The Hiroshima's story as you've never seen it before

These six stories are included in John Hersey's indispensable journalistic report, which became a phenomenon, about what happened that August 6, 1945 in Hiroshima and its terrible consequences.

A priest, a doctor, a clerk, the widow of a sewer, a surgeon, and a reverend, how did they experience the attack on Hiroshima? In this Pulitzer Prize-winning report, we find the revelation of the horror within the first atomic bomb detonation in an urban place, in the final chapter, we find the life stories of these six survivors.

The first chapters were at the time,1946, individual stories, published for The New Yorker magazine. Each one portrays a person's experience from the moments before the explosion to a few days later. The stories they tell the distressing moments, the confusion after the explosion, a scene full of corpses in the streets, people totally burned, disfigured, mutilated, in a shattered city; filled with the sound of screams, the pleas of people who were injured or who were asking for help to get their loved ones out of the rubble.

Later that desolation became greater with the main hospital collapsing, most of the injured doctors unable to work and the hopelessness of the promised help that did not arrive in time, leaving thousands of silent deaths as well. Only days and weeks after the events the Japanese did not know about the nature of the bombs (Nagasaki was bombed three days later) of which they were victims.

Almost 40 years later, in 1986, Hersey returns to give us the last chapter that consists of the portrait of the lives of the 6 survivors, what the radiation caused on them, and their experience as hibakushas. These are also mediated by notes on the nuclear development that proliferated in the following decades, the public opinion about the Americans, and the focus given to the commemoration of the attacks in this period of time.

A story that touches us from our deep human side, that borders on political criticism, that lets us see from the eyes of those who witnessed it: the horrors, the feelings, the raw images, and the opinions. A complete picture to try to imagine the pain caused by the atomic bomb and what happened around this historical event that was not enough to stop nuclear development.

This is what turns Hiroshima by John Hersey in a journalism classic, an indispensable reading to get to understand the impact of an atomic bomb in times where it starts to be relevant again, facing the threats of a possible new cold war.