Japan’s A-bomb survivors urge the world not to forget

Eighty years on, and with over 12,000 nuclear warheads still in existence in the world, Maroosha Muzaffar asks: are we forgetting the horrors endured by ‘hibakusha’, the survivors?

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She was only eight when she saw people with their skin peeling off, faces swollen beyond recognition, stumbling through a city in flames.

For Keiko Ogura, a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the morning of 6 August 1945 was the day her childhood ended.

She remembers the moment the bomb fell: Hiroshima flattened in an instant, as if a giant had stomped the city into the ground. “Buildings were crushed, and fires broke out everywhere. That night, Hiroshima burned. The entire city kept burning through the night.”

Ogura’s family had moved a year earlier to the far side of a small hill just outside the city centre – a decision, made by her father to avoid air raids, that ultimately saved their lives. The hill stood between their home and the bomb’s hypocentre, shielding them from the full force of the blast.

Scenes of horror surrounded Ogura in the days after the bombing. Survivors had leapt into Hiroshima’s seven rivers to escape the fires, but many drowned or died from their injuries. She remembers the waterways choked with bodies – some drifting downstream, others washing back with the tide, missing limbs and swarmed by flies.

Mass cremations became part of daily life. In front of her home alone, her father cremated around 700 people. “Even children like me had to help carry bodies on straw mats,” she recalled in a video published by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

Nearly eight decades later, those memories remain vivid - etched with scenes of unbearable pain and incalculable loss. For Ogura, they are more than personal recollections. They are warnings. Warnings, she says, that the world must never allow itself to forget.