Suspected by both sides for his eagerness to create a religious community in a Japan hostile to any Westerner, Pedro Arrupe went from being a collateral victim for the United States in a few days in its decision to end the Pacific War in a sudden way – thus, in its textuality – to a hero for the spoils of the Empire of the Rising Sun for his courage in helping the victims of the nuclear bomb that devastated Hiroshima, the first launched on the civilian population.
The Jesuit who had insisted so much on following in the evangelizing footsteps of Saint Francis Xavier in Japan was, along with the Jesuit community settled in Hiroshima, another victim of that barbarism. Although he, the thirty novices he was training and the other four religious who professed his faith in the church built in the center of the city miraculously managed to survive. To a large extent, because both the seminary that Arrupe directed and the temple were built and cushioned both the shock wave and the heat released by the explosion, which reached a thousand degrees.
In its aberrational decision, the Truman Administration was not only aware of the presence of a Christian community made up of Western religious in Hiroshima, but also considered that their sacrifice, like that of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, was inevitable in order to bend the will of the Emperor Hirorito and force him to a humiliating surrender, even though he and his family got off scot-free by the victors’ own will.
At the time of the terrifying explosion, Arrupe and his novices were in the company’s house in Nagatsuka, barely six kilometers from ground zero, where the other four Jesuit priests were. Instead of determining the evacuation, the superior ordered the novices to go in search of food and medicine to care for the largest number of wounded. Likewise, as soon as the flames that had just destroyed the city had died down, he led an expedition to the center of the city in search of the brothers who were there.
Father Arrupe’s testimony of the great human tragedy left behind by the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, stark, was the first vision with Western eyes of the barbarism that had generated a strategic decision taken coldly thousands of kilometers away. This is how he explained it two years later before a commission of American journalists and this is how he left it written in his memoirs, from which we collect an excerpted fragment.
In order to understand what was the scenario on which the atomic bomb represented its tragedy, it is convenient to remember something of what has already been said about the city and add some additional information. Its inhabitants exceeded 400,000, that is, a little more than Seville. And its incomparably greater extension, because apart from a few cement buildings that rose magnificently in the center of the city, dominating the plain, all the others were typically Japanese, one or two stories, built with wood as an element of resistance, and reeds, mud, cardboard and strong paper as complementary. And on the ground this always, rice straw in a fine mat fabric that was to be a frighteningly fast fuel when the apocalyptic hour of the final cry sounded.
Militarily it had an undeniable value. It was not a city that bordered the skies with the warlike smoke of war factories, but it was a military port for the embarkation and disembarkation of troops, perhaps the most important of those that gazed confidently at the southern seas. Every week, with a constancy that was never interrupted by the war, we saw the double parade of the new uniforms who went to the front to receive their blood circumcision, and those who came devastated with the pain of the fight, and the hope of victory. .
We Jesuits then had two houses in Hiroshima: one in the center of the city that was the parish, and the other in Nagatsuka, six kilometers from the cozy center of the metropolis that was the novitiate. I had been there for several years. Thirty-five Jesuits formed the core of the community. The most striking thing about the entire war, in the Hiroshima sector, was the absolute peace in which the American aviation left the city. Relatively close were other large cities such as Kure, and further on Osaka and Kobe, which had been fiercely bombed.
The population of Hiroshima, at first, went to sleep in the caves carved into the neighboring mountains, but seeing that time passed without the tranquility being disturbed by anything other than the unpleasant and insistent whistle of the sirens, they gradually recovered their consciousness. confidence lost in the first moments. After some time, he preferred to expose himself to die between sheets than to live among cobwebs, catching rheumatism, suffering from pneumonia, ending up dying with all the discomforts of his new subterranean existence.
Life slipped by without abnormalities. Every day, at 5:30 in the morning, a B-29 crossed the sky over the city, only once dropping a bomb on us. Such was his perseverance that naturally and with a bit of fine irony he was baptized with the name of the American mail. On August 6, 1945, it was the only one, the first and the last, that entered the new road. At 7.55 a second alarm signaled us that the enemy was approaching.
At a great height another B-29 passed without anyone worrying about it. There were so many times that we saw air formations of 200 and more aircraft cross at a distance! At 8:10 a.m. the end of danger was sounded and the population prepared to continue their lives along the ordinary path of routine. At the wrong time they stopped playing the sirens. Barely five minutes had elapsed, it was 8:15 a.m., when a flash like magnesium tore through the blue of the sky.
I, who was in my office with another father, immediately stood up and looked out the window. At that moment, a deaf and continuous roar, more like a waterfall that breaks in the distance than like a bomb that instantly explodes, reached us with terrifying force. He shook the house. The shattered glass fell, the doors were unhinged, and the Japanese partitions, made of mud and reeds, broke like a playing card crushed by a gigantic hand.
That terrible force that we thought was going to tear the building from its foundations knocked us to the ground with the slap of its thrust. And while we covered our heads with our hands, in an instinctive gesture of defense, a continuous rain of shattered remains fell on our bodies lying motionless on the ground. When that earthquake ended we stood up, both fearing to see the other hurt. Fortunately we were unharmed, with no more consequences than the natural bruises from the fall.
