Hersey's Hiroshima

It is hard to imagine what it must feel like if one were under attack. Hiroshima, by Hersey (1989) is a book that tells what happened on the fateful day characterized by the title. In 1945, a bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Hersey explores not what it might be like, but exactly what it was like by providing information from the people who lived through the attack. Tales are told through the views of several individuals. On the very first page for example, the tale of one individual is relayed and begins as follows: "...on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down" (HERSEY, P. 1). Also on page one; it is revealed that "Dr. Masakazu Fujii was settling down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asabi on the porch of his private hospital". Clearly, from the beginning, this book humanizes the tragic event by telling the tale through the eyes of several different individuals.

The importance of the day's events to these six people is presented in a way that makes the reader stand in their shoes and consider the same questions that haunt them. A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts on many small items of chance or volition--a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the next--that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew anything (HERSEY, P. 4).

These six did have some warning, but by this time in the war air raid warnings were meaningless. They were heard all the time without there being any bombings. At the same time, rumors circulated "that the Americans were saving something special for the city" (HERSEY, P. 5)....