Bombing of Hiroshima-Yasuko Yamagata

While looking this photo up, I read that Yasuko Yamagata was 17 when she witnessed the bombing and was in class at the time. After the bombing she saw the corpse of a woman and child. The sad part was that the woman looked like she was running at the time they were incinerated (as pictured). This reminded me of "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury where is describes a city left in rubble. This next excerpt is from this short story and in reading it, I'm sure it will bring about almost the same image as in this painting.

"Ten o'clock.
The sun came out from behind the rain. The house stood alone in a city of rubble and ashes. This was the one house left standing. At night the ruined city gave off a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles.

Ten-fifteen.
The garden sprinklers whirled up in golden founts, filling the soft morning air with scattering of brightness. The water pelted windowpanes, running down the charred west side where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick up flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him, a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down. The five spots of paint—the man, the woman, the children, the ball—remained. The rest was a thin charcoaled layer. The gentle sprinkler rain filled the garden with falling light." (http://www.gladdemusic.com/raybradbury-there%20will%20come%20soft%20rains.htm)

I feel that this short story by Ray Bradbury helps me to picture what Yasuko Yamagata must have felt during this experience. What you would picture at certain times are now gone. The world you saw the day before is no more and there is no beauty left to look out your window to. What once was a woman carrying her child is now a stain on the face of the earth. I could only imagine other horrifying images these marks would bring about for people like Yamagata who survived the bombing and had no where to go and nothing to look for.