New pictures of Hiroshima’s devastation following the atomic bombing on August 6, 1945, have come to light.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reports that the death toll from the nuclear blast ranges from 110,000 to 210,000. People who stayed in Hiroshima after the bombing experienced a reality that not many other people on Earth experienced.
Since Ben Green’s great uncle, Dr. Bernie Greenwald, first showed him these pictures when he was a little boy, he has never forgotten them. Green remembers his uncle’s story of his trip to Hiroshima as if it were yesterday.
After the war ended, Greenwald continued to pursue photography as a pastime. The collection includes images of Japanese warships that went down at sea. Green also has a propeller piece that belonged to a kamikaze pilot that his great uncle found after it struck the USS Dorsey.
A peek of the devastation may be seen in the photographs. Destroyed buildings, downed trees, and people sifting through the rubble in search of signs of their previous lives.
According to Green, he was around seven or eight years old when he first saw the pictures, and the impact of what he witnessed was profound. He said that the danger of becoming desensitized to disasters lies in the fact that these ideas can become too abstract. I was still quite sensitive to them when I first saw them. I was still a stranger to the world’s disorderly condition.
Despite never seeing each other again, Green said that his uncle had a long-lasting friendship with a Japanese doctor whom he aided during his time in office.
Greenwald died at the age of 97, and the stories he chronicled and the images he captured will live on. He was deeply affected by the acts of generosity that occurred in the wake of Hiroshima. The circumstance encapsulates the vast array of human emotions, encompassing both the most devastating weapon ever unleashed on humans and their inhumane treatment of one another.
Green has expressed his hope that his uncle’s photographs may one day be part of a museum collection or some other repository documenting the Hiroshima events.
He said he decided to post them on Reddit under the pseudonym u/LurkerFailsLurking in reaction to a computer-generated animation he saw online that, in his opinion, failed to convey the full force of the incident.
Ultimately, he only wants them to document what happened and what remained after August 6, 1945.
