Episode 235: The Girls, their Teachers, their Parents

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This is the Memory Palace.

I'm Nate DeMayo.

What are we supposed to do with the 541 girls, the seven teachers, who weren't in class that morning, as was so often the case that summer?

The war was being lost, their writing was on the wall, if not in the official propaganda.

The Americans were firebombing ports and factories and airfields, lately whole cities.

Their city hadn't been attacked yet, but it was a matter of time.

So their principal had decided that helping prepare Hiroshima for the inevitable arrival of American bombers was more important than geometry or poetry.

The girls, 12 and 13 years old, were put to work trying to limit destruction and save lives.

They were given shovels and helmets and hatchets and work gloves, gray jumpsuits, and they pitched in, demolishing and clearing wooden structures to make fire breaks.

So when the bombs came and the buildings burned, the fire wouldn't spread in the ways that it had in Kobe and Nagoya and Osaka and Yokohama that spring.

Toyama, an industrial town on the west coast, home to 160,000 people.

Its factories made steel and aluminum, but its houses, most of its buildings like in Hiroshima, were made of wood.

American bombers appeared over Toyama.

The whole city burned to the ground.

That was August 1st, less than a week before the girls were out working one morning, breaking up lumber, clearing it, dragging floorboards, window frames, as best as they could manage, when the nuclear bomb exploded.

They died instantly.

They probably didn't have time to be afraid.

Everyone had been worried for months about a massive assault.

That was the way the attacks went.

Everyone was on edge listening out for the rumble of hundreds of approaching planes.

But there was just the one.

No firebreak, no amount of dismantled homes or tailor's shops could have saved them.

They were just 500 yards from the hypocenter, the point on the ground directly beneath the bomb when it exploded in mid-air.

So there's some mercy in that.

In being within what is known scientifically, they say it plain, scientists don't do euphemism, as the zone of complete destruction.

There were tens of thousands of people there with them, within that zone.

That first concentric circle that physicists and military planners drew, set their protractors, depending on the scale of the map, to trace out a ring a mile out from Ground Zero.

There are circles drawn for radiation, for electromagnetic pulses, for heat damage.

The girls were in the innermost ring for heat damage as well, and thus were incinerated instantly.

Somewhere between 70 and 80,000 people also died in that same moment there in that city.

But this is a story about those 541 girls, their seven teachers,

and about the people they left behind, mostly their parents.

Some of them gathered on October 30th, 1945, so a little more than than two months since a weapon they had never heard about had exploded a bit less than 2,000 feet above their city and did things they'd never imagined.

The heat, the fire, the light, the strange quiet, and then continued in the days that followed.

The streams and rivers filled with the dead.

Humans, horses, people who had seemed uninjured, had seemed to have escaped, but then got sick suddenly, and then died.

People say the world changed forever on that day in August 1945

after what happened in Hiroshima and what was done to Hiroshima and that is true and arguably true.

The whole world did.

But this is a story about these people in Hiroshima.

Mostly the parents who that fall had spent the previous 10 weeks adjusting their understanding of the world as best as their brains would allow

to enfold scenes and smells and sicknesses they had never experienced, a reality that had never existed before, and at the same time grief, which however human and eternal had never been experienced in that way, in that context.

About a hundred people gathered as a community to try and memorialize these 541 girls, their seven teachers, as best as they could.

Their bodies were ash and unidentifiable, and they were intermingled by the force of the blast and by people trying to figure out what to do with them, the remains.

And on that day there were Buddhist rites performed, and the families were each given ashes, of which some proportion may or may not have once been part of their child.

And then the parents went off to wherever they had found shelter in those weeks after, in that destroyed place, and each figured out what to do with those ashes that may have held a part of their child, that may have held held the parts of many

and parts of buildings, cherry trees, tailors' shops, maybe the bomb that burned them.

In the months to come, those parents would form an organization called the Bereaved Families of Hiroshima Municipal Girls High School.

They would raise money in a city that was trying to rebuild, in a city where people were still dying of radiation poisoning.

where children were still being killed, which was still killing children at the Municipal Girls High School, and their teachers, Another 135 of them were killed elsewhere in the city, some on that first day, some over the course of the months after, some years after.

And in that city that was just beginning to rebuild, in a city that was under military occupation, the parents raised money and built a memorial, a monument that was unveiled in 1948.

It's about five and a half feet tall, so small, though, taller than almost all of the girls.

It is simple, gray granite.

There is a frieze carved of three girls kneeling.

The one in the center is in the jumpsuit uniform the kids wore when they went out to clear wood.

She has bobbed hair, a cravat.

She represents the girls who died.

She is flanked by two figures in school uniforms meant to represent the girls who didn't, who were left to keep the memory of the dead.

You figure out what to do with it.

The girl in the center holds a sign that says E equals MC squared.

The censorship rules of the American-led occupation were strict, didn't allow for any official mentions of the bomb.

So the parents asked a physicist for an idea, a way they could get around those rules.

He suggested Einstein's formula.

Spare a thought for that physicist and the things that he had learned since that day in Hiroshima.

For about a decade, the memorial sat on the grounds of the school, but in 1957 it was moved to the main thoroughfare nearby.

The rules against war-related memorials had been rescinded, and more were rising around the city.

There is a larger monument, the Memorial Tower to the Mobilized Students, which commemorates all of these 6,300 kids who'd been out of their various schools that day and put to work demolishing buildings, making firebreaks, and had been killed.

It was built on the eastern bank of the Motoyasu River in 1967.

The bereaved families of Hiroshima Municipal Girls High School helped make that one too.

They had experience.

And they let their grief intermingle with that of other parents.

There are other monuments across the river in Peace Memorial Park.

There is a museum, an extraordinary one, and there are several cenotaphs, tombs for people for whom there are no bodies, including the central one built to honor every victim of the bombing regardless of nationality.

Those who died instantly, those who died from radiation poisoning and cancer, many well beyond the city.

There is a stone chest in the center that holds a register of the names of every one of them, as best as the people who built and maintain it have been able to determine.

There are 297,684 names in there.

The names of the 541 girls are there, their seven teachers.

Their other monument is nearby.

a bit down Peace Boulevard, a main artery from downtown.

It is a more prominent location.

There is more foot traffic, more people who might stop and look, read the inscription,

hold the memories,

carry them with them a bit further, past other concentric rings marking time.

This episode of The Memory Palace was written and produced by me, Nate DeMayo, in August of 2025.

This show gets research assistance from Eliza McGraw.

It is a proud member of Radiotopia, a network of independent listener-supported podcasts from PRX, a not-for-profit public media company.

During the last episode of the show, I was talking about my personal history with radio and audio and how much it has meant to me as a professional and as a human being.

And

it's had me reflecting.

One of my favorite things about being part of Radiotopia is I get to be colleagues with the Kitchen Sisters.

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Their fascinations, their fixations, it is one of the most enviable, admirable careers I can think of in any medium.

And if you haven't ever checked out their stories, their sound-rich, layered, gorgeous histories, their deep, surprising interviews, their archival audio, their particular genius, then I've got the rest of your summer sorted.

Dive into their archive, float around, see where it takes you, subscribe and hear the new stuff as it drops.

Listen to two women still at the top of their game who kind of set the rules of that game.

Trust me.

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