元気に生かされとるのは、語り継ぐため
Survived for succeeding
to tell stories
篠田 恵
Megumi Shinoda
(12 yrs. 2.8 km away from H.C.)
（中国新聞 2017年5月1日 「記憶を受け継ぐ」より）
原爆投下から2か月余りたった1945年10月、やせ細った弟の晴樹ちゃんの遺体は、大芝町(現西区)の自宅近くの河原で焼かれました。
「お経もあげられず、今考えると、本当にかわいそうなことをした」と篠田さん。
けれども、当時は特別な感情をいだきませんでした。
「毎日のように、あちらこちらで遺体が焼かれ、感覚がまひしとった」からです。
広島女子商業学校の2年生だった篠田さんは、8月6日の朝、同級生と鶴見橋付近で建物疎開に出る予定でしたが、寝坊をしたため作業を休み、自宅で弟と折り紙をしていました。
晴樹ちゃんは、おしゃべりが上手になり、かわいいさかり。
「おばちゃん、たべんちゃい。」
石臼を借りに来た近所の女性に、弟が炒った豆を差し出した瞬間、ぷわーと部屋に焔が入ってきました。
爆心地から2.8キロ、障子はめらめらと燃え、畳がすり鉢のように落ち、不気味な静けさがしばらく続きました。
「恵ちゃーん」
母の声で我に返った篠田さんが立ち上がると、縁側にいた母と弟は、腕や足が赤くはれ、ところどころ焼け爛れていました。
爆心地そばの広島市信用組合（現広島信用金庫）の、左官町支所へ出勤したお姉さんの幸代さんが戻ってきません。
翌日、恵さんは、姉を探し求めて父と一緒に市内を歩き回りました。
相生橋のあたりは、丸焼けになった遺体がごろごろ転がり、黄色い贓物が飛び出した馬の死体も。
弟と同じくらいの小さな子が、母親らしき遺体のそばでじっと座っていました。
「世羅さんでしょ！」
大八車に横たわった、全身大やけどの人から声を掛けられ、よく見ると、同じクラスの友人でした。
鶴見橋一帯の建物疎開作業中に亡くなった女子商の生徒は262人に上る、という資料もあります。
あの人はどうなったのか、ずっと心にひっかかっています。
戦争が終わっても、弟は、飛行機を見るたびに、
「姉ちゃんをかえせ！」と叫んでいた晴樹ちゃんは、9月からひどい下痢に苦しむようになり、
10月22日、母の腕の中で息を引き取りました。
父親は職を失い、原爆の後遺症か、顔に皮膚病ができた恵さんは、女子商を退学。
2年おくれで、安田女子高に入りなおしました。
先生の薦めで「原爆の子」（長田新編）に手記を載せたことはありますが、22歳で結婚し、3人の子育てに追われる中、次第に被爆の記憶から距離を置くようになりました。
高校時代の恩師で被爆証言を続けた沼田鈴子さんとも、長年、親交を深めました。
それでも自分の体験を語ろうとはなかなか思いませんでした、
「建物疎開を休んだ自分には資格がない」と思っていたからです。
数年前にすい臓がんを乗り越え
「元気に生かされとるのは、語り継ぐためじゃ」
と強く感じるようになりました。
「戦争があったから原爆が落ちた。戦争は本当にむなしい。」
体が動く限り、命の大切さを伝えていくとともに、今も見つからない姉の遺骨を探し続けるつもりです。
(Excerpt from ‘Children
of Hiroshima’ edited
by Dr. Arata Osada 長田新)
A lady, who was one of our neighbors, had come over to borrow
a stone mortar (石臼;a cooking tool
for pasting food).
My mother was talking to her on the veranda.
I was in the living room, leaning against a post and folding papers for
my three-year-old brother.
I had roasted some beans for my brother that morning, and he was eating
them, one by one, out of a dish.
He went over to the lady, holding the dish of beans,
and said to her, ”Have some more beans…”
At that very moment, the bomb was dropped….
The paper sliding doors began to burn.
I thought, ‘Water!’ and ran to the kitchen.
That moment, I was knocked down by the ceiling boards, plaster,
pictures and things that came falling down.
By the time I could get up, the fire had already been put out by the
blast following the flash.
There were a few minutes of ominous silence.
“Megumi-chan!” “Megumi-chan!”
I came to my senses at the sound of my mother’s voice and rushed into
the air-raid shelter in the back garden.
My mother, brother, the lady in my neighbor, had been burned so badly
on the right side of their bodies that the burns were blistered.
I was shocked and ran back into the house to get some medicine.
This was the first time I saw how badly the house had been damaged.
Though, our house was about 2 and half miles（4km) from the center of
the explosion, almost nothing but the uprights were left of it.
There was a huge hole in the roof, all of the ceiling boards of
the sitting room were gone, and the ones in the next room were snapped upward.
The sliding doors were blown down, and the plaster had come off
the walls.
There were broken glass and plaster on the tatami floor.
The sewing machine, which had been in the hallway, was on its side
in the middle of the sitting room.
Some bed quilts, which had been hanging out in the sun on one side
of the house, had been blown through the two rooms to the kitchen.
My mother stopped me from going inside the house.
“A bomb fell here. It’s dangerous to go in.”
At the time, each of us believed that our
house had received a direct hit.
But I wanted to treat my brother’s burns
as soon as possible, so I went inside, moving cautiously, picking my way from
the threshold.
Fortunately, the medicine box was
undamaged, and there was medicine for burns in it.
Shortly after that, we heard loud voices from the street in front of
the house, and we all went to see what was happening.
