We lost our uncle to the Atomic Bomb and
our two young nieces were killed ;
our younger
sister sufferd burns and our father
died
after six months ; many friends perished.
Iri left Tokyo for Hiroshima on the
first
train from Tokyo, three days after
the Bomb
was dropped. Toshi followed a few days
later.
Two kilometers from the center of the
explosion,
the family house was still standing.
But
the roof and roof tiles were mostly
gone,
windows had been blown out, and even
the
pans, dishes, and chopsticks had been
blasted
out of their places in the kitchen.
In what was left of the burned structure,
rescued bomb victims were gathered
together
and lay on the floor from wall to wall
until
it was full.
We carried the injured, cremated the
dead,
searched for food, and found scorched
sheets
of tin to patch the roof.
With the stench of death and the flies
and
the maggots all around us, we wandered
about
in the same manner as those who had
experienced
the Bomb.
In the biginning of September, back
in Tokyo,
we heard for certain that the war had
ended.
In Hiroshima,we hadn't known.
It had never entered our minds--at
that
time, we couldn't think beyond what
we were
seeing and doing.
Three years passed before we began
to paint
what we had seen. We began to paint
our own
nude bodies to bring back the images
of that
time, and others come to pose for us
because
we were painting the Atomic Bomb.
We thought about a 17-year-old girl having
had a 17-year life span, and 3-year-old child
having had a life of three years.
Nine hundreds sketches were merged
together
to create the first paintings.
We thought we ha painted a tremendous
number
of people, but there were 260,000 people
who died in Hiroshima.
As we prayed for the blessing of the
dead
with a fervent hope that it never happen
again, we realized that even if we
sketched
and painted all oflour lives, we couldn't
never paint them all.
One Atomic Bomb in one indtant caused
the
deaths of more people than we could
ever
portray.
Long-lasting radioactivity and radiation
sickness are causing people to suffer
and
die even now. This was not a natural
disaster.
As we painted, through our paintings,.these
thought came to run through and through
our
mind.
Iri Maruki, Toshi Maruki
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