Owasso woman survives Hiroshima blast

An Owasso grandmother remembers that day well. Shigeko Ferguson doesn't judge whether the decision to drop the bomb was right or wrong. <br/><br/>She tells News on 6 anchor Tami Marler what it was

Monday, August 8th 2005, 11:23 am

By: News On 6

An Owasso grandmother remembers that day well. Shigeko Ferguson doesn't judge whether the decision to drop the bomb was right or wrong.

She tells News on 6 anchor Tami Marler what it was like on that day 60 years ago when she was a schoolgirl in Japan.

"And just flashed you know real, shiny flash and then got dark. And then next thing I knew kids start falling down on top of me. And they was dead."

Hearing about the collateral damage of war on the news or reading it in the headlines somehow makes the loss seem less real but Shigeko Ferguson was 12 years-old when the Enola Gay dropped its deadly load and what she was experiencing was very real.

"I looked and ran and it was so dark I couldn't see anything. First thing I saw is a man was holding a baby with blood all over it."

Dazed and confused, Ferguson walked to where her home once stood, but it was devastated. Many of her classmates were among the 140,000 killed, and she was severely burned over most of her body.

"When I was laying in bed, I could smell, you could smell burned people, human, I could smell. I was laying in bed for about two years."

Hiroshima is now a booming metropolis of 3-million where the scars of the nuclear nightmare are barely visible but still burn deep in Shigeko Ferguson's memories.

"I saw a lot of people got killed, so I don't want to think about any kind of war. Even in Iraq. So I don't want to think about it because it hurt you know. Hurt me. So, I'm sorry."

She has trouble finding hate in any war, only pain. Maybe because she's found herself on both sides of the hatred. Maybe because of a lesson her father taught her as she struggled to heal.

"My dad used to tell me, you can't blame on nobody. You know. War is war you know."