One of the most significant visits I had this year was in the atomic bombing sites of Nagasaki and Hiroshima – two major cities of Japan. 65 years ago, to “force” the unconditional surrender of the Japanese nation aligned to the axis power (Nazi Germany), the Americans, together with the Allied forces (UK, Russia, China) decided to go ahead with the bombing of the two cities.On August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m. Tokyo time, a B-29 plane dropped a uranium atomic bomb, code named "Little Boy" on Hiroshima. In minutes, half of the city vanished. On August 9, 1945 at 11:02 a.m., the atomic bomb, known as the "Fat Man", exploded over the north factory district at 1,800 feet above the city to achieve maximum blast effect.
Within the first two to four months of the bombings, the acute effects killed 90,000–166,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 in Nagasaki, with roughly half of the deaths in each city occurring on the first day. In both cities, most of the dead were civilians. For more information, visit this site.
The first-hand visit to these places this year sort of awakened me: how much we here in the West have spoken of the Jewish Holocaust, and how so little of the not-so-different Japanese Holocaust that took place in the East. The photographs of the victims and survivors, as well as the burnt-bodied mannequins set up in the Nagasaki and Hiroshima museum sometimes haunt me like ghosts: I could clearly see the hanging, peeling skin, the wet red flesh and burning hair…
And I realize, it’s not only me. The story continues. See this Japanese Art Exhibit, Hibakusha, referring to the bomb-affected people, recently opened in London.
Last August 6, for the first time, the United States of America who dropped the bomb, sent a representative to attend the celebration at Hiroshima. The mayor of the City welcomed Washington's decision to send US Ambassador John Roos, saying he hoped the event would boost global denuclearization. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who also attended the ceremony for the first time, presented flowers at the Eternal Flame in Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park, and challenged the public to a way forward: "Life is short, but memory is long," he said. "For many of you, that day endures... as vivid as the white light that seared the sky, as dark as the black rains that followed." He told the gathered crowd of 55,000 people from 74 nations that the time had come to move from "Ground Zero, to Global Zero" - a world without any nuclear weapons. Read more here.What moved me to come back to this blogsite and write of my experience after months of silence? Or should I say “Who?” Could it be the saint whose memorial we celebrate today – Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, nee Edith Stein, a Jewish philosopher, convert to the Catholic faith, Carmelite nun and martyr at Auschwitz in 1942?
Canonized by Pope John Paul II on October 11, 1998 and proclaimed as one of the Patron Saints of the European Continent, Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, was herself a victim of the Jewish Holocaust. She was born on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, in 1891 in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), the youngest of eleven children in a devout Jewish family.I would like to end my sharing with this excerpt from the homily of Pope John Paul II during the Saint’s canonization: “A few days before her deportation, the woman religious had dismissed the question about a possible rescue: "Do not do it! Why should I be spared? Is it not right that I should gain no advantage from my Baptism? If I cannot share the lot of my brothers and sisters, my life, in a certain sense, is destroyed".
The Pope then pronounces his challenge which I would like to cite here so that we may never forget that we are part of one and the same human race and that hopefully, more and more we cross beyond our borders and embrace all peoples especially those who are still suffering because of our inhumanity to one another: “From now on, as we celebrate the memory of this new saint from year to year, we must also remember the Shoah, that cruel plan to exterminate a people a plan to which millions of our Jewish brothers and sisters fell victim. May the Lord let his face shine upon them and grant them peace (cf. Nm 6: 25f.). For the love of God and man, once again I raise an anguished cry: May such criminal deeds never be repeated against any ethnic group, against any race, in any corner of this world! It is a cry to everyone: to all people of goodwill; to all who believe in the Just and Eternal God; to all who know they are joined to Christ, the Word of God made man. We must all stand together: human dignity is at stake. There is only one human family. The new saint also insisted on this: "Our love of neighbour is the measure of our love of God. For Christians and not only for them no one is a "stranger'. The love of Christ knows no borders".
