They Arrested the Book

At 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, Kiyoshi Tanimoto was on the outskirts of Hiroshima, unloading a handcart at a house in the suburb of Koi. He was two miles from the city center. He had slept poorly — the overnight air-raid warnings had kept him up — and he had risen early and set out with the cart.

Then the sky turned to fire.

Tanimoto was a thirty-six-year-old Methodist minister. He was not killed. He ran back toward the city. He found people moving without expression, following one another in silence. He wrote later: “Skin from faces, hands, arms, and breasts was stripped off or hanging loose. People were moving… without expression… following one after another in silence… like a procession of ghosts.”

He spent the day ferrying the injured across the river in a damaged boat, using a pole because there was no oar. He went back and forth through the ruins until dark.

Two years later, in 1947, he sat down and wrote 230 pages in English — not his first language — and mailed the manuscript to John Hersey, the American journalist who had already published his landmark account of six Hiroshima survivors in The New Yorker in 1946. Tanimoto was one of Hersey’s six subjects. He had his own account to give. He wrote it in English because he wanted Americans to understand what their weapon had done to the people it hit.

The manuscript arrived at Hersey’s address and disappeared into his papers.

For nearly eighty years, Tanimoto’s words sat in a folder at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, unread. In 2023, Hersey’s grandson, Cannon Hersey, opened the folder and found the manuscript. This week — on the 81st anniversary of the bombing — the memoir was published as Hiroshima, 8:15: The Lost Memoir by Modern Library.

Tanimoto died in 1986. He never knew whether his account had been read.

Vasily Grossman was a Soviet journalist who covered the Second World War from its first days to its last. He was there when the Red Army entered the ruins of Stalingrad. He was there when Soviet soldiers liberated Treblinka. He wrote what he saw. He wrote the testimony of survivors. He was one of the first writers in the world to document the Nazi extermination of Jews.

He spent years writing Life and Fate, a vast novel about the war and about the Soviet state — a book comparing Stalinist totalitarianism to Nazi Germany. In 1960, the KGB came to his apartment and took the manuscript. They took the carbon copies. They took the typewriter ribbons. They told him the book could not be published for two or three hundred years.

Grossman appealed to Nikita Khrushchev personally. His appeal was denied. He died in 1964, four years after the confiscation, believing the work was gone.

It was not gone. A friend had made a microfilm copy. It was smuggled to the West. The book was published in Switzerland in 1980. It was published in Russia in 1988. It is now read around the world and considered one of the great novels of the twentieth century.

After the KGB took his manuscript, Grossman said: “They arrested the book. Why bother arresting me?”

He was right. The book was more dangerous than the man. Because the book was the record.

 

Tanimoto wrote 230 pages and mailed them to Hersey, and they were not read for eighty years. He wrote them anyway because he had been there and someone had to write it down. He wrote them in English because he wanted the people who had dropped the bomb to understand what they had dropped it on.

Grossman wrote for years and the state confiscated every copy. He died believing the work was destroyed. The work survived him by decades and is still being read.

Neither man wrote with any certainty of readership. Neither wrote to build a career or reach an audience or win a prize. Both wrote because the record had to exist. Because someone had been there. Because if they did not write it, no one would.

The Power of Authors teaches: the obligation to bear witness does not depend on readership. It depends on presence. If you were there, the record is yours to make. Not because someone will read it tomorrow. Because someone will need it someday.

You may be writing something right now with no certainty anyone will read it. No publisher has said yes. No audience has formed. The work is difficult and the outcome is unclear.

Tanimoto wrote in a second language about the worst morning of his life. Grossman wrote against a state powerful enough to confiscate his typewriter ribbon. Both wrote anyway.

Write the record. Honestly. Completely. It will find its readers. Even if you are not there to see it.

Discover why purpose is the foundation of every sentence worth writing in The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen.

The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.

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