The first time I arrived in Hiroshima I was humbled. As a history student and a journalist I ought to have known much more. I ought to have realized what the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki meant. But I didn’t.

       Not until I had met the survivors, hibakusha. When I had heard them tell about their experiences I decided to try to contribute what I could, as an historian and a journalist, in spreading knowledge about the effects of nuclear weapons. Especially important 65 years afterwards is the long-term psychological effects, lasting generations.

      Almost every one of us has seen the pictures of the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Maybe we have also seen the almost complete destruction of Hiroshima, a large city on the banks of a river with five arms. In that desert, in an instant, only very few buildings were left standing. One of them, the skeleton of a former industrial exhibition hall, is the symbol of the slogan ”No more Hiroshimas”. It is preserved to our days.

      Since that first time I have visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki on many occasions. My doctoral dissertation in history, The Atomic Bomb Suppressed. American Censorship in Occupied Japan (M.E. Sharpe 1991) studies censorship of all material concerning the atomic bombings by the American occupation authorities 1945-1949. It included even a young girl’s eyewitness account.

          In the novel Hiroshima överlever (Hiroshima survives, Bonniers 1982; transl. into German Wir sind die Angst der Welt, Fischer Taschenbuch 1984), I describe the means that the hibakusha use to come to terms with the fact that they did survive – and the way a well-informed non-Japanese university professor tries to cope with meeting them.

      In later research, I have followed how the survivors have been and still are discriminated against – and how the atomic bombings influence not only themselves but also their children and grandchildren.

      All the hibakusha are old. They are survivors of that, which changed the future of mankind forever. We must listen to their experiences to save ourselves.

Read more:

Hiroshima, the survivors and us

2010  Hiroshima Alliance for Nuclear Weapons Abolition Appeal.pdf

Below are books where Monica Braw has written about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the effects of the atomic bombings on the survivors: