Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park
The Dagestani poet Rasul Gamzatov, when visiting Hiroshima, was impressed by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and its monument to Sadako Sasaki, a girl who contracted leukemia as a result of the radioactive contamination of the city. Following Japanese traditions, she constructed one thousand paper cranes, hoping (in vain) that this might save her life. The memory of paper cranes folded by this girl—a girl who to this day serves as one symbol of the innocent victims of war—haunted Gamzatov for months and inspired him to write a poem starting with the now famous lines: