On August 6,  1945 the city of Hiroshima became the victim of the first recorded use of an atomic bomb dropped on a human population. President Truman, in a bid to end the bloody war with Japan, authorized the use of the newly developed atomic weapon. Nicknamed “Little Boy”, the bomb detonated 1,900 feet over Hiroshima. It eviscerated everything in its vicinity. It’s estimated that 67% of the city’s structures where destroyed or severely damaged, while a gut wrenching 70,000 people were killed in the initial blast. In total, its estimated that upwards of 200,000 people died as a result of radiation damage.

I won’t go into the details of the war. I will say that Hiroshima was selected to be the site of the first bomb because it had high concentration of troops, military facilities and factories not damaged in the war. Tragically, there was a large civilian population in the area. Thousands of children and women died as collateral damage in this attack.

No one knew the attack was coming. It was a calm and sunny Monday morning. People were casually going about their daily morning routines. When the bomb detonated, those closest to the explosion died instantly. Their bodies turned to black char and ash. The white light acted like a giant flashbulb, burning dark patterns of clothing onto the skins of people and created shadows on walls indicating the places where people died. After the detonation there was a “blast wave” that knocked people off their feet. One boy was blown through the windows of his house and across the street as the building collapsed behind him. Within minutes, 9 out of 10 people who where half a mile or less from ground zero were dead. In a blink of an eye thousands of humans where wiped off the face of the earth.

After the bombing, many doubted that Hiroshima could ever recover from such a devastating attack. Yet (somehow) it has, maybe to a fault. Today the only building in Hiroshima that has not been razed or rebuilt is the Genbaku Domu. It survived the blast because it was located exactly below where the bomb detonated. The damage radiated outward, allowing this building to survive. It was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996. Today it’s the only building from that event that (hauntingly) remains standing.

So the question is, how do you preserve the history of this tragedy as a reminder of why we should never allow the use of an atomic bomb ever again?

An impossible task that somehow the Japanese have managed to pull off with the moving “Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum”. The focus of this museum is on the human causalities. Through pictures, personal artifacts and stories of the human devastation the event is perfectly memorialized. When I walked through this museum there was a solemn quiet. I couldn’t help but shed tears over the victims stories.