VOSHN 129

<body><a href="../index.html">HOME</a><br><table summary="121"><tr><td class="etesti">121</td><td class="edate">Before August 15<sup>th</sup>, 1945</td><td class="eage">30 years old at that time</td></tr><tr><td class="ei_midasi" colspan=3>I was more afraid of the Living than the Dead.</td></tr></table><table summary="haikei"><tr><td class="bg" background="../../photo/img332.jpg"><div class="large"><p>I was engaged in the operation of cremation.  Corpses were not thoroughly burned.  Sometimes heads or some parts of the bodies were left unburned.  With a Tobiguchi<span class="red">*</span>, I walked around the piles of corpses, pulled and turned around the bodies so that they would be thoroughly burned.</p><br><p>Dead bodies, there were gold on teeth of dead bodies.  People came to pull the gold out from the bodies with pliers or nippers.  Also the blankets covered dead bodies would be gone, too.  People came to snatch them away from dead bodies by night.</p><br><p>These people came to take things in desperation.  They were really desperate in doing such things.  I was afraid of living people much more than dead people.  Dead people wouldn't resist against you.  They were not frightful.  The livings were frightful.</p><br><p>The blankets I was talking about, which covered the decomposed bodies, had human flesh and some other things.  They didn't care about the human flesh trickling down from the blankets.  They just took them with it.</p><p>When I caught a robber, I noticed that he was a very old man.  And I asked him, "Grandfather, what are you going to do with this blanket?"</p><p>He answered, "Well, to tell the truth, I will wrap our new-born baby with this, because it wears no clothes."...</p><br><p>*Tobiguchi: tool that is equivalent to the special rakes for fire fighters to rescue victims or to break through the blockage on site of a fire.</p></div></td></tr></table></body>