Hiroshima survivor encourages UW grads
Nobel Peace Prize winner Setsuko Thurlow urges grads to find a cause to make their own
WATERLOO — Hiroshima bombing survivor and activist Setsuko Thurlow recounted the horrors she witnessed, and urged University of Waterloo students to take up the cause of forever banishing all nuclear weapons.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner spoke Wednesday at a convocation ceremony at the university, where she received an honorary doctor of laws degree.
Thurlow was 13 when a nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, suddenly turning a “bright summer morning” into one of Japan’s darkest days, as the sky filled with smoke and dust from the mushroom cloud.
“I survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima,” Thurlow said. “Even as many of my schoolmates and relatives did not.”
Thurlow was rescued from a collapsed building and became witness to the terrible toll on the innocent people caught in the nuclear blast — what she called “an indiscriminate massacre.”
Classmates were burned alive and she watched a “procession of ghostly figures slowly shuffling from the ground zero of the detonation with skin and flesh hanging from their bones.”
“Some carried their own eyeballs in their hands,” Thurlow said.
The victims who survived were convinced no human being should have to experience what they did that day, nor the unspeakable pain that haunts them still.
“Our mission was to warn the world about the danger of this ultimate evil,” she said.
Thurlow, who immigrated to Canada in 1962 where she earned a master’s degree in social work at University of Toronto, has dedicated her life to advocating for a complete ban on all nuclear weapons.
As a representative of the International Campaign to Abolish
Nuclear Weapons, Thurlow was a co-recipient of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize.
She became a member of the Order of Canada in 2006.
“I hope you can join me in this cause,” Thurlow told the auditorium of graduating students and their families.
“And I hope you can find one to make your own.”