It has been sixty-five years since the Allies dropped atomic bombs on the unsuspecting populace of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A couple of weeks back the world remembered the thousands and thousands of people who lost their lives, either on that day or for years afterwards from diseases caused by their exposure to radiation – people whose only fault was being born into one country and not another. No one asked for their opinion when their country went to war – they did not matter. And yet it was they who paid for it. With their lives.
And all the children who died… Imagine the magnitude of human potential lost in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (or for that matter, in the gas chambers of Germany, or on the bloodied roads of Nanking). One such child was Sadako Sasaki.
Sadako was only two years old at the time of the first bomb and about 1.7 km away from ground zero. She survived. Only to die ten years later from leukaemia – the atom bomb disease. The story goes that when Sadako was slowly wasting away in the hospital she was paid a visit by her best friend, who made an origami paper crane for her and told her about the Japanese saying that one is granted a wish if one folds a thousand paper cranes. Inspired by this, Sadako started making paper cranes – her wish, to live. There are two versions of whether Sadako managed to finish a thousand. According to one she completed 644, and according to another she completed a thousand and kept folding more. But she died any way, on the morning of October 25, 1955, at the age of 12.
The Children’s Peace Monument in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park has immortalized Sadako where she is placed on top, holding a crane. The base of the monument reads,
“This is our cry. This is our prayer. Peace on Earth”
Sixty-five years have passed and the prayer has yet to be answered.
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