A walk through Hell

by David Benjamin

My mother-in-law is hibakusha, an A-bomb survivor. On the morning of August 6, 1945, she took the last train out of the center of Hiroshima, an area known forever after as Ground Zero. She was a schoolgirl required to work in a munitions plant on the edge of the city. It was there that she saw the weird mushroom cloud. Dutifully, she walked back into the ravaged center, toward her dormitory, not knowing that it was little more, by then, than a pile of ashes. She has described that journey into Hiroshima as “a walk through Hell.” But her account stops there. She says no more. However, her husband, my wife’s father, became active, on her behalf in hibakusha remembrance groups. He made many friends who share the experience of those days in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Because I’m a writer, he asked me to visit and interview one such friend, who was in a hospital near Izu. I was reluctant. I had read many accounts by A-bomb survivors and I couldn’t believe that one more reminiscence could augment the already voluminous public record. Also, I knew a trip to Izu would take up most of a day. However, I couldn’t gracefully refuse.

Our conversation took place in 1995, almost 50 years after the Enola Gay dropped its load. My interview lasted almost four hours because the dying man, Kishi, needed oxygen at regular intervals and was interrupted frequently by visits from nurses. He also slipped occasionally into self-reproachful digressions that made the main thread of his account difficult to follow. I’ve deleted those passages. Everything else is just as he told me.

My name isn’t really Kishi. I don’t suppose it matters any longer whether anyone knows who I am or what I did, But I would be ashamed to tell you this if you knew my real name.

In 1945, I was 38 years old. They had drafted me into the Imperial Navy and assigned me to the Akatsuki Corps at the port of Ujina, near Hiroshima. We were learning how to navigate torpedo boats, to attack American ships when they brought invasion troops. Each of our boats was mounted with two torpedoes. We were supposed to steer toward an American ship and smash into it, igniting the torpedoes. This would blow us up as well as the enemy ship. It’s funny, but I didn’t expect to be blown up. Our boats were flimsy and leaky. The engines often failed. With the weight of the torpedoes in front, we could barely steer. Most of us would drown.

That’s how I expected to die. I was ready to die. It wasn’t a terrifying prospect, really. We knew the war was lost and that the Americans, in revenge, would kill millions in the invasion. Better to die at the beginning.

Then, on the morning of August 6, the Americans dropped this strange, overwhelming bomb. From Ujina, it was a sight that staggered my mind and reached into my soul with a freezing hand. For a moment the flash turned everything white, and then the cloud —

But you know about all that. I’m avoiding what I meant to tell you.

We were ordered into Hiroshima, to help people. That’s what the officers said. “Help people,” they said. They didn’t say how. They didn’t give us any equipment or supplies. So we started out.

As we approached the city, we were surrounded by people from the nearby villages, rushing toward Hiroshima to find their relatives. It was still morning when I saw the first…

I was going to say “survivor,” but I’m sure he didn’t survive. He had managed to walk five or six kilometers because he had been wearing white pants, and so — in the bomb’s flash — his legs weren’t burned. But from his waist up, he was black and red. The black was his skin, burned the color of charcoal. He was red where the skin had peeled away, leaving his raw flesh exposed to the sun and the dust. It was over 32 degrees that day. Blood was flowing from his torso. It had soaked his pants down to his knees.

It’s strange but, I guess, human nature. Instead of rushing to help him, we avoided him. He passed us silently. I don’t think he saw us. I turned after he had passed, and he fell onto the road, suddenly, as though struck by a blow. He didn’t move then.

Soon, there were hundreds like him on the road, burned and blind, moving toward us like roasted ghosts. I can’t forget that. Most horrifying was their silence, as though their voices had been melted shut inside their throats. When they spoke, barely a whisper, mostly they begged us for water. But we’d been told not to give them water, that it was dangerous to do so. I didn’t know why.

We weren’t really soldiers. So, even before we actually entered Hiroshima, we had broken ranks. One by one, we fell away to help one of the awful things who came toward us in waves or lay on the road, reaching out. Their hands had no skin. They were like birds’ claws — just bones covered with blood. I stopped near a fallen man. I thought he was dead. Suddenly, his hand — this claw — reached out and, weakly, he grabbed my leg. He had no clothes and the front of his body — which had faced the flash of the bomb — was burned hideously, like scorched meat. His face was bright red and swollen so big that his eyes seemed to be sealed shut. It looked as though the skin there would burst open any second. Somehow, he spoke. It was only a whisper. Kill me, he said. Please kill me. He kept forcing this out of these lips that were cracked, bleeding through huge cracks. Kill me. Kill me.

