by JuicyPuffin

Created on: February 25, 2009

On August 6, 1945 the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb to be used for war on Hiroshima, Japan. The city was destroyed and countless people lost their lives from the radiation. People are still living with the effects of the bombings - disfigurement, mental retardation, and illnesses are passed on from generation to generation through genes that became mutated from the radiation. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum aims to educate and remind the world about this horrific event and about the terrors of atomic weapons. In the park outside the museum is the Children's Peace Memorial Statue, which is built in the form of Sadako Sasaki. Sadako is the most well known victim of the atomic bombing.

Survivors and their family members have donated many items from the bombings, including items from Sadako Sasaki's stay in the Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital (Museum). Sadako was two years old at the time of the Hiroshima bombing, and had no apparent disfigurement or impairment from radiation as she grew older. Her entire family survived the bombing of Hiroshima with the exception of her grandmother. She was a healthy girl and attended Nobori-cho Elementary School, until early 1955 when she began to get sick almost ten years after the bombing. Her neck became stiff and her face became swollen, so her family took her to the hospital for testing, where her parents were told that she had leukemia (Museum).

While in the hospital, Sadako learned about a legend where if a person folds a thousand paper cranes while saying a prayer, their wish will come true. Her wish was to get better, and so she folded cranes constantly, using even the wrappers from her medicine as paper after she ran out of the squares that had been given to her (Museum).

Sadako reached her goal of a thousand cranes - but she did not get well, so she was determined to make one thousand more. No one ever told Sadako what illness she had, but her parents did tell her teacher and classmates. Despite this, as time progressed Sadako figured out the truth on her own, from noticing other children in the hospital with symptoms similar to hers who were dying. She wrote down a record of her daily blood cell count and kept it under her bed so no one would know what she was doing. This record was found by hospital nurses after her death, and is now in an exhibit in the Peace Memorial Museum. Sadako died on October 25th, 1955 with over 1,300 finished cranes. Some paper cranes she made, as well as pictures of Sadako and a

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