Hiroshima’s fading legacy: the race to secure survivors’ memories amid a new era of nuclear brinkmanship

Yoshiko Niiyama, who entered Hiroshima two days after it was destroyed by an atomic bomb to search for her father. This year marks the 80th anniversary of the attacks. Photograph: Justin McCurry/The Guardian

The fires were still burning, and the dead lay where they had fallen, when a 10-year-old Yoshiko Niiyama entered Hiroshima, two days after it was destroyed by an American atomic bomb.

“I remember that the air was filled with smoke and there were bodies everywhere … and it was so hot,” Niiyama says in an interview at her home in the Hiroshima suburbs. “The faces of the survivors were so badly disfigured that I didn’t want to look at them. But I had to.”