2023-06-08 14:55:02
When Captain William Parsons pushed the button on Monday, August 6, 1945, the world changed forever. The bomb took 55 seconds to reach the height determined for its explosion, 600 meters above Hiroshima. The projectile did not fall on the intended target, but 250 meters away, specifically, on the Shima Surgical Clinic. The temperature rose a million degrees Celsius and, in just a few seconds, the two gigantic fireballs that formed killed between 60,000 and 80,000 Japanese.
70,000 people were also injured, some of whom were interviewed by Agustín Rivera, a former correspondent in Japan and author of ‘Hiroshima: Testimonies of the last survivors’ (Kailas, 2023). One of the survivors, Mori-san, who was 19 years old when the bomb was dropped and was at her school, recalls that tragic day:
“The temperature was a hundred times higher than now. Some people fell into the river and drowned. Many corpses floated in the water. They smelled dead, like rotten fish. I still see the black color of decomposed bodies. The few people who were in the street had their backs charred and maggots were coming out of the rotting corpses. The wounded walked in silence.
In the podcast we rescued this and other testimonies from those known as ‘hibakusha’, the still-living victims of the atomic bombs, and we interviewed Rivera about his encounter with them.
Credits
Screenplay and production: Israel Viana.
Editing: Manuel Garre.
Voice over: Manuel Garre, Israel Viana, Javier Díaz Guardiola, Blanca Nava, Pablo Ortega and María Romero
Collaboration: Agustin Rivera.
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