The route to the school seemed strangely flat and empty. Someone asked, ‘Weren’t there houses here when we came to the shelter?’ The whole world appeared so surreal we just accepted that structures could disappear off the face of the earth. We were living a terrible nightmare.

My classmate Fumiko scampered about 50 meters ahead of us. When I looked up to see why she was calling, I saw her pointing to a large form on the ground.

‘Look over there,’ she shouted. ‘It has escaped from the zoo. It’s an alligator.’ It lay in our path to the school, so we approached with caution. Fumiko found a rock.

She drew back the rock above her head as she approached the creature. Then, Fumiko froze in her tracks, screaming hysterically. I ran to her side. The face looking up at us from the crawling creature was human. The shrieking in my ear kept me from hearing what the face was trying to say. I could just see it pleading for something — probably water. No clothes or hair were visible, just large, gray scalelike burns covering its head and body. The skin around its eyes had burned away, leaving the eyeballs, huge and terrifying. Whether male or female I never found out.

The head fell forward — face in the dirt. It didn’t move after that. Fumiko crumbled to the ground and I dropped beside her.

National Archives

A mother and her young child who have survived the attack on Nagasaki stare in shocked silence. Both have been injured but are lucky to have lived. Nearly 75,000 were killed during the attack.

We were both 15. The wartime schedule of year-round attendance would allow us to graduate in another month. We were lucky. At the end of spring, the Student Mobilization Order closed many of the other girls schools and moved the students to Yawata. It’s a steel-mill town near Kokura where the girls worked all summer. The boys schools also closed. Those boys who had not enlisted in the military ended up working in the Nagasaki shipyard.

When we felt like standing up, we plodded on toward the schoolhouse. Fumiko and I encountered two or three groups of people. They appeared numbed, standing around victims who were on the ground. We saw nothing we could do to help, and we moved on.

Because of the dust and debris, we couldn’t see the school building until we were almost upon it. It appeared to have remained sound, except the windows were blown out. We soon saw the other students who had stayed in the schoolyard. Fortunately for them, most were on the opposite side of the building from the blast.

Two girls wore makeshift bandages on their arms. Flying glass from the windows had caused their lacerations. Many of them displayed the bright red faces and hands, which I have come to know as characteristic of second-degree burns. The reinforced concrete-block building offered protection in case of additional explosions, we thought. So, we remained with the group for about half an hour.

It seems a little petty to me now, but I wanted to go into the building to retrieve my books and belongings. A student in our group said, ‘I think one of the teachers is dead.’ It’s funny how my books seemed so important, but my parents had purchased them from their meager income. I was determined to enter.

The blast knocked out our electricity, which added to my dread as I made my way along the hall. Only the dimmest light filtered through the thick dust and smoke. Though a little disoriented, I found room 1-Kumi, my homeroom. Glass littered the floor and lay on the desks, but my books were intact. I tucked them under my arm and retrieved my hat, pulling it tightly to my ears.

Once again in the hallway, I heard a person’s voice. The door to 3-Kumi, the room next to mine, stood ajar. The voice from inside called, ‘mizu, mizu‘ — water, water. The door seemed stuck with his body lodged against it, so I pushed with all my might to get in. He screamed in agony when the door moved his body. I recognized Sakamoto Sensei — Teacher Sakamoto. He had wrapped his shirt around his bloody leg. Blood also oozed from the side of his neck. Lifting the crimson-soaked shirt, he motioned to his thigh by nodding his head.

The only sounds he made were gurgling grunts. I saw the wide, gaping slice in his leg. His thighbone showed white in the bloody pool. He looked up at me and mouthed the word mizu. I ran to my homeroom because I knew where cups and a full teapot sat. Returning, I held the cup for him to drink.

He emptied it and motioned with his head toward a pile of overturned desks. I missed the word he whispered. Holding my ear closer I barely heard him say, ‘Tani.’

‘Tani Sensei?’ He nodded. I walked behind the pile of desks and saw on the floor a woman’s body with a slab of broken window glass on her chest. I wrapped one of my books around the edge of the glass and attempted to move it. I probably screamed when I saw her head; I don’t remember. The head had been virtually severed, but her eyes remained open. The sight of the inside of her windpipe haunts me to this day.

I filled Mr. Sakamoto’s teacup with more tea and left it for him. I could do nothing more for him or for Miss Tani.

Almost out the back door, I was nearly crushed by my classmates rushing into the building. ‘Look at my arm,’ one said, showing it to me. I saw large dark wet spots. ‘The rain is black…large drops and they hurt when they hit you.’

Before I returned to the school from the shelter, four of the students who suffered the most painful burns had departed for the river. They planned to bathe their wounds in the cooling water. The explosion apparently knocked over the city’s water towers, bringing the pressure to zero at our school. The Urakami River runs through the middle of the town and drains into Nagasaki Harbor. Our school was located a couple hundred meters from the river.

In such a state of shock I don’t know if I made sense, but I attempted to tell the group about the fate of the teachers. I continued trying to get my story out when the four girls returned from the Urakami. All were crying. Two girls could only be described as hysterical. The others attempted to hug us and then quickly pulled away in pain from their burns.

They told us how they reached the river where hundreds of severely burned people were trying to cool their injuries in the water. The girls described many as looking like dead trees with their bark peeling off — skin hanging from their faces and hands. Along the shoreline floated bodies, some stacked two or three deep. A few still moved, lacking the strength to pull themselves out onto the bank.

The parents of several of the girls came to the school and escorted their daughters away. Mine did not. I fretted considerably about that fact. Had they been killed or injured? Trying to brace myself for whatever tragedy I might find at home I set out walking. Two classmates departed with a crutch made from a tree branch to help Haruko with her injured leg.I dutifully strapped my schoolbooks on my back and headed off from the others. On two occasions I found myself lost. The streets were covered with debris and most landmark structures had been demolished by the blast. A ridge of land, some 30 meters high, formed a wall between the river delta of our school and the district containing my home. Guiding on a saddleback in the ridge, I found the path that led to my neighborhood.

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