I felt in my jacket for my revolver. It was a .22 caliber pistol that had been a gift from my nephew, Toshi. He had taken it from an American prisoner in the Philippines and brought it to me. Toshi died when the Americans retook Luzon. That was when I knew the war was lost, when Toshi died. He was a beautiful child. Smart and happy. He was life itself, until he became death.

After Toshi presented the gun to me with great ceremony and secrecy, I hid it and never touched it until I was ordered into the navy. It’s odd to think of it now, but I was one of only three men in the squad who had a gun. I didn’t see it as very important because I never expected to shoot it. Except for the bullets that were in it when Toshi gave it to me, I had no ammunition. I had never cleaned it. If I shot it, there was a chance it might blow up and kill me.

I pulled my leg free from the burned man and backed away. Kill me, he said. I hurried away from him, hoping he would die soon. I can’t describe my shame. There was nothing I could do to help the man, but I didn’t even try. I’m sorry.

Hiroshima was the same everywhere. The deeper I went into the city, the worse it was. Corpses were everywhere. Fires swept through the ruined buildings. I felt stupid and helpless. I wasn’t a doctor. I wasn’t even a soldier, really. I was just another person, like the dead and the burned things who crawled a little way and then died, too.

Again, one of them reached out and held onto my pants leg. It was a boy, burned worse — if that’s possible — than the man who had begged me to kill him. His hair was burned away and his head was covered with blisters. The left side of his face had peeled away from his head, and half his teeth were exposed like the grin on a skull. From his neck down, all the flesh of his left side was cooked away. His arm was a red bone. His wounds were coated with dirt. The dusty ground beneath him was soaked with his blood. I thought he must die that very instant. Instead, from some terrible reserve of strength, he pulled himself up to his knees. He kneeled there, his living hand clutching at my clothes, his living eye staring at me.

I looked around. None of my comrades were with me any longer. All I could see were fires and corpses. I took the gun from my pocket and put the barrel to the boy’s head, where an eye used to be. He seemed to take a deep breath. He closed his remaining eye. I shot him. He fell over on his right side.

I left him there. I didn’t try to straighten his limbs or move him out of the sun. I just left, quickly. I’m sorry.

As I fled, I looked at the gun. It was dirty, with old bullets. It could have misfired and killed me. It should have. I almost wished it had.

On the next street, I saw two figures approaching me. The smaller one was recognizable. A small girl, perhaps five years old. The other must have been her older sister. She was a vision from Hell. At a distance, her face was a blur of red and the tatters of her dress were wet and shiny with the blood that must have poured from what had been her face. When I came closer, I saw the shards of glass — it must have been a mirror because they reflected the sunlight blindingly — that had pierced her face in dozens of places. She was blind, of course, but when I approached she said, “Is that you, mother?”

Then she fell. She croaked with pain when her head struck the ground. Several shafts of glass fell out and the wounds gushed blood. The little girl asked if I could help find their mother. I told her first I would help the older girl. I carried her away a short distance and lay her down in the shelter of a wall. The little one stood where I had left her, swaying and staring blankly. Everyone was in shock. 

The older sister had been looking in the mirror when the bomb struck. I wondered why. Washing her face, putting on lipstick, wondering if she was pretty. I shot her. The roar of the fires muffled the sound. Her little sister didn’t hear.

I went back to the little one and said, “Your sister needs to rest for a while.” She nodded, with a weariness that spread to me and made my knees weak, and I led her away. We found a first-aid station in a schoolyard. A harried woman handed me mercurochrome to coat the little girl’s wound, and I tore part of my shirt to wrap her arm. Then I lay the girl on one of the straw mats that had been spread on the schoolyard. She was surrounded by burnt, scorched, blackened, dying people. I said, I’ll go get your sister now.”

I was lying, of course.

She said thank you.

The next person I killed was a woman in a building. I heard a voice and looked inside. Her head, her shoulders and one arm were free, but the rest of her body was trapped beneath a pile of rubble. She was crying out feebly, barely able to breathe. The opening through which I saw her was only 10 or 15 centimeters wide. I could reach through and touch her head, but I couldn’t move anything. When I arrived, she was whimpering, clearly in a state of panic, because the flames were about to reach her. They soared into the sky 20 meters, 40 meters high and they swept through an entire building in a few minutes. She could hear the fire coming. When I looked up, it made my face hurt. Through the rubble, she could feel the encroaching heat.

I said, “I can’t get you out,” and her eyes widened with terror, like no emotion I had ever seen. I told her I had a gun. That seemed to calm her fear. She seemed almost… not happy. But relieved. Contented.

She said please. She said it very formally: “Onegai shimasu.” And then she reached up and helped me place the gun barrel on her head where she wanted me to shoot.

