Allan Appel photo
City Peace Commissioners Millie Grenough and Paul Bloom, at Tuesday's vigil.
On the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, a half dozen American aircraft arrived and hovered over Hiroshima, Japan. They included planes tracking the weather, taking pictures, and monitoring weapons systems. One carried the world’s first atomic bomb.
At 8:09 a.m. it was dropped, the first nuclear weapon ever used, wiping out a civilian population roughly the size of New Haven’s and reducing to unrecognizable rubble an area that would be about 25 percent of the Elm City today.
Roll the clock ahead nearly eight decades and, at approximately the same time Tuesday morning, 40 passionate anti-nuclear activists gathered on the New Haven Green.
Their aim: a moment of silence, music, speeches, and poetry to mark the annual vigil in remembrance of that moment and all its implications for peace and survival today.
“We have a lot of war memorials,” said Henry Lowendorf, who heads the City of New Haven Peace Commission, one of three sponsoring organizations of the event, “but few peace memorials.”
Tuesday’s vigil featured participants holding posters of the blast, its horrific effects, and, as importantly, calling attention to what vast societal goods might be achieved with even a modest shifting of the huge military budgets to starved humanitarian ones.
The speakers included Jim Pandaru from another of the sponsors, Veterans for Peace, and Mary Compton of the Greater New Haven Peace Council.
Compton said that among hopeful signs in what can sometimes seem the Sisyphean struggle for nuclear disarmament, the U.S. Conference of Mayors has signed on with a resolution calling for the terminating of funding for nuclear weapons modernization — at a cost of staggering trillions of dollars — and moving the money to fund human needs.
Former Mayor Toni Harp (center) with Veterans for Peace member Jim Brasile, and Henry Lowendorf in background.
Long-time peace activist Stephen Kobasa, quoting Czech author Milan Kundera, said, “The struggle of humanity against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
Former Mayor Toni Harp offered a particularly arresting perspective because, she said, her birthday is August 6.
“As a little girl I’d look on the calendar to see what else happened on the day I was born,” she recalled.
That’s how she began to learn, she said, of the horrific effects of the bomb, and its continuing effects on the earth.
The former mayor said what she personally, spiritually, gets out of attendance at such a vigil is that “it reminds me of how close we are to human destruction, especially these past few years. And how we resolve our problems through violence, and that has to change.”
What made the 79th anniversary particularly poignant, said Lowendorf, is that this is the first vigil that was not attended by Al Marder. The long-time and founding New Haven peace activist died, just shy of 102, in December, recalled Lowendorf.
“He’s here in spirit,” said Lowendorf. “As we organize, we’re mindful of his presence.”
And what would have been Al Marder’s message if he were here?
“We memorialize the wars,” Lowendorf answered, “and the dead and we fight like hell for the living. That’s what he would have said.”
Paula Panzarella and Stephen Kobasa at the vigil
On Friday, at 11:00 a.m. a similar vigil will take place, this time, at the Amistad statue adjacent to City Hall, to memorialize the dropping of the second atomic bomb, on Nagasaki.