an older woman tenderly clasping her hands

‘I felt scared because I lost my emotions for a time.’

Shizuyo Takeuchi, Japanese survivor

There’s no escaping her memories of February 25, 1945—the night American B-29s firebombed Tokyo. Then 13, Takeuchi returned to find cinders where her home had been. Only an iron rice pot survived. The forbidden English dictionary, a gift from her father, was ash. She held a single page, which the wind soon swept away. A second firebombing on March 10 left her with images of running through a maelstrom of debris and smoke, and passing charred bodies—one, a mother who had tried to shield her infant beneath her.

“I felt scared because I lost my emotions for a time,” Takeuchi recalls. Now 89, married and with a son and daughter, she works as a storyteller at a center dedicated to bearing witness to the horrors of war.

Hear more voices from World War II.

More from the magazine

For Hiroshima’s survivors, memories of the bomb are impossible to forget
75 years after the Nazis surrendered, all sides agree: War is hell

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