Bodies burned beyond recognition can still walk painfully to the makeshift clinics in the elementary and junior high schools. Mothers carry their dead babies on their backs. Everyone is dazed. No one knows what to do. And as the first months pass, radiation sickness becomes evident.
People drop like flies for no apparent reason.
Amazingly there are still some people alive. But 3 and one half years after the blast, the first case of leukemia is documented and Hiroshima begins yet another fight. One of my students, and fortyish English teacher, tells a story of when she went to this museum on a junior high school field trip. She walked around laughing and talking with her friends. Suddenly, they came upon an old man who was simply standing before a display of a partially burned elementary school uniform shirt.