The survivors of the nuclear bombs dropped by the US on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known in Japan as "hibakusha", said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. This "deeply moving, quietly devastating" BBC documentary marries archive footage from the time with interviews with a handful of survivors, who are now octogenarians "at least".
Shigeaki, who was eight in 1945, remembers a young woman swaying as she walked towards him while clutching her internal organs. Chieko, then 15, recalls seeing a group of schoolchildren with what "looked like long strands of seaweed hanging from their waists. It was the skin of their legs peeling off." Another survivor says that the noise of insects always reminds her of "the voices of the dying who begged her for help and water". The documentary is, at times, "almost unbearable" to watch, but these witnesses "are asking us not to look away".
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