomorrow. It is on a lake and surrounded on all sides by hills. No one will bother you there. The place is situated on a height and is very healthy.”
And so it was. My heart soared when I visited the place they had offered us. The students of our community were already exhausted after many years of study due to the food shortages and nervousness of the war years. They absolutely needed peace. That manor house at Lake 113, especially in August, was a godsend for the students to recover their health. I could not have imagined anything better, not even in my dreams.
But there was one more thing to sort out. They insisted that we all go, but I told them right from the start that I wasn’t going. After all, how could I go when we had another one hundred and fifty wounded in the house? I was the only doctor in the area and knew from experience what would become of the patients if I were to leave them in the hands of amateurs.
Since my position was much more humane than theirs, they finally agreed to my proposal that I stay in the house with five priests, who would help me care for the sick. And so we immediately began to prepare to move.
Two weeks later, they all returned enthusiastic, physically refreshed and spiritually strengthened, so that they could resume their studies.
Behold, how true are the Lord’s words: “You will receive a hundredfold reward for your work and eternal life.”
Who would have ever guessed that in the midst of that disaster we would be forced to take a vacation, and a free one at that, even in a beautiful hotel on the lake? Providence proved to be very motherly toward us.
Although we saw that our youth was exhausted from a lot of work, it never occurred to us to give them a vacation at that time. The young men would have reluctantly refused such a suggestion. However, God intervened in the matter and forced them to do so through the Japanese police. Once again, we were all together.
The victors and the vanquished
It must have been an impressive sight when the victors and the vanquished first came into contact with each other. Suspicion on one side, fear on the other. At the end of a war, resistance groups often form among the vanquished, while those who send their occupying troops frequently display great savagery and brutality. However, there were no conflicts. The one side’s capitulation was honorable, the other’s administration, chivalrous. No exploitation, no betrayals! A tacit agreement, the only one possible under those circumstances.
When the American occupation troops entered Hiroshima, Catholics often began inviting me to say Mass for them on the ships that had anchored in the harbor.
As soon as they learned of our meager food supplies, they showed the generosity characteristic of them. I never received the Mass stipends in cash, which had no value after the war. After all, what can you buy with it when there is nothing for sale in the shops? And so, every one of my apostolic excursions was generously rewarded with boxes and cans of all colors, various sizes, and all kinds of contents.
Since I was looking after the entire community, I did everything possible to get them to give me what I wanted. And I didn’t want to hinder their generosity.
I noticed, however, that it was filling at an extraordinary rate, even though there was room in it for only one-fifth of what they wanted to give us. I therefore had to keep enlarging it until it reached a considerable size. But the captains had no sense of measure in their generosity.
I continued my apostolate and carried with me a large chest, inside which was a slightly smaller one, and in that a third. They all filled up and were so heavy that I had to drive home or need an assistant to carry half of it. My arrival home was almost always met with “We Praise God,” because it meant the students’ food supply was secure again for a few days…
Independent Workers Party of Los Angeles 