PARAPAN AM: Crowds will celebrate as the ParaPan Am Games kick off this Friday, but in celebration we should also remember the past. Photo courtesy Toronto 2015 Host City.
By Dennis Kucherawy, Corktown Correspondent
Tomorrow is the eve of the Toronto 2015 ParaPan American Games. It’s an exciting time for Torontonians and physically challenged athletes from the Americas and Caribbean who are striving to achieve the highest level of excellence in each of their sports.
However, tomorrow is also Remembrance Day. No, it’s not November 11th, but instead a time to recall and commemorate the 70th anniversary of the day the first atom bomb was dropped and exploded on Hiroshima, Japan with devastating consequences, the likes of which had never before been seen. It was the worst event in our history, revealing the worst in human nature and the depths of which are species is capable of reaching.
Nagasaki was bombed three days later.
To understand how horrific those atomic explosions on August 6th and 9th were, imagine sitting at the Athletics Stadium at York University this Friday night during the ParaPan Am Games’ opening ceremonies. The stadium is full of athletes, dignitaries, performers and cheering fans. The crowd is on its feet, dancing and swaying to the music.
Suddenly, there’s a brilliant flash of light and an excruciatingly loud boom, called a “don.” When you regain your eyesight, everyone is gone, vaporized instantly. There are no ashes. Just shadows of silhouettes burned into whatever concrete was left standing. Ray Bradbury, author of the science fiction classic “Fahrenheit 451, described the phenomenon after seeing a photograph of a side of a house in Hiroshima taken after the bombing.
The shadows of people who had lived there were “burned into the wall (by) the intensity of the heat. The people were gone, but their shadows remained.”
There was no trace of people near the centre of the explosion, reported William Burchett, the first journalist to enter Hiroshima after the bombing. “There was no trace; they vanished,” he wrote.
“The theory in Hiroshima is the atomic heat was so great that they burned instantly to ashes – except that there were no ashes.”
Burchett described the utter destruction that greeted him when he arrived: “You can look around and for 25, perhaps 30, sq. miles, you can see hardly a building. It gives you an empty feeling in your stomach to see such man-made devastation.”
Hiroshima’s casualties consisted of more than 20,000 soldiers plus U.S., Dutch and British prisoners of war. Between 70,000 to 146,000 civilians were killed. The bomb was intended to fall on the Aioi Bridge, but drifted due to crosswinds. Instead, it detonated right over a medical facility, the Shima Surgical Clinic. Many killed were doctors, nurses and patients.
In Nagasaki, between 39,000 to 80,000 people, many innocent citizens, were killed. Deaths in both cities totaled between 129,000 to 246,000.
It was a “war crime,” said noted American scientist George Wald despite the view of army leaders that dropping the bomb was necessary to bring a quick end to World War II and avoid countless deaths in Asia in conventional warfare.
Others agreed with Wald, including German author Günter Grass, author of the classic anti-war novel “The Tin Drum.” He compared Hiroshima’s legacy to contemporary times, saying, “How do we prevent Iran developing an atomic bomb when, on the American side, dropping bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not recognized as a war crime?”
So, ironically, as we celebrate the athletes of the Parapan Games who, in peaceful competition, seek to achieve greatness in athletic prowess by pushing limits and proving how far humans can reach in excellence, on this anniversary we must remain mindful of what destruction war can wrought.
As the great artist Pablo Picasso observed, “The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.”
It’s no mistake the the arms race, in which the Communist Bloc and the West amassed enough nuclear weapons surpassing the level of mutually assured destruction, was labeled with the acronym “MAD.”
Instead, these brave young men and women who struggle each day to overcome the limits imposed by their own physical disabilities, remind us the key to our survival is perseverance and living together in peace.
Excellence in ParaPan Am sports, like all athletic competition, are measured against records of past outstanding performances – in a word, memory.
And memory is what will save us from another Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
As John Hersey, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, observed: “What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much at it’s been memory – the memory of what happened in Hiroshima.”
Lest we forget.