The bomb released in the sky over Hiroshima took only thirty-four seconds to hit the ground and transform the city into a mute desert. After the blinding light, a wave of 108-million-degree heat vaporized humans, plants, and animals. Then the shock wave razed whatever had survived the heat. There were 150,000 deaths that day, August 6, 1945, and three days later, in Nagasaki, a second nuclear explosion killed 73,000 more. The survivors of that devastation are called the hibakusha. Today these men and women are at least eighty years old, and their stories reveal lucid memories that seem to have been kept only in order to be shared. Their words express the wounds they bear in their bodies and souls to this day, including physical mutilation, psychological trauma, leukemia, and social isolation, a suffering that united them to the point of wanting to create a shared home in the Nihon Hidankyo association, founded in 1956 to protect not only their rights but above all their stories. Notwithstanding their age, many hibakusha still travel the world fighting to promote a humanity free of nuclear weapons. For this commitment, Nihon Hidankyo received the 2024 Nobel Prize for Peace, presented in Oslo to the co-president Toshiyuki Mimaki, who will be a guest at the Meeting of Rimini together with another hibakusha, Dr. Masao Tomonaga, honorary president of the Red Cross Hospital of Nagasaki and a hematologist who has spent his life studying the impact of nuclear radiation on human health. “This is Masao Tomonaga. This is me,” he repeated at the end of the story of what life has led him to do, as if to affirm that not even total destruction could annihilate that seed of life that makes us human and capable of limitless trust in our neighbor.

Dr. Tomonaga, you were two years old the day the bomb exploded over Nagasaki. Do you remember it?

The memories of that August 9th are my mother’s. That morning I was in bed with very bad tonsillitis and a fever of 104. Our home, not quite two miles from the epicenter, was built entirely of wood and collapsed in a second. Fortunately, the part of the roof over my bed stayed up and protected me. My mother was able to pull me out completely intact and escape before the flames developed that devastated the entire zone in fifteen minutes. We found refuge in a temple, where we spent the night, and where they gave us two onigiri, the typical Japanese rice balls. The next morning, since trains were still leaving the Nagasaki station, my mother took one for Omura, the city where her family lived. We stayed there for four years.

And your father?

My father was a military doctor, serving at the Taiwan air base in those years. He believed we were dead, until a month later when he received a letter from my mother. He returned home after a year and a half and resumed his work in the old hospital of Nagasaki. Many physicians had died after the bomb and he immediately shouldered great responsibility. His activity concentrated in particular on Internal Medicine, because four years after the nuclear explosion there began to be numerous cases of leukemia in seven- and eight-year-old children. This was the first long-term effect of the radiation. At the time it was a fatal disease. There was no treatment and they died in the arc of a month or a year. My father was among the first to publish studies on the correlation between radioactivity and the proliferation of leukemia cells.

Your father worked in the same hospital as the Servant of God Paolo Takashi Nagai. Did he ever tell you about him? Did he know him?

Certainly. They had been friends since childhood because they had played on the same basketball team. After the war, when my father returned to Japan, he found Dr. Nagai ill with a chronic form of leukemia. Dr. Nagai asked specifically for my father to treat him, and my father cared for him until Dr. Nagai died in 1951. But there’s more.

Tell us.

When my family lived in Omura, Dr. Nagai asked us to take care of his son Makoto. He wanted him to spend time far from the devastation of Nagasaki, in a more serene context. He was eight years older than me and we lived together like brothers. I remember well Dr. Nagai at our home when he came once a month to see Makoto. He wanted to know all about our health and our studies. I don’t have more detailed memories: I was little. Only as an adult did I read everything he wrote. I learned a great deal about medicine from him, but most of all from his faith in God, so deep and strong.

You, too, decided to become a medical researcher.

Certainly, the great figure of my father guided me, but there was more. Leukemia continued to strike a very high percentage of children my age and I was deeply anxious, fearing I would fall sick as well. After all, those of us who had been so close to the epicenter were destined to develop cancer. But probably the little hill behind our neighborhood had protected us, even though it was destroyed by the explosion. Evidently, I was not destined to fall ill with leukemia, but to study it, so I became a hematologist.

What did you concentrate your studies on?

I continued to study leukemia and other potentially malignant disorders correlated with nuclear radiation. After the peak among children, in the mid-1960s there was an increase in the number of cases among survivors aged 30-40. Every day, for each new case, I collected bone marrow samples for microscopic observation. This enabled me to make diagnoses, and to classify the types of illnesses. For fifteen years I did only this. Then in the 1980s we saw a new type of leukemia, myelodysplastic syndrome, which was striking the elderly population. This means that the effects of the bomb are permanent and continue for the entire life cycle of a person. I spoke about this evidence on the occasion of the Nobel Prize for Peace given to Nihon Hidankyo in Oslo last December.

And instead, regarding the psychological consequences, is there evidence of permanent trauma?

Through an evaluation system based on tests and scales set up by the World Health Organization, in 1995 we were able to evaluate the effects of the two explosions on the mental health of the survivors. Fifty years after the traumatic events, they all reported signs of depression, insomnia, intrusive and recurrent thoughts, anxiety, avoidance, and difficulties in personal relationships. And like the physical effects, for the psychological ones the scores were higher in relation to the person’s closeness to the epicenter. This tells us that those weapons are truly inhuman, in the sense that they alter every aspect of the person.

Is this trauma also transmitted from generation to generation?

The consequences of psychological trauma, in particular if experienced in a grave or prolonged way, can be transmitted over the generations through epigenetic mechanisms. This means that traumatic experiences can leave a biological imprint on genes, influencing the mental health and behavior of successive generations, even in the absence of a direct traumatic experience. We are still studying this phenomenon. There are genetic studies on parent-child pairs, but some years will still be needed to reach conclusions with scientific evidence.

You still travel the world to participate in scientific conferences and to meet new generations. You often repeat that they are “the key.” Why? How can they be different from the generation that used the atom bomb?

Humanity lives within history, which is a journey. It is not necessarily destined to always repeat itself in the same way. We have the opportunity to learn from the great errors of those who preceded us. We hibakusha will disappear soon, but not the deep trauma that overturned our lives, if someone will keep the memory alive. We must be increasingly aware of what happened.

What happens during these meetings?

I tell my story and at the end there are always many questions. A few weeks ago in Cambridge, an elementary school girl asked me if I still felt angry at the Americans, or Westerners in general, who caused so much pain for my people. And I told her, “No, no longer. I have overcome these feelings. I believe this is the case for all the Japanese. There is no hatred for those who caused so much harm, in part because after the war and the famine that followed, we were able to rise again thanks to their aid. The same hand that struck us supported us in the long process of reconstruction. Now I only have space for the pain and shame for this world where the race for nuclear bombs has not stopped.” But I also told her that her question was excellent because peace depends on what is in our thoughts. Children understand this as well.

In an interview, a hibakusha from Hiroshima said that “peace begins when there is a heart capable of understanding the pain of the other.”

This is very true. Peace is possible if my heart is capable of hearing you, and thus I am interested in speaking with you. This is how dialogues begin. This answer reminds me of the words Dr. Nagai repeated in the last period of his life to those who went to visit him. “Love your neighbor. Love him just as he is.” I believe this is the central point of Christianity. It is the quickest way to reach a world that does not want to destroy itself. It is the way of peace.