Nobuo Miyake recalls being on the train to Hiroshima on the day the bomb fell, in 1945. "It was 8:15 in the morning. Suddenly, the carriage's ceiling radiated a blue light, the same kind of light as when you are blinded by the strong flash of a camera," he says. "I thought at first that there was a power shortage in the train, but then I immediately understood that something unusual had happened."
Among his listeners is Giselle Cycowycz, a Hungarian Jew who survived the horrors of Auschwitz in 1945. Miyake and Cycowycz met for the first time in occupied Jerusalem this week. They were both attending a meeting of survivors of the Holocaust and of the August 1945 atomic bombings of Japan - "two tragedies for which no words are strong enough to describe," in the words of Sharon Dolev, who moderated the meeting.
"I jumped from the train," the Japanese man says as he continues telling his story. "Suddenly, a strong wind from the blast threw me to the ground. I was convinced that the bomb had hit me. 'I'm about to die,' I thought. Around me, everything was black and full of dust. I couldn't see anything. "I ran as fast as I could to where my mother was. I saw that half the house was completely destroyed, the other half wasn't, and managed to save lives. I saw a huge fire approaching from the centre of the city.
"Together with my mother we ran back to the open space in the direction of the train. We saw horrific sights of people with terrible burns, whose skin had disappeared, who looked like non-human creatures. "'I'm hot. I'm hot. I can't breathe,' they yelled. They were all shaking. People were throwing themselves into the river. I felt as if I had reached hell."
Miyake was 16 at the time. Meanwhile, a world away, then 18-year-old Cycowycz was living through the horrors of Auschwitz. After the March 1944 Nazi invasion of Hungary, her comfortable life in the town of Chust changed from one moment to another. Over the course of eight weeks, more than half of Hungary's 800,000 Jews were sent to the famous concentration camp in then Nazi-occupied Poland.
She survived almost a year in the camp, where more than 1.2 million people were murdered, living on a slice of bread with margarine and a bowl of watery soup and sharing two latrines with 32,000 other women in what she describes as a "piece of street." The story-telling ended after nearly four hours in weeping and embraces.
Miyake and three other Hiroshima survivors are on a six-day visit to Israel, the first by such a delegation to the Jewish state, and to its Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum. Scheduled to leave Sunday, they are travelling the world to spread their call: "No more Hiroshimas, no more Nagasakis." The Israel leg comes at the height of tensions between Israel, the West and Iran, over the latter's alleged nuclear weapons drive.
The organisers - the Tokyo-based Peace Boat, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and an Israeli movement against weapons of mass destruction - hope it will stimulate discussion, also in Israel, on nuclear weapons, especially ahead of a UN-sponsored conference on a nuclear-free Middle East in Helsinki in December. At the meeting, the room becomes deadly silent as the Holocaust and Hiroshima survivors continue to tell their stories.
Miyake, now 83, was just 2 kilometres from the spot where the US nuclear bomb was dropped. He saved himself by immediately jumping out of a carriage enveloped by people. "Anyone exposed directly to the radiation just melts," he explains through an interpreter. To Cycowycz, who is now 85, his words remind her of the "total helplessness" she also felt. "You can do nothing to help yourself. Nothing," she says.
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