I wasn’t born yet when Hiroshima happened—August 6, 1945—but it isn’t terribly far away in the way history can still feel close enough to touch. I didn’t serve in Vietnam either. My own “war background” comes from history books, documentaries, and old footage. Still, war found its way into my life: I lost two close friends in Vietnam, and I had two brothers who served there. So even if my knowledge is secondhand, the cost of war has never felt abstract.
And yet—out of everything I’ve read, watched, or listened to—this one video about Hiroshima has impacted me more than any book, movie, or story I’ve ever encountered.
It tells what happened that morning when a B-29 dropped an atomic bomb—“Little Boy”—over Hiroshima. In an instant, buildings were flattened for miles. Tens of thousands died immediately, and the suffering continued long after the blast. The scale is hard to hold in the mind. You almost can’t take it in without wanting to turn away.
But then the story narrows to one small place near the heart of the devastation: a rectory beside a church—Our Lady of the Assumption. Eight Jesuit missionaries were there. Close to the hypocenter. Close enough that it makes no sense what comes next.
They survived.
Four of the priests are known by name—Father Hugo Lassalle, Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, Father Hubert Schiffer, and Father Hubert Cieslik. They were injured by shattered glass, but not crushed, not burned, not deafened. Their church lost its stained-glass windows, but it didn’t collapse. In a city where so much turned to rubble, it remained standing—one of only a few structures left upright.
What affected me most wasn’t only that they lived through the blast. It was what came after. Doctors warned them about radiation poisoning—about lesions, sickness, and slow deterioration. Many victims suffered horrific burns and sores. But the Jesuits, astonishingly, showed no lasting radiation effects. They were examined again and again—hundreds of times over the years—and the predicted consequences never came.
Father Hubert Schiffer, who was only thirty at the time, later described the moment. He had celebrated Mass early that morning and then sat down for breakfast. He had just sliced a grapefruit—such an ordinary detail, so human—when a flash lit the room. Then came the force. He said he was lifted from his chair and hurled through the air, battered and spun as if the wind itself had turned violent and personal. When he opened his eyes, he was on the ground. Around him: nothing. Whole sections of the city leveled as far as he could see. And he discovered, almost impossibly, that he was still alive—only a few pieces of glass in the back of his neck.
Years later, he told the story publicly and kept being asked the same question: Why were you spared? When so many died in an instant—or suffered afterward—why did this small community survive, and why without the radiation effects everyone expected?
Father Schiffer’s answer was simple and steady. He attributed it to devotion to the Blessed Mother, to the Rosary, and to living the message of Fatima. Not as a slogan, but as a daily practice—prayer, repentance, consecration, and fidelity in ordinary life. He believed they had been protected, as if sheltered under a mantle.
The video includes that haunting reconnaissance photo taken after the bombing: the church standing amid the flattened city. It looks almost like a signpost in a wasteland. And there are the priests—small figures in the street—staring out over miles of ruin, giving thanks that they were spared to continue God’s work.
I don’t watch that and feel triumphant. I feel sobered. I feel the weight of what human beings can do to one another—and then, right beside it, the mystery of mercy. The story doesn’t erase the horror, but it plants a strange, stubborn light inside it: the reminder that prayer is not pretend, that grace is not an idea, and that God can still be present in the middle of a world that has gone utterly dark.
That’s why this has stayed with me. Not because I think I can explain it neatly, but because I can’t. And because, after all the books and films and arguments, this one testimony makes me want to pray—quietly, faithfully—like it matters.
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