One in four Americans watched This Is Your Life every week. There were just no rules for how you do it. And though Hanna Kohner's episode was, well, blunt, it was the first national television show to have a Holocaust survivor tell her story. His model for the show was love thy neighbor. The overworked language, the wholesome, all-American spirit forced into a foreigner's tragedy, the game show tactics, a Holocaust survivor asked to guess who's next to come through the curtain. There's something undeniably strange about all of this. It's the kind of Holocaust charm bracelet you pass down to your kids. To their credit, Marshall Jewelers played it safe, with a 14 karat map of Czechoslovakia, a mountain house, a Jeep, a sergeant's hat, a suitcase, a star of David, the Statue of Liberty, the flags of Luxembourg, where Hanna was married, and the United States. Stay with us.Ĭan't be easy to design a Holocaust charm bracelet. And what to do if a certain women in Minnesota offers you an orange. Next, a cautionary tale about how anything you give may be used against you, sometimes in a court of law. Four stories, four gifts.įirst, a story about a gift that was given out every week in front of 40 million people. I'm going to call them stories, not acts today- see how that feels. Today on This American Life we will be rummaging deep into the oh, you shouldn't have gift pile to see just how fraught it all is. But plenty of others say, I thought I was thinking of you, but really I was thinking of me. Some gifts, good gifts, say I thought of you. I'm picturing- and you can picture your own pile- misguided sweaters, noise makers for children, lingerie for coworkers, et cetera, anything creepy. I feel like I got handed one of those gifts that when you tear off the wrapping paper and see what's inside, you say, "oh, you shouldn't have." And part of you means it.īut what are you going to do? A lot of gifts are complicated, if not flat out bad. I found out about it not that long before you did. We shall never repeat our mistake.I want to tell you that there wasn't some long, behind the scenes build up to this guest hosting gig. Lewis died in 1983, but Kondo says every year when she goes to a park that honors the dead of Hiroshima she always remembers the man who dropped the bomb on her city. She decided she wanted to fight for peace and the end of nuclear weapons.
That meeting changed the course of Kondo's life. "I just wanted to touch his hand because I thought, that's my way of showing I'm sorry I hated you, but it's not you who I should hate. She came up close to him and held his hand. I should hate the war itself, which we human beings caused." "So I was staring at his eyes, 'you're the bad one, I'm the good one.' "īut then she saw Lewis crying and thought, "He's the same human being as me. "I was so shocked because I wanted to meet those people who own the airplane so I can revenge," Kondo told NPR. He told the story of the day he dropped the bomb and said he entered into his log, "My God, what have we done." Lewis was a co-pilot on the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb over Hiroshima. Kondo, then just 10 years old, was on the stage when they brought on Capt. It looked like a procession of ghosts," Tanimoto, her father, told the show.
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"I saw the whole city on fire and many people running away from the city in silence, their skin peeling off, hanging from face, from arms. "So I said, someday when I'm grown up, I am going to revenge."Ī decade later, her father was invited onto an American talk show, This Is Your Life, to talk about the day the bomb dropped. "As a child, I thought if they never dropped the bomb, many children didn't have to become orphans," she said. Once Kondo realized the lasting effects that had been wrought by the American attack, she vowed revenge. In the days and weeks following, many more became sick from radiation poisoning. In total, hundreds of thousands of people were killed and more were injured upon impact. Shortly after the bombs were dropped, Japan's Emperor Hirohito surrendered, ending World War II. "With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces," President Harry Truman said as he addressed the nation after the first attack on Hiroshima. 9, 1945, the United States dropped a bomb on Nagasaki. Three days after dropping a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, on Aug. She said when she was out from the house, the environment was completely different.
"She moved little by little and she made a little hole," Kondo told NPR's Weekend Editionof her mother's attempts to escape. She was trapped beneath the rubble with her mother. "Suddenly, the whole house crashed," Kondo recounts. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, had left earlier that morning. Koko Kondo was 8 months old and with her mother when the first atomic bomb hit her home city of Hiroshima on Aug.