Elderly survivors of Hiroshima worry the world will forget
Koko Kondo had a secret mission as a little girl: revenge.
Ms Kondo was determined to find the person who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, who caused the suffering and the terrible burns she saw on girls’ faces at her father’s church, then attack them.
The atomic bomb that exploded in her city 75 years ago did not only kill and maim. Its survivors have lived for decades with lingering shame, anger and fear.
Some hid their status as survivors. Some harboured thoughts of vengeance. Some watched as loved ones died, one by one, from radiation sickness, and wondered, “Will I be next?” With an average age now of 83, many feel an extreme urgency. They are desperate to rid the world of nuclear weapons and warn others of the horror they witnessed on August 6, 1945.
Ms Kondo’s chance came in 1955, when she was 10. She appeared on the US TV show This
is Your Life with her father. Ms Kondo stared in hatred at another guest, Capt Robert Lewis , the co-pilot of the B-29 plane Enola Gay, which dropped the atomic bomb on her city.
While she wondered whether she would act on her fantasy, the host asked Capt Lewis how he felt after dropping the bomb.
“Looking down from thousands of feet over Hiroshima, all I could think of was, ‘God, what have we done?’” he said.
Ms Kondo saw tears well in Capt Lewis’ eyes, and her hatred melted away.
“He was not a monster; he was just another human being,” she said. “I knew that I should hate the war, not him.”
Ms Kondo said she was grateful to have met Capt Lewis because it helped to dispel the hatred within her.
For 70 years, Lee Jong-keun, 92, kept as secret that he was an atomic bomb survivor, not even telling his wife, always fearing people might notice the burn scars on his face.
But today Mr Lee, a second-generation Korean born in Japan, is speaking out.
“Survivors won’t be here 20 years from now but our stories must be,” he said, as he prepared to meet Prime Minister Shinzo Abe after today’s ceremony, to demand Japan does more to ban nuclear weapons.
About 20,000 ethnic Korean residents of Hiroshima are believed to have died in the attack.
The city had many Korean workers, some of whom were forced to work without pay under Japan’s 1910-1945 colonisation of the Korean Peninsula.
On the morning of August 6, 1945, Mr Lee, then 16, watched the blue summer sky turn ochre.
He suffered burns on his face and neck that took four months to heal.
When Mr Lee returned to work, colleagues stayed away, saying he had “A-bomb disease”.
“I ask younger people to never forget us and to understand the tragedy, absurdity and cruelty of the war so that nuclear weapons will be eliminated from the world as soon as possible,” Mr Lee said.