Father wilhelm kleinsorge biography channel

“Ground zero.”

Such haunting words. They bring to mind, of course, the hideous images from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Unforgettable in their horror. And, ever since, the words “Ground Zero” have become embedded in our collective vocabulary.

The words “Ground Zero” became embedded in another generation’s vocabulary as well. Almost eight decades ago, on August 6, 1945. On that day U.S. forces dropped the atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. “Ground Zero” for Hiroshima was a one-mile radius in the center of the city, an area in which an estimated 150,000 people lost their lives in the aftermath of the explosion. Hiroshima was targeted because it was one of the most important communications and military centers in the country.

The purpose of this first nuclear attack in history was to expedite the end of World War ll and save the lives of potentially thousands of Allied soldiers and civilians. Three days later the atom bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki.

In Hiroshima, it was reported that everything within a one-mile radius of Ground Zero was destroyed. But that wasn’t quite accurate. A group of four Jesuit priests who lived within that radius survived. The bomb exploded eight blocks from their parish church, the Church of Our Lady’s Assumption.

He, like all the citizens of Hiroshima, however, was feeling unusually jittery that day. Like his neighbor, Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, he was “almost sick with anxiety” in those early August days of 1945. Air-raid sirens were a nightly feature of life in the city. Of all the major cities in Japan, only two, Hiroshima and Kyoto, had not yet been a

The BBC had also invited John Hersey to be interviewed and his cabled reply is in the BBC archives:

"Hersey gratefullest invitation and BBC interest and coverage Hiroshima but has throughout maintained policy let story speak for itself without additional words from himself or anybody."

Indeed, Hersey was only to give three or four interviews his entire life. Sadly not one of them was for the BBC.

A 1948 recording of a reading of Hiroshima remains in the BBC archives. The effect of the crisp English voices telling this harrowing story is startling. The prose is revealed as rhythmic and often quietly poetic and ironic. One of the readers is the young actress Sheila Sim, newly married at the time to the actor Richard Attenborough.

By November, Hiroshima was published in book form. It was translated quickly into many languages and a braille edition was released. However, in Japan, Gen Douglas MacArthur - the supreme commander of occupying forces, who effectively governed Japan until 1948 - had strictly prohibited dissemination of any reports on the consequences of the bombings. Copies of the book, and the relevant edition of The New Yorker, were banned until 1949, when Hiroshima was finally translated into Japanese by the Rev Mr Tanimoto, one of Hersey's six survivors.

Hersey never forgot his survivors. In 1985, on the 40th anniversary of the bomb, he went back to Japan and wrote The Aftermath, the story of what had happened to them in the intervening four decades. Two of them had since died, one of them certainly from radiation-related disease.

I—A Noiseless Flash

At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk. At that same moment, Dr. Masakazu Fujii was settling down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital, overhanging one of the seven deltaic rivers which divide Hiroshima; Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, stood by the window of her kitchen, watching a neighbor tearing down his house because it lay in the path of an air-raid-defense fire lane; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest of the Society of Jesus, reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order’s three-story mission house, reading a Jesuit magazine, Stimmen der Zeit; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young member of the surgical staff of the city’s large, modern Red Cross Hospital, walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood specimen for a Wassermann test in his hand; and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, paused at the door of a rich man’s house in Koi, the city’s western suburb, and prepared to unload a handcart full of things he had evacuated from town in fear of the massive B-29 raid which everyone expected Hiroshima to suffer. A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition—a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the next—that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew anything.

The Reverend Mr. Tanimoto go

In August, 1946, a year after the bombing of Hiroshima, Hatsuyo Nakamura was weak and destitute. Her husband, a tailor, had been taken into the Army and had been killed at Singapore on the day of that city’s capture, February 15, 1942. She lost her mother, a brother, and a sister to the atomic bomb. Her son and two daughters—ten, eight, and five years old—were buried in rubble when the blast of the bomb flung her house down. In a frenzy, she dug them out alive. A month after the bombing, she came down with radiation sickness; she lost most of her hair and lay in bed for weeks with a high fever in the house of her sister-in-law in the suburb of Kabe, worrying all the time about how to support her children. She was too poor to go to a doctor. Gradually, the worst of the symptoms abated, but she remained feeble; the slightest exertion wore her out.

She was near the end of her resources. Fleeing from her house through the fires on the day of the bombing, she had saved nothing but a rucksack of emergency clothing, a blanket, an umbrella, and a suitcase of things she had stored in her air-raid shelter; she had much earlier evacuated a few kimonos to Kabe in fear of a bombing. Around the time her hair started to grow in again, her brother-in-law went back to the ruins of her house and recovered her late husband’s Sankoku sewing machine, which needed repairs. And though she had lost the certificates of a few bonds and other meagre wartime savings, she had luckily copied off their numbers before the bombing and taken the record to Kabe, so she was eventually able to cash them in. This money enabled her to rent for fifty yen a month—the equivalent then of less than fifteen cents—a small wooden shack built by a carpenter in the Nobori-cho neighborhood, near the site of her former home. In this way, she could free herself from the charity of her in-laws and begin a courageous struggle, which would last for many years, to keep her children and herself alive.

The hut had a d