The Meaning of Life.

The Meaning of Life, by: Yoshitake kawamoto.

On the morning of August 6,1945, I observed a pale blue flash. The impact of the blast caused me to faint dead away. Perhaps a half hour later, upon coming to, I realized I had been buried alive. Soon I began to hear my other junior high school classmates singing in the darkness. And, as time passed, their voices got weaker and weaker, dying away,one after another.
At last I wriggled my way out of a huge mount of radioactive debris,or what used to be my school. All around me I observed nothing but devastation.
What I beheld in the crepuscular of the morning was a swirling monster of towering vapors that eventually came to be known as a mushroom cloud.
The city had vanished; purgatory had taken its place. The atomic blast had gone off almost directly above my classroom. In time I realized that out of a classroom of 35, I had been the only one spared. As I began to flee that morning, I saw innumerable,trembling hands and arms, reaching out for my help from the burning piles of what had been Hiroshima.
Even at 13 I could pose the inevitable question: Why do We Exist?
The only answer i could formulate was that death was horrible that every living soul had no choice but to live in order to escape his fear of it.
Gradually, though, I came to see that my reply was wrong. I now believe that I live for an excellent reason: to tell as many people as possible about the importance of eliminating war-the greatest cause of death and,therefore, the greatest menace to human existence.
Yoshitake Kawamoto
is the Director of the Hiroshima
Peace Memorial Museum.