Margotlog: Remember Hiroshima
This morning (12/4/2017) the Mpls/St Paul Star Tribune published an article by New York Times writer, Nicholas Kristoff: "Latest missle test conveyed a sobering message." Many of us are jumpy at the bellicosity of North Korea and its threats of exploding a nuclear weapon capable of killing a million U.S. citizens. Terrified all of a sudden, I flit through the empty house, and finally dial my friend Jo outside Tampa. Jo is one of my few connections to the generation that survived World War II. She helped care for my father's first cousins, Eleanora and Sadie when they all lived in Dover, Delaware. Eleanora's husband Dick was killed in 1943 when the Japanese torpedoed his ship in the Pacific. Sadie served in the Waves. My mother was a stay-at-home Mom, and my father did war work because his flat feet made him exempt from active duty.
Though I was born in the midst of war, any trace of that seemed to have evaporated by the time I was old enough to understand what it meant. Growing in the 50s and 60s, with jalopies and sex in the front seat, and parents whose incomes allowed us to move to the suburbs of Charleston, South Carolina, I thought nothing at all about World War II until my uncle Stanley came to visit. He had been a commissioned officer in the Mediterranean as the British and Americans, slowly, very slowly moved into Italy. The only part of his war expeience I heard about had to do with managing tete-a-tetes between Neopolitan prostitutes and American officers. Ah, the joy of the conquoring hero. Those were my war stories.
Now fear of war for the first time lands on my shoulder and clutches at my throat.
At the end of his article about North Korea's nuclean threat, Kristoff writes "let's try talking, rather than risk the first exchange of nuclear weapons in the history of our planet." I stare at these words. Kristoff seems to have forgotten, Hiroshima, the first nuclear decimation of a civilian population in world history. In 1945, soon after U.S. warplanes dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, John Hersey was commissioned by The New Yorker to write a description of the city. In his calm almost uninflected voice, Hersey wrote about six survivors: two doctors, two women, a Protestant clergyman, and a German priest. The New Yorker published this materpiece in one issue. The cover showed ordinary Americans enjoying summertime activities. We have so often wanted to turn aside from whatever threatens our childish sense of well-being
In a June 8th, 2010 article by Jon Michaud appears an excerpt from Hersey's masterpiece:
Father Kleinsorge went to fetch watr for the wounded in a bottle and a teapot...At a beautiful moon bridge he passed a naked, living woman who seemed to have been burned from head to toe and was red all over....When he had given the wounded the water, he made a second trip. This time the woman by the bridge was dead....he heard a voice from the underbrush, "Have you anything to drink?" He saw the uniform....there were twenty men and they were all in exactly the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned, their eyesockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks....Father Kleinsorge got a large piece of grass and drew out the stem to as to make a straw, and gave them all water to drink that way. One of them said, "I can't see anything." Father Kleinsorge answered, as cheerfully as he could, "There's a doctor at the entrance to the park. He's busy now, but he'll come soon and fix your eyes....
...immediately after leaving this horrible sight he stopped on a path by one of the pools and discussed with a lightly wounded man whether it would be safe to eat the fat, two-foot carp that floated dead on the surface of the water. They decided, after some consideration, that it would be unwise.
Hiroshima follows these six survivors through many years. Hersey describes suburbs and inner city. He does not describe the slow rebuilding, though my memory tells me he does chart the six survivors as their extraordinary good fortune sometimes turns into anguish.
Ten years ago, I went as high as I could in Honolulu, where many battleships from World War II remain as warnings and emblems of U.S. participation. The slow, pleasant bus ride up the hills above Honolulu ended a few blocks from a cemetery where were buried American and British war dead. I wanted to find the grave of my dear Eleanora's husband Dick, the husband who never came back, the husband whose death she mourned walking through the midnight streets of Pittsburgh, her mother on one side, her sister on the other.
It is a beautiful cemetery, with a fresh breeze and a vast panorama of blue-green ocean. Close to the ground, the dead lie under small stones, with names and various insignia, identifying their rank and service. They seemed like the tombs of unknowns. All treated alike, all disappeared from the lives they might have had years ago. I wanted to mourn, but I found that I could not. I lay a sprig of wildflowers on Dick's stone and went away. Only now, with fear clutching at my chest do I grasp what Eleanora might have suffered day after day, night after night. No wonder it took her almost a decade to recover. And then she recovered her essential ebulient personality and became a public health nurse whose patients (after various other jobs) became the higher ups in various Washington, D.C. administrations. She watched generals weep and I have no doubt that there was forgiveness but also pain in her care of them.