We went to tour the house. My great concern was the 35 young Jesuits for whom, as superior, I was responsible. When I passed through the last of the rooms, I saw that there was not a single person injured and that the explosion had caused nothing but destructive material damage. With that natural curiosity that one experiences after danger, we all went out into the garden to see where the bomb had fallen that had made us roll, so impolitely, in time with its vibrations.
But our efforts to find the spherical footprint of its fall were useless. There was not the slightest trace there. The garden, the orchard, everything as before. And in a violent contrast with the nature that radiated life at the dawn of August, the worn and limp house, with the broken tiles, violently piled up, without that symmetrical elegance that comes from being straddled each one on top of the previous one. Crystals not a single one remained intact. And through the windows, brutally open and deranged, the wounded interior, with the broken partitions and the dust still in that circular dance that maintains life until it settles.
We climb to the top of the hill to look for a greater vision radius. And from there, looking out over the plain to the east, we saw the scorched lot of what had been Hiroshima. It was no longer. It was burning, like a new Pompeii. The inverted crater of the atomic bomb had thrown the first flare of intense white fire over the victim city. And in contact with its terrible heat, all the fuels burned like matches in a furnace. And as if this were not enough, the wooden houses that collapsed under the wave of the explosion fell on the embers of the home stoves that soon turned into bonfire flames.
Faced with that spectacle that we had not even been able to imagine, we remained rooted to the ground. Then, collecting data unrelated to our own impressions, we were able to reconstruct the entire scene. At 08:15 in the morning, an American B-29 plane dropped a bomb that exploded in the air at a height of 1,560 m. The noise was very small, but it was accompanied by a flash that gave us the effect of a magnesium flare. For a few moments something, followed in a red column of flame, fell rapidly and exploded again, this time terribly, at a height of 570 m above the city.
The violence of this second explosion was indescribable. Blue and red flames shot out in all directions. Immediately a terrifying thunder accompanied by unbearable waves of heat that fell on the city devastating everything. He burned as much as he could burn; and the metal parts melted. All this was the tragedy of the first moment. The next, a gigantic mountain of clouds swirled in the sky. In the very center of the explosion appeared a balloon with a terrifying head. And with it a gaseous wave at 500 miles per hour speed swept away everything within a 6 km radius. Finally, ten minutes later, a kind of black rain fell in the northeast of the city.
The Japanese, who were unaware that the first atomic bomb had exploded, with that imitative harmony of their language, designated this phenomenon with the word pikadon. Pika was to them the dazzling flash, and don the explosive noise that followed. To us, like everyone else, that was inexplicable. After four years of war, we had seen many bombs fall and many grenades explode. However, that was something new that in no way admitted comparison with what had been known until then.
We wanted from the beginning to enter the city. It was not macabre curiosity. Nor was it to search for the wounded, since there were so many of them who came to us without having to go out to meet them. The motive that prompted us was to remember that in the very center of Hiroshima, in one of the parts most affected by the bomb, were the remains of our residence and perhaps nothing more than the corpses of our parents. It was therefore a duty of brotherhood. However, we could not take a step towards them. The fire closed all the roads, jumping from house to house and cornering the streets with reddish tongues of fire.
We would make a hospital out of the house. With what ardor they all welcomed the idea. With what painful enthusiasm they set out to collaborate. I remembered that I had studied medicine. Distant years now, without further practice, but at that time they made me a doctor and surgeon. I went to pick up the first-aid kit and found it among the ruins, destroyed, with no use in it other than a little iodine, some aspirin, fruit salt and bicarbonate.
There were more than 200,000 victims. Where to start? It was necessary to act without remedies and this reality imposed the procedures that could be used. We found ourselves with natures worn out by a harsh war, in which food had been scarce for a long time. They had tubercular funds, common substratum of many millions of Japanese that we had to fortify in order to double their energy for convalescence. It was therefore necessary to feed them abundantly… and we had nothing in the pantry.
We, like any other Japanese, lived with the meager ration of rice that was passed to us. And this was so small that there was no possibility of saving. I gathered all the young Jesuits who were under my jurisdiction and in four words I gave them the guidelines of what they had to do: ‘Go –I told them– where God leads you and bring things to eat. Don’t ask me anymore. I don’t care about the site. Borrowed, bought, given away. The thing is that all the wounded that will be here when you return from the search can eat and recover. Nobody said anything. The idea was clear. The realization… God would say. They all went out.
The poor surrounding villagers, who had watched the bomb and the fire from a safe distance, gave generously of what they had and offered to provide us of what they did not have. So it was. None of our wounded complained of hunger, because we were always able to give them more than they needed. This first precaution crowned our efforts with success. Without knowing it, just because God wanted it to be so, we unconsciously attacked the anemia and leukemia that would develop in the majority of those attacked by atomic radiation.
First of all, we had to clean those wounds that had different origins. Many were consequences of bruises produced by the collapse of buildings. They were broken bones, and cuts, but not like those of a saber or a bullet that leave the lips of the wound clean, but like those caused by the collapse of a building, by the pressure of beams that sink into one, by the rains from the pulverized tiles, which tear the muscular mass and leave particles of sawdust, glass, wood embedded in it… and splinters of the shattered bones themselves.
