Survivors of the first nuclear attack in history, on August 6, 1945 in Hiroshima, have described the "scene of hell" they lived through at the time to Pope Francis, who is visiting Japan to deliver the message of nuclear disarmament.
Yoshiko Kajimoto was a 14-year-old schoolgirl, 2.3 km from ground zero, working that morning at an airplane engine factory when the bomb hit Hiroshima at 08:15 local time. He saw a blue light from the window, then remembers the darkness that covered everything when the factory collapsed. Then she lost consciousness.
He awoke in a landscape of utter destruction and desolation, as if it were night despite the fact that it was day, with a "rotten fish smell" in the atmosphere.
“Where I was, there were people walking side by side, they looked like ghosts, people whose bodies were so burnt that I couldn't tell the men from the women. They were disheveled, with faces so swollen that they had doubled in volume, their lips hanging down, their arms stretched out in front of them, their burnt skin torn to pieces."
"No one in this world can imagine such a scene of hell," the woman told the pontiff.
"In the following days the white smoke had covered everything:Hiroshima was a crematorium".
About 140,000 people were killed instantly and in the following months.
The then teenage girl will feel joy, as she will manage to find her father who was looking for her for three days, but who, however, a year and a half later will vomit blood and die from the effects of radiation. Her mother will endure for five years the "atomic bomb disease", which will finally defeat her.
Yoshiko will be left alone, without her friends, who died from the effects of the nuclear weapon. She herself will suffer from leukemia and a cancer, which will result in the removal of two-thirds of her stomach.
"I am working hard to proclaim that we must not use these terrifying atomic bombs nor let anyone suffer such pain," Kajimoto told Francis.
Koji Hosokawa was 17 years old in 1945 and was 1.3 km from ground zero of the explosion. He couldn't make it to the ceremony. In his message read before the pontiff, he invoked the physical pain of those who, like him, survived, but also referred to the "prejudices" that isolate them.
"I believe that the whole world should be aware that the atomic bombs did not only affect Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the whole of humanity," writes the survivor.