Thursday 6 August 2015 / Hour 1, Block D: Charles Pellegrino, author (Last Train from Hiroshima)and explorer, in re: the seventieth anniversary of Hiroshima. August 6, 1945: Uranium bomb dropped at 8:15 AM (JST). . . . Some people left Hiroshima after the bombing, took a train to Nagasaki – and survived the second bomb. These are called "double survivors." Most of the young people, including single-survivors, were on work detail to tear down houses to build firebreaks against possible firebombing. One young girl, Tamiko Morimoto, survived; Charlie met her five years ago and heard her story.

"Just returned from the 70th anniversary Hiroshima memorial service at New York's Society for Ethical Culture. It included perhaps the most beautiful rendition of Ave Maria I've ever heard, during which I could only think of the "burnt Maria" at Urakami Cathedral. Having known through the years more than 100 survivors, the moment of silence during the 43 seconds the bomb dropped brought to mind rolling flash-overs of where each name was, on the map, and what was about to happen to them during the next 20 minutes, 70 years ago today. If everyone could know even ten of those names and places, and visualize it at that moment, there would never be another atomic bombing.

"Tomiko Morimoto West spoke to us. I had interviewed her in 2010. Her experience was much the same as that of other student work-crew survivors at her radius from the hypocenter. But tonight she told a story that she had kept to herself until correspondence with a friend just this week. She was 13 at the time, a typical teenager for any time in history. On the morning of the first atomic bomb, she argued with her mother, and she had no way of knowing, as she angrily slammed the door on her way to her school work detail, that she would never see her mother again. Her lesson to us all - to all families tonight - and as a hibakusha (the exposed) was: never, ever to say goodbye to a loved one without a sign of love; and especially in these times when, if our leaders are unwise, and fail to pay attention, we could all become hibakusha, anywhere, at any moment."

Of all the survivors I've met, of Japanese bombs and WWII Holocaust, almost everyone has devoted his life to helping others.