Setsuko Thurlow

📍1-10 Ōtemachi, Naka Ward, Hiroshima 730-0051, Japan

“Setsuko Thurlow was born Setsuko Nakamura in Hiroshima in January 1932. On 6 August 1945, at thirteen, she was one of a group of schoolgirls mobilised to work decoding messages at the army headquarters about 1.8 kilometres from the hypocentre when the atomic bomb exploded. The building collapsed on her; she crawled out of the rubble and escaped as the city burned, and she has described the procession of terribly injured people moving out of the city. Most of the girls in her group, and many members of her family, were killed. The ruin of the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, now the Genbaku Dome, was preserved as the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. She later studied in the United States and settled in Canada, becoming a social worker and a lifelong campaigner against nuclear weapons, and in 2017 she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of ICAN in Oslo. At ninety-four she was still speaking for nuclear disarmament.”

Sources: Thurlow, S. Nobel Peace Prize lecture (2017), ICAN; Hogan, M. Hiroshima in History and Memory (1996), Cambridge University Press