The fire almost caught me as I fled. It leapt across whole streets. It screamed and crackled and lunged at me. The sky was black and the air was like breathing flames. In the midst of this, I saw a man standing in a burning plain. He was naked except for the few shreds of his clothing that were still in flames. He held his arms away from his torso, to avoid the pain of touching himself. He fell once, to his hands and knees, and the fire licked up, almost hungrily, at his body. I raised ,my gun and aimed at him, but thought he would just collapse into the flames. Instead, he struggled to his feet again, completely black except for his teeth, clenched together, exposed where his lips had burned away. I shot ’til he fell again. I waited to make sure he didn’t move.

The fire rushed on then, to another part of the city.

An hour later, I stumbled upon a new horror. It was a baby, no more than a year old, alive on the street, face down. Like everything, it was burned, its skin like black scales. It made no sound, but flapped its arms and legs weakly. I was shocked with myself, but I could not help but picture a fish that had been grilled alive. By then, I was acting from instinct. Or habit. I don’t know what to call it. The poor thing was no longer human. I shot it and it stopped moving.

I ran then. I don’t know where, because I had never been in Hiroshima. I ran blindly for a long time, but when I stopped, the scene was unchanged. Death everywhere. I could have had a hundred guns, a thousand bullets, and shot them all day and all night, and still there would have been more people to kill. I knelt down beside a woman. She was naked and burned and horribly swollen.

I thought of shooting her, too. But she shuddered then, a great spasm passing through her body. And she was still.

And in that moment of death, she gave birth. I saw the baby’s head emerge, a blue and pink orb, between the woman’s legs. Stupidly, I tried to shake the dead mother awake. “Your baby,” I said. “Your baby.” When I remembered she could not wake, I forgot the mother for the baby. I was clumsy, but I pulled the baby from the mother’s body. I rubbed its bloody body, hoping for life.

Its cry was more of a whisper, like the first dying man I had met on the road. The navel cord was limp. No blood pumped from the dead mother. I cut the cord with a shard of glass and sealed the end as best I could, with a match. I wrapped the infant in the remnant of my shirt. I looked at its face, felt its body. It was still alive.

I had to find a hospital. With the baby in my arms, I started walking hurriedly, asking people where I could find a hospital. But everyone who wasn’t hideously burned appeared to be in a trance. It seemed like hours before someone told me of the army tuberculosis hospital in Ono, miles outside Hiroshima. He pointed my way and rushed off. Along the way, I kept checking the child’s breath. I found a well outside the remains of a temple. There was a corpse there, with its head in the water. But the water looked all right. I didn’t know then that it was full of radiation. So I dipped a finger and gave the baby a drink.

Later, I met a man who said he had tried to help some of the burn victims by giving them water. One after the other, they drank the water and died. I still don’t understand why. But I thought then that the only difference between that man, who killed the dying with sips of water, and me, who shot them with a gun, was that I meant to kill. He meant to save them. Or at least comfort them. 

Well, it seemed like forever. It was dark when I found the hospital at Ono. I told the baby, “We made it. You will live, in your mother’s place.” I ran inside. It was madness. Scorched bodies, dying people, corpses were lined up on the floors. I looked for a doctor and found a man dressed in a bathrobe and pajamas. He looked unhurt, and so he seemed terribly out of place.

But he was the only one who really belonged there. He announced to me that he was Colonel Ito. He was an officer who had been sent to the hospital for treatment several days earlier. I remember his words: “This is shameful. I am here to get well and return to battle, and lead our empire to victory, in the name of Tenno Heika. My men need me. Japan needs me. I demand that the staff clear this place and send these casualties to civilian hospitals. Where are they all coming from?”

Then he looked down at me. “Who are you, corporal? Why aren’t you with your unit? Your uniform is a disgrace. Why are you carrying that filthy corpse?”

I guess I knew the baby was dead. It had been dead for at least an hour. But I ignored this extra small death until that officer shouted at me. Suddenly, for the first time that day, I was angry. I should have been angry at the Americans, I suppose, for dropping that bomb, to end all bombs. But at that moment, there was only the selfish colonel. I drew my revolver from my pocket and pointed it straight at his heart.

And I shot.

It only clicked. The grilled child I had killed on the road, hours before, had taken my last round.

I put the dead baby in the arms of Colonel Ito then. I dropped the gun. I went away.

That’s what I did. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was there that day, with that fucking gun. I’m sorry that every time I close my eyes, I can see…

When I’m drunk, an odd thing happens. I stop lying to myself and I don’t regret killing those helpless, harmless people. I should have shot more people. I could have helped everyone.

But I ran out of bullets.

I’m sorry.

*          *          *

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Kishi is a fictional character. But his story is based on a collection of remembrances, The Witness of Those Two Days: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, collected by Nihon Hidankyo, the Japanese organization of A-bomb survivors.