They Were All Swollen Like Pumpkins

We all hid in the big air raid shelter in Aburagi valley because many bombs were dropped over Urakami on August 1. Then because the raids continued every day, we stayed and slept the shelter from then on.

On August 8 I came home for the first time since leaving for the air raid shelter, and all of my family had a meal together. It had been quite a long time since all the members of the family had last come together. Mother said, "Let's have the usual neighborhood meeting tonight, because we are not sure when we will be able to all meet together again."

The meeting was held at our house. I remember Mother saying to the neighbors, "If the time comes when we have to die, let's die together hand in hand." Every one laughed together at this. Mother was laughing cheerfully, too. The next day we didn't want to leave Mother. Although the air raid warning bell rang, we didn't hurry to the shelter, but continued playing in the house. Mother said to us again and again, "I feel it will be dangerous today, so hurry and hide." But still we didn't leave. Finally she shoved out lunch boxes at us and hurried us off to the air raid shelter. Mother alone stayed in the house and was working busily drawing water for storage and removing the sliding doors to protect their glass windows from the air raid. We were playing in the big air raid shelter that everyone in town had dug at the foot of the mountain. "Flash!"

I only remember an explosion of light. I think now I was knocked down by the bomb blast and fainted. When I became conscious, the air raid shelter was completely packed with people.

How and from where had all these people come, anyway? I couldn't guess how many hundreds of people there were. And still, from the entrance of the shelter, they continued to come in. They were all swollen like pumpkins and were screaming as they came staggering in. Almost all of them had been stripped of their clothes and were naked. Soon it became hard to move because people continued to thrust themselves into the shelter. I tried to move slightly because my body was becoming numb in the cramped space. But when I did the people around me cried out in pain. Everyone was seriously burned or injured. What kind of great air attack had occurred? "This was no small matter," I thought.

Everyone I asked said, "Everything is totally destroyed." But nobody knew what had really happened. I heard lots of voices: parents' voices calling their children, children's voices crying for their parents. All of the voices were mixed and bouncing off the walls of the shelter in a great roar.

I began to worry about Mother. "Is Father all right?" "How about my big brother?" Although time passed, nobody in my family appeared at the entrance of the shelter. But I was too terrified to go out. The roaring of what seemed to be low flving planes could be heard constantly.

The air inside the shelter gradually began to smell. I felt choking and sick. Around five o'clock, I saw Father, who was looking well, come into the shelter. We were so glad to see each other that we cried together.

Father soon took me up in his arms, and passing through and stepping across many people, he brought me out of the shelter. How delicious the fresh air was! I realized then for the first time the smell of air. Soon after that I recovered my spirits and began to treat the injured. As I didn't know how to help, I asked them, "What do you want?". Everybody answered, "Water!" I looked for water, but there was no clean water around there.

There was a little puddle in front of the air raid shelter but the water in it was muddy, so I couldn't give it to the people. While I was worrying about this, one of the injured who looked very, very thirsty crawled out of the shelter and over to the puddle. Putting his lips water, he drank sweetly with a loud sucking sound. When he was satisfied, he tried to turn around to crawl away. But he collapsed almost immediately and never moved again. When I went over to him, he had already died. One after another, the people crawled out of the shelter and drank the water. And after drinking, each one died.

Watching them I thought, "Human beings are sorrowful. We die from only one mouthful of water." Then a woman came to look for her child. She was calling his name loudly but there was no answer from anywhere. The woman looked one by one at the people who had died from drinking the water. All at once she flew to one of them. It was the child she was seeking. The mother held the body in her arms. She put her mouth to his ear and tried calling him in a loud voice. She patted his chest and rubbed the tops of his fingers. She tried everything she could to revive him.

It seemed to me she was gradually going mad. The woman looked about my mother's age, and her son, the student, resembled my big brother. I thought of my own mother and brother. Neither of them had come yet. And my other sister hadn't appeared.

Suddenly, the mother stood up and let go of the corpse. She ran to the people who were giving assistance nearby and grasped the hands of one of them, crying bitterly, "Why didn't you save my child?" I was afraid that I would be grabbed next by the woman.

