When the stones breath - 1. Chapter 1

It looked like a small beautiful hill resting quietly in the middle of the park, surrounded by short stones as if someone was still trying to protect a secret. In front of it hung a sign filled with tiny writing: 70,000 people buried beneath the earth, their ashes burned beyond recognition, their names dissolved into history, their souls perhaps still wandering somewhere between this world and the next, forever lost and forever waiting to be remembered.

It was just an ordinary step attached to a stone wall, the kind no one would ever stop to notice. Yet there it remained, a small dark shadow etched into the stone. Was it too much rain, was it dirt left by time, or was it a man simply waiting for the bank to open before the sky burned him out of existence. One second he was thinking about another ordinary day, and in the next his body was gone so completely that only his shadow remained behind, stuck to the stone like the world itself refused to forgive what had been done to him.

It was another hot summer day, the kind meant for school children to run through the streets, laugh loudly, and come home before sunset with tired feet and dirty hands. But they were there instead, the 8,400 children forced to tear down buildings under the burning sky, never knowing that death was already falling toward them. Many of them vanished within minutes, their small bodies burned into ash before they had the chance to become anything in this world, and the ones who survived carried the pain for the rest of their lives, waking up every morning inside a nightmare that never truly ended.

It was the little boy waiting for his father, who never came to pick him up. It was the baby who suddenly stopped crying in its mother’s arms while she begged God to let her hear that voice one more time. It was the sister too weak to carry her brother’s burned body through the ruins of the city, forced to leave him behind among the dead. They were not soldiers, they were not pawns of powerful men sitting in fancy rooms making decisions about war and death. They were ordinary people, people who wanted to grow old, fall in love, raise children and come home at the end of the day, yet they were the ones burned alive by the pride and madness of men far away from the fire they created. An entire city disappeared in front of their eyes so the mighty could teach the world a lesson about fear, while innocent people paid for it with their skin, their voices, their families and their futures.

Thousands of folded cranes hang everywhere, carrying silent prayers for peace, for the souls who never found their way home, for the pain of that morning still walking silently through the streets even after all these years.

Some people say humanity learned a lesson from Hiroshima. Did we? So why are drones still dropping bombs on cities, why are people still massacred and driven from their homes, why are people still tortured and hanged in total internet blackout so the world never hears their final cries. Unknown bodies are piled together once again while powerful men threaten humanity with another fire even more devastating than the last one. “Give me what I want or I will burn the world with me” has become the language of our time.

So let us pray for peace, pray for the souls who never found rest, and pray that the next generation survives the terrible decisions of people drunk on power and untouched by suffering. Life will continue with or without us. The trees in Hiroshima still stand there quietly, silent witnesses to the brutality human beings are capable of.

Still, I will fold another origami crane and leave it there among the thousands of others, a small and fragile prayer against all the cruelty human beings keep creating. Maybe it will change nothing. Maybe this world will continue burning long after we are gone. But I still want to believe that even the smallest human kindness can survive the fire, and that somewhere in the middle of all this darkness, another person might choose not to hurt the world around them.