But the dominant thing, perhaps, was the burns. Like the one who came several hours after the explosion with a blister that covered his chest and stomach, in front and the same extension on his back. And so many. Victims who had fallen under the remains of their houses, and who had only managed to get out of the rubble when they had already paid their blood tribute to the fire that burned everything. This was natural in a city built almost entirely of wood.
What was disconcerting were the burns of many who claimed not to have been burned. To the ritual question: ‘What happened to him?’ The answer was always the same. ‘Don’t know. I have seen a light, a terrible explosion, and nothing has happened to me. But after half an hour I felt that superficial blisters were forming on my skin and after four or five hours they had the appearance of a violent burn that began to ooze the next day. Today we already know that they were the effects of infrared radiation that attack tissues and produce not only the destruction of the epidermis and endodermis, but also muscle tissue.
Immediate consequence, suppurations throughout the affected area and mediate effect, many times, an unexpected death that at that time was inexplicable to us. The wounds had to be punctured and disinfected in cold blood because we had neither ether, nor chloroform, nor morphine, nor any other anesthetic for the operations. Terrible pain those of those priests in bodies with a third and sometimes more of their skin raw, which made them writhe in pain without a single complaint escaping from their lips.
It must have been around 4:00 p.m. when the evaporation produced by that gigantic fire condensed into a heavy rain that extinguished the surface of the earth. In the background, under the scorched logs and the collapsed roofs, an ember continued to crackle, which the rains did not allow to ignite. It was time to break through the encirclement of fire and enter the besieged city. Dantesque vision that presented itself to our eyes. It is impossible to imagine it, let alone describe it. Dead and wounded in terrible confusion without the saving compassion of a Samaritan being extended to them.
None of us who lived through those moments will ever be able to forget them. Heartbreaking screams, which crossed the air like the echoes of an immense howl. Because those throats, destroyed by the effort of many hours asking for help, emitted hoarse sounds that had nothing of human. And digging into the soul, much deeper than any other pain, the one that was experienced when seeing the children undone, dying, abandoned and feeling on themselves all the weight of their own impotence.
Poor creature that had been writhing for eight hours with a piece of glass stuck in the pupil of his left eye. Anguishing pains, because, in addition to being terrible, no one shared them to soften them with a protective gesture, with a word of affection. More terrifying was the vision of that other one who was wallowing in a pool of blood with a large splinter stuck in the intercostals. Eight hours also with these wooden stabs piercing his chest.
How he looked at us when we approached him! He no longer seemed alive! His pain-stricken features had gone from their first paleness to an olive-green color. His half-open mouth was drooling with agony, and his hands, in a convulsive, half-desperate movement, traveled the path of his chest a thousand times. And there, without the strength to suffer any more, they stopped without being able to tear out that splintered wood that was killing him. ‘Father, save me, I can’t take it anymore’. And his eyes brightened for a moment to utter this plea that came hissing from his lips, contracted in a supreme spasm, I don’t know if of trust or despair.
And like him, each one with a torture that his greatest executioner would not have imagined, thousands and thousands of creatures who had not deserved to be victims of the war and who were purging the sins of others. What desperate terror must have felt that poor child whom we stumbled upon holding on to two beams and with his legs charred up to the knees. The house collapsed on him, but he neither had the generosity to leave him immune nor the compassion to leave him dead. No, he stayed alive. He bit him between the dirty jaws of two rough beams, which squeezed without killing to prolong his martyrdom. It took us five hours to get to where the five Jesuits were. All wounded, but none dead.
In our slow progress of macabre procession through the dead streets of the city we reached the river bank, not far from the very center of the explosion. Another indelible memory in the collection of those gruesome scenes that seemed to have no end. At the time of the tragedy and in subsequent hours, when the burns began to manifest themselves in all their painful consequences, the injured, to flee from the fire, sought refuge on the river bank from the flames.
Fatal measure that cost the lives of many thousands of unfortunates. Sunk in the silt of that delta that flows out with almost no unevenness, they let the first hours of their misfortune pass, losing blood and vitality and energy during them… When at nightfall the sea began its slow work of counterbalancing, the waters stopped ebbing, and a moment later, the balance broken in favor of high tide, the level of all the arms of the delta began to rise slowly but steadily.
Terrible torment for those unfortunates who saw the ascending march of the waters. Prisoners of their weakness and of the muddy land into which they had recklessly submerged, they heard the laughter, that macabre day, of the waves that broke on each wall. The last one would be here soon. Their mouths were filled to the brim and in the throes of their suffocation, they still found the strength to clear their lungs once more. Until the new wave. Until the one that was definitive and covering their heads, they would not withdraw anymore.
How anguishing it was to hear the laments of all those hundreds of wounded condemned to a slow, irremediable death, who knew it as a certain destiny long before the first victims began to resolve themselves in the agonies of their long fight! The next morning, the entire delta bed was paved with corpses bloated with the brackish water of the Pacific. Not a single one had been able to escape.
