By Cara Jepsen
Snider hitched a ride to the countryside, where she was eventually reunited with her father and other family members. Her mother had died in the blast. She had been working with community mobilization forces to tear down houses vacated by fleeing residents, so as to hinder the spread of fires in the event of incendiary bomb attacks. The day before the bomb fell, at Snider’s urging, her mother had retrieved her from the austere country school where she and her classmates had been sent for their safety. Her mother had wanted to stay overnight but instead returned with Snider to the city. If they’d stayed overnight in the village, Snider thought, her mother’s life would have been spared. For years afterward Snider blamed herself for being “childish and selfish” and causing her mother’s death.
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The book signaled a coming to terms with the disaster. “When I was younger all I wanted to do was forget,” she says, adding that she was also suppressing the very real fear that she could fall ill and die at any time (her uncle and a fellow student from Hiroshima both developed cancer). “No one knew when their time would be up,” she writes. As a student she had called off an engagement to a classmate at the U. of C. with whom she was deeply in love and she didn’t understand why until much later. “Neither of us had heard about post-traumatic stress disorder,” she writes. The two were reunited and married in 1995.
“I wish that this would be part of the educational curriculum,” she says. “When I spoke at some of the high schools, the children said it was wonderful to see a real person explain what this means in real life, because they only see it in the textbooks as statistics. In a relatively short time, all of the survivors will be gone. The question is, Is the new millennium going to be one in which we will grow to be very aware, or will we continue to become more ignorant?”
