Rochdale
and
Littleborough Peace Group members gathered beside Hollingworth
Lake on Sunday
night (5 August 2012) to mark the 67th anniversary of
the dropping
of the first Atomic bomb on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
in 1945 and to
commemorate all who have died or been injured in war. They
shared readings and floated
lanterns with a variety of messages, including “Scrap Trident
Now”, “No More
Hiroshimas”, “No More War” and “No More Nagasakis”.
The
readings
included extracts from speeches made survivors of the bombing of
Nagasaki at
the 3rd Nagasaki Global Citizens’ Assembly for the Elimination
of Nuclear
Weapons in 2006. Sakue Shimohira who was 10 years old at the
time of the
bombing said then, “To tell the truth, I’d like to lock away
that painful and
sorrowful scar at the bottom of my heart, and not talk about it.
But 61 years
after that unforgettable day, I feel that I must pass the story
on. … All I
could do was scream, “Mummy, help me!” My younger sister had
been sent flying
by the blast, and I had no idea what had happened to my friends.
… The shelter
stank of charred corpses, and we vomited as we waited for help.
… My foster
father had come to rescue us. He helped us outside, and again I
was shocked:
not a single house was left standing. There was nothing but a
mountain of
charred corpses and rubble.” Meanwhile Koichi Wada reports that
“The streets
and neighbourhoods were like replicas of a hell on Earth … It
was not until 30
years later, when my first grandchild was born, that I began to
recall the
corpses of infants in the rubble after the atomic bombing and to
feel a
pressing duty to ensure that the atrocities of that day are
never repeated.”
Philip
Gilligan,
on behalf of the Peace Group, said,
