Nagasaki to the Bronx, A Message of Peace

Yarelys Vazquez Marquez, 15, folded 230 paper cranes out of the 1,000 her school made to send to Hiroshima, Japan. These cranes hang on the wall behind her. She holds up 1,000 paper cranes sent to her school in the Bronx by students in Hiroshima, an unexpected gift presented after atomic bomb survivors shared their stories at her school in the Bronx. (Tara MacIsaac/The Epoch Times)

NEW YORK—Yasuaki Yamashita survived the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on Aug. 9, 1945. He shared his story with a library full of teenagers at Jane Addams High School in the Bronx on Monday, one of 16 schools he will visit across the city with other survivors this week.

“If you can imagine, [it was like] 1,000 lightning [bolts] at the same time,” recalled Yamashita, who was six years old when the bomb dropped, destroying his home. “My mother put me down on the floor and covered me with her body … when we stand up, there is no window, there is no anything, just columns.”