There were a lot of people gathered around the neighborhood air-raid
shelter.
My neighbor’s house was on fire; about eighty percent of it had already
burned down.
She was running frantically around her house, shouting, “Mother must
still be inside!”
Once we calmed down a little, we started worrying about the people
in our family who had gone out to work.
Two of my older sisters were working in a company far out in the
suburbs of the city, and were sure to be all right, but my father was at the
Clothing Depot, and my other elder sister was at the Credit Association in Sakan-cho.
Since she could get home from there in less than an hour, we knew
that something must have happened.
Either she had been injured, or not allowed to leave, or …worse…
Fate chose the last.
The life of my 19-year-old sister and that of the Credit
Association Building ended together.
About six-thirty, we got word that my eldest sister was all right,
and my other sister got home around seven o’clock.
I asked the people coming by, on their way to a safe place, about
the Credit Association Building and the Clothing Depot, but they had no time to
be concerned about other people.
I could only pray for the safety of my father and sister.
My father got home about ten that evening.
I was so happy that I hugged him tight and cried.
It was all I could do to say, “Father, Sachiyo hasn’t….”
He must have known already.
There were tears running down his cheeks.
That night, we and the neighbors put straw mats on the ground
around the air-raid shelter and lay down on them.
The stars were out and the sky was beautiful but we were not able
to sleep because air-raid sirens kept going off.
The morning of the seventh came.
My head was heavy from lack of sleep.
My shoulder and thigh-hurt badly.
Something must have hit them when the house collapsed, but I didn’t say
anything about it and went out with my father to look for Sachiyo.
Only a block from our house, everything had been burned down.
We could see the twisted girders of the Industrial Exhibition Hall and
the Fukuya Department Store.
Here and there, electric power poles were still burning, and trees
smoldering.
We walked through the heat, around electric wires and burned trees, and
finally got to Yokogawa.
We thought that Sahiyo might have retuned to the main office.
We walked in, but I immediately staggered back, covering my eyes.
Was this the meaning of “hell on earth?”
There were burned bodies, eyes lifeless, all over the floor and on the
counters.
My father walked among them shouting,
“Sachiyo! Where are you? Is Sachiyo Sera here?”
But we could not find her.
From Yokogawa we went on to the Tokaichi area.
There were many bodies on the ground that had been burned black.
There were the bodies of a soldier and his horse, and of a mother and
her baby.
But we didn’t find any sign of Sachiyo.
We stopped and prayed in front of the Credit Association Building, where
we thought perhaps Sahiyo had died.
The prayers we had said before, for “victory”, had brought us hell.
We learned that the juice of cucumbers was good for burns, but at the
time cucumbers were very difficult to get.
The local doctors, whose homes and clinics had been destroyed, set up
an emergency treatment center at the Ohshiba Primary School.
But, of course, none of them knew the best way to treat the bomb
sickness, when its true nature was unknown.
Wherever he heard an airplane, my three-year-old brother would run out
into the street, his arms and legs all in bandages, and shout, “Bring back my
sister! Bring back my sister!”
There was no electricity for many days. When morning came, a newspaper
with printing you could hardly read would be delivered.
Bodies were cremated every day, in the bamboo grove near the house, on
the river bed, or in the corners of fields. It made a horrible smell, and
sometimes even the white smoke would come around our house.
The burns of my cute little brother took a long time to get better.
But even so, he was just like any boy, wanting to go out and play with
the other children on the sand-banks.
He took a long stick and poked holes in paper doors we had just
patched.
Other times, he would make us laugh by taking piece of paper and
copying what we were doing, and make gestures and sing something we could not
understand.
The food situation got worse.
Often we had only pumpkin from morning to night.
Once my brother said, “Mummy, I hate pumpkin,” and refused to eat it,
and my mother slowly turned away and wiped away her tears.
My brother’s burns finally got better, but he began to suffer from
diarrhea from the beginning of September.
By that time, even we knew that diarrhea was one of the symptoms of
radiation sickness, but they only treated him for dysentery at the clinic.
He kept getting worse.
It was terrible to see him suffer.
Typhoon hit our half-wrecked house.
Twice there were floods.
My brother, who had always been high-strung, was convinced that
terrible things came out of the sky and began to be afraid of looking at the
sky.
“The stars are beautiful, look at them,” I would say, but he would
never look up.
Whenever there were typhoons, or flood waters came near, he would stay
in my mother’s arms, trembling.
October came and it was cooler in the mornings and evenings, but my
brother got worse.
He could not get out of bed after the tenth.
We went to the country to look for more nutritious food for him, but all
we could find were a few eggs.
My little brother, who had cursed the airplanes that had taken the life
of his loving sister, and who had feared even to look at the sky, died in my
mother’s arms on October 22, without a chance to be treated by a doctor.
The neighbors cremated him on the river bed.
It was done simply and plainly.
Just a little bit of white smoke rose up….
The cold winter came, making people living in the galvanized iron
make-shifts suffer.
The weather seemed even colder because of our empty stomachs.
Nevertheless, spring came again.
It had been said that for 75 years, nothing would grow on the ground
that had been scorched, so when grass started coming up that spring, ever one’s
spirits revived.
Stands selling rice soup overflowed with crowds of unemployed people
from morning on.
The sound of hammering began to reverberate across the razed city.
Hiroshima 広島 ヒロシマ ひろしま Nuclear and the Humankind cannot Co-exist / Nuclear Victims Forum / 竜安寺石庭 Ryoan Temple Stones Garden / Ave Maria
That is what she wrote in her book which was
published in 2016.
