Children in a war

This is something I encountered in Nagasaki - and it deserves more space than to mention it just in passing sentence - while there, I have visited Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum that has quite impressive exhibition that introduces visitors to the life in Nagasaki before Atomic Bomb destroyed the whole city, kind of before-and-after, very interesting and naturally a moving experience. Well, at least for me, some of my fellow visitors didn't like being faced with what is obviously a moral dilemma so I could hear them muttering about exhibition being one-sided, however to be fair I must admit that most of the people simply fell apart. Its one thing when one just reads about it and completely another experience when one can connect faces and the names with this enormous tragedy. I kept myself relatively well together until the very end when this photo really got me: it was a photo taken immediately in aftermath of explosion, when people brought bodies to be cremated and this little boy brought his baby brother with him. Since this is not something kids do just for fun, it must be that little boy probably didn't have anybody else left from his family. Here is what photographer (Joe O’Donnell) had to say about the picture:

“I saw a boy about ten years old walking by. He was carrying a baby on his back. In those days in Japan, we often saw children playing with their little brothers or sisters on their backs, but this boy was clearly different. I could see that he had come to this place for a serious reason. He was wearing no shoes. His face was hard. The little head was tipped back as if the baby were fast asleep. The boy stood there for five or ten minutes. The men in white masks walked over to him and quietly began to take off the rope that was holding the baby. That is when I saw that the baby was already dead. The men held the body by the hands and feet and placed it on the fire. The boy stood there straight without moving, watching the flames. He was biting his lower lip so hard that it shone with blood. The flame burned low like the sun going down. The boy turned around and walked silently away”.

Well, talk about picture worth thousands words - the whole exhibition was heartbreaking enough, but when I encountered this photo, I was already weeping out loud (and I wasn't the only one), the rest of the day I wasn't myself anymore and found very hard to focus on people & work around me, everything seemed so trivial compared to this.

Just before I arrived in Shanghai, I decided to check it out a little bit more on Wikipedia, to at least get some idea what is the city all about. Not surprisingly, I have discovered that in years leading to WW2 China and Japan were in extremely tangled and complex relationship, there was lot of fighting, bombing and whatnot, basically the whole area is a very explosive one and I thought Balkans were dangerous, but boy, we have nothing on Far East. Apparently there was a Japanese attack on Shanghai in 1937. and focus of bombers happened to be Shanghai South Railway Station - Japanese air crafts concluded that huge crowd assembled there must have been retreating soldiers so they bombed the station - unfortunately as it happened, crowd were all civilians trying to escape the city, no army whatsoever.

Moments after massive bombing basically completely destroyed the railway station and people were strewn across the tracks and platform, a cameraman and reporter H. S. Wong arrived on a scene and took this unforgettable picture of a burned and crying baby in the ruins of the station. In confusion and mayhem of circumstances he never found out identity of the child, except that it was eventually carried away on a first aid stretcher. The picture was immediately published all over the world and became known as "Bloody Saturday" - it was incredibly powerful and influential media weapon that finally convinced people that non-interventionism is not really answer. On their part, Japanese authorities claimed that photo was staged - but there were far too many witnesses and photographer has several pictures taken at the same time from various perspectives, so we know its genuine. Just like the picture above, it just breaks my heart, it doesn't matter is it Japanese or Chinese or who in the world, when children suffer in the war it upsets me very much and this is something I can't distance myself from, this is one of the rare occasions where I would get involved totally, without thinking twice. Even the animals have protective impulses towards their offspring, but people are the only species on the planet that enjoy cruelty for cruelty sake.