We saw a student tottering toward us, supported by another's shoulder. When I looked hard at him, I realized that he was my big brother, a medical student. We ran to welcome him. He was breathing with difficulty. As I helped him to the shelter, I saw a young man lying beside a pit. He was one of our neighbors. I took a glance at him, and was given quite a shock. His belly was split open, and his intestines were spilling out. He cried loudly when he heard us approach. "Bring me something ... I'm in such awful pain. Do something for me or kill me! Hey! Give me something to kill myself with. It Hurts! Who … who is there? Help! Soon he lost all consciousness and he died. I became dazed by the terror of it all. Now when I remember that scene, it makes me shudder. That night I became absorbed in taking care of my brother. I also looked after a neighbor woman who was seriously injured and all alone. As my mother still hadn't appeared, I took care of the woman with all my heart as if she were my own mother. But she died before dawn.

I became more and more anxious about my mother. As there were no doctors here, at daybreak we took my seriously injured brother to Nagasaki University Hospital. One of the two chimneys left standing there had been bent in the middle like a broken match stick. Under that, a temporary medical relief station was opened and the doctors and nurses who had survived were working busily. My brother, too, would have been helping a lot of people if only he had not been injured. He was given many injections by a doctor. I was happy to see that, and I believed he would be all right.

But he also was hopeless. On the evening of the fourth day, he called me and said faintly, "Good-bye. Our farewell is near. Carry on my will, Sakue. Study hard and finish what I wanted to do." He said some more. I watched his mouth moving but I couldn't hear his words any more. And then he died.

He was always saying: "I'll study hard to be a great man and good doctor, and I hope someday my name will be world famous. These words have now become my duty, and my mind is always filled with them.

We returned to our house, but it was completely destroyed and half burned. Sitting in front of it, we waited for my mother and big sister. It seemed to me that Mother would suddenly appear, and I waited vacantly for her without doing anything.

Many, many people who were looking for the bodies of their families wandered by. The thought that my mother and sister had been buried under the house suddenly flashed across my mind. So we began digging. We dug and dug, but we couldn't find them. Still we continued to dig as if under a spell. We dug all day long, and finally we found something black. We felt better to see that and continued to dig. It was a corpse as we guessed. Was it Mother? Was it Sister? Or was it someone else? We dug and dug until the whole body appeared. The body was almost completely charred. We came to the head. Strangely the face was not burned and had remained unchanged. It was my big sister whom I had been longing and longing to see. I can't express how happy I was to see her face. I smiled without thinking, and then suddenly I was filled with sorrow and wept. Now only Mother was missing. I looked for her patiently the next day and the day after. Perhaps as a reward for our patience, perhaps at the suggestion of mother's departed soul, we finally found her body in the neighbor's house which she used to visit.

Mother and the lady who lived there had died facing each other. I'm sure they were talking about something. Standing around Mother's corpse we felt a kind of relief and we cried. But we didn't know what to do with the corpse, so we left it alone.

As far as our eyes could see, not even a single green leaf remained, much less any flowers that we could offer to my mother. And there were a lot of things to do for those of us who were still alive. We couldn't stay with our mother or big sister. After about one week, everybody began to burn their family's corpses. It seemed there were no longer severe rules about where to cremate the dead. The people whose relatives died burned them one by one. The bodies that could not be recognized were burned in one heap. We could see far across the destroyed and burned town, and I saw many fires here and there which burned corpses.

Mother was burned up in flames of red and so was my sister. They became only a few bones Picking up the bones, we put them into a wooden tub. I was afraid that they would be angry at this, but the tub was the only thing we could find to use.

After we finished that, we decided to go to our home town in the countryside. As we were making preparations to leave, from somewhere a little girl about three years old appeared before us. When she saw me, she cried, "Big sister!" and hugged me. I was surprised and looked at the child's face, but I couldn't recognize her. I'd never heard her name, didn't have the slightest idea where she was from. Though I explained to her many times that I was not her sister, she clung to me with a smile and insisted, "Yes. You're sister! You are my sister."

I'm sure she had been the only survivor in her family. And she might have had a big sister who looked like She was a very cute little girl. We decided to raise her until somebody in her family could be found. The girl soon became attached to us. We had been lonesome because we had lost three of our own family. And now laughter returned to us as we welcomed a new member into our family. We were stirred to new energy because the innocent child made us laugh. We worked busily preparing to leave Nagasaki. After three days, on the day when we planned to leave, the little girl suddenly disappeared. We sent people after her, but we couldn't find that cute girl again. Finally we gave up looking for her and left for our home town.

Who on earth, who was that pretty girl who looked like an angel?

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