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Ah, Atomic Bomb（嗚呼原爆） (106)Shizuko Ohkura（大倉静子）On the night of August 6, I went through a strange experience. It wasabout 2 or 3 in the morning and I saw my son Tetsuro wearing a combat hatwith gaiters standing at salute in the front yard, saying “I’m home, Mom.” Itstartled me awake, and then I responded to him, saying “I’m so glad you’vecome home safely without any injuries.” After that, I got up and startedlooking for him in my house, only to find he was nowhere to be seen.Although what I saw was perhaps a hallucination, I was sure his souldesperately wanted to come home, and that is why I saw him.On August 6, after I ate breakfast, I went out to my back yard. I lookedup into the sky and muttered to myself, “It will be another hot day today.” Iwas about to turn around and go inside, when I heard an enormous noisenearby. It was not a jarring sound but an immense sound, beyond description.Intuition told me that the building site for a new airport in Karita-mura(Katsuta) had been attacked. There was a plan to build a new airport and myhusband was sometimes mobilized to work there. Time passed by and it wasin the late afternoon that we received the news that Hiroshima City had acatastrophic disaster. My husband, who was a member of the civil defenseunit, jumped into a truck and left with other members.I was filled with anxiety. We had two sons. The older one, Shouzou, wasin the fourth grade at Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial High School andthe second one, Tetsuro was a student at the Second Hiroshima PrefecturalJunior High School. Both of them lived in Hiroshima. At first, my husbandvisited where my younger son, Tetsuro stayed, which was in Enomachi. Thehouse was burned down to the ground. Among the remnants of the building,he found a wooden board, on which the residents’ names were written andwhere they were. So he went there to look for our son.However, what he found out that day was the fact that our son had lefthome in the morning, never to return. Later, we heard that when the atomicbomb was dropped, three hundred first-grade students from the SecondHiroshima Prefectural Junior High School had all lined up at the other endof the bridge across from the prefectural office building in Kakomachi, andwere being given instructions about their work. They were all bombed, andthen they jumped into the river. The river was full of students, so you could