Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.One summer morning, a group of schoolchildren notice a plane shimmering in the sky. Moments later, they are surrounded by a blazing, unearthly orange light, followed by a blackness so dense that it feels as if the sun has been extinguished. When the darkness finally lifts, a hellscape emerges. A city has been reduced to rubble; living and breathing humans to piles of charred bones.This is what happened in Hiroshima on August 6 1945, as recalled by those who were there. Known as hibakusha, the survivors of the first atomic bomb — and the one that hit Nagasaki three days later — have rarely spoken about their experiences until now. Atomic People, a soul-piercing BBC documentary, invites some of these witnesses the opportunity to share “what happened under the mushroom cloud that day”. Broadcast almost exactly a year since the release of Christopher Nolan’s awards-sweeping Oppenheimer, the show serves as a corrective to the way that film privileged its hero’s conscience over Japanese perspectives. Through 90 minutes of harrowing first-hand testimony, we’re encouraged to reflect on human tragedies often obfuscated by anonymising statistics (an estimated 90,000 and 120,000 dead in Hiroshima; 60-70,000 deaths in Nagasaki) and western-centred histories of the second world war. The contributors are evidently caught between wishing they could forget the atrocities they witnessed nearly 80 years ago and feeling responsible for ensuring the world understands. When the camera focuses on their faces, it’s clear that they are not merely remembering but reliving every awful moment. Grimly vivid accounts of what it felt like to walk past eviscerated bodies, searching for family members or collecting the remains of classmates make one’s heart ache. Unsparingly graphic archive images and video reels cause one’s stomach to turn. At one point, these nightmarish shots are juxtaposed with footage from V-J parties in the US: a potent reminder that the event that finally ended the war also marked the beginning of decades of suffering and trauma. In the second half of the film, the focus moves to the days, weeks and years after the bombings in which thousands more died from radiation sickness. We hear of the health panic that gripped the nation and the stigma that surrounded the hibakusha. There are chilling reminders, too, that the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission — set up by the US government in 1946 — conducted research on thousands of survivors, often without providing medical care or information to those afflicted.But the film is more than a perspective-shifting history lesson or another forum through which to debate whether the bomb was justifiable. By confronting us with the horrors of what they experienced, the hibakusha provide us with the most urgent, unflinching and unequivocal warning possible about where nuclear escalation may lead.★★★★★On BBC2, July 31 at 9pm
