Last year, the documentary Atomic People told the stories of some of the survivors of the nuclear bombs dropped in 1945 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most of them nonagenarians, some in their hundreds, they described with unfaltering clarity their experiences of being caught in the blast. They talked of people coming towards them with organs spilling forth, skin peeling off, one carrying a baby “burned black as stone”, and of lives lived thereafter with knowledge that threatened to corrode them from the inside. Some of the estimated 78,000 who died instantly, out of a population of 350,000, left what looked like shadows against the buildings. Others were vaporised without even that tiny trace. Thousands more would die of radiation sickness by the end of the year, and then would begin the long tail of deaths from cancer caused by direct exposure and mutations passed down to later generations. Survivors were known as “hibakusha”, discouraged from speaking about their awful experiences, and were to varying degrees shunned thereafter, finding it difficult to marry and to find employment as people feared to let them “taint” their families or face the horror they embodied.
It was a harrowing, strangely ethereal and delicate 90 minutes of film, as interviewees remembered what their cities were like before the bombs, before the silver shimmer of the B-29 they all recall was first glimpsed against the clear blue sky. They closed their eyes and the very earliest days of childhood lived again. The documentary did not mark any particular anniversary – simply the fact that time was running out for these people, silenced for so long, to tell their stories, allowing them to function, in so far as is ever possible, as the warnings from history they want to pass on.
