Survivor’s story highlights horror of atomic weapons
Originally published at People’s World.
It was early in the morning and 7-year-old second-grader Michiko Kodama was learning her lessons with her classmates when the life she knew — the world she knew — came suddenly to an end.
There was a blinding flash of light and an enormous explosion. The school roof fell in, literally. The windows shattered into hundreds of shards of glass. Many impaled her, leaving her dazed and bleeding. When she made it to the nurse’s station, there were no medicines, bandages or gauze to help heal her.
Kodama, you see, was a schoolgirl in Nagasaki, Japan, that day, August 9, 1945, when the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on that Japanese city, her home. It exploded 600 meters above and several blocks away from the school, and changed her life forever. It was the U.S.’s second A-bomb of Japan, after the destruction of Hiroshima three days before.
Kodama, now 81, brought her story — with pictures — to a meeting in D.C. on August 5, remembering the carnage wrought by those two bombs, which U.S. warplanes let loose. The two bombs ended World War II, but they also left hundreds of thousands of people dead, then and down through the years.
And they left survivors, such as Kodama, a polite slim woman who does not look her age, and who is now secretary-treasurer of a worldwide confederation of nuclear bomb survivors, to lead a movement to ensure such obliteration never happens again. They’re campaigning for the elimination of all 13,586 nuclear weapons the nations of the world hold.
Kodama, now a grandmother, saw even worse after her father came to the school to get her.
“I saw a mother carrying her baby and it was totally burned,” she said…
