PHOENIX MEMORABILIA: "I saw a little child--

     I saw a little child with hurt eyes trying to understand how a bomb dropped 16 years ago could have killed her mother yesterday.
     I heard a sobbing woman tell of her young daughter who, bleeding from ears, nose, and mouth as a result of radiation sickness, had cried brokenly on her last day, "I don't want to die! Mother, don't let me die!"
     I saw a friend point to a spot near the naked skeleton of the Peace Memorial Dome and heard him say flatly, "Our house was there."
     I met the minister, the housewife, the schoolboy, the grandfather, who lost all but their hopes on August 6, 1945, and then lost their hope also when the fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki became a beginning, not of peace, but of an arms race for power.
     In my nightmares I have searched the charred and hollow fragments of the buildings left erect, seen in the sand beneath the river the scattered bones of the thousands who fled the A-bomb's fire, watched the pitiful human beings trail silently past, their skin hanging from them in burned and ghastly tatters.
     Man everywhere has become for me through Hiroshima something immensely precious. As I can imagine the horror of a bomb dropped on my own people, so I can feel the agony of those who would die or wish they had died.
     I do not wish to live in this world if it must be in a bomb shelter. I never want to start protecting myself before I have done everything humanly possible to make such protection unnecessary for anyone, anywhere.
     Believing that all people share the same love for life and thirst for righteousness, I wish to help them prevent the greatest tragedy of misunderstanding ever to face the world. I wish to prevent the war no one wants, for which there would be no cure.
     This is why I am protesting the existence of nuclear weapons on earth. This is why I want everyone to share my faith in mankind and to work together for peace.
     By sailing to Russia, as we sailed into the Bikini test zone, in protest against nuclear weapons and the arms race, this is what I am trying to tell the world.

--Jessica Reynolds, 1961