Hiroshi Haradare remembers how his leg sank into one of the bodies blocking a narrow Hiroshima street 70 years ago, as he fled the spreading fire ignited by the atomic bomb.
"My leg slid deep into one of them. Then it was very hard to pull my leg out ... To escape, I had no choice," said Mr. Harada, the 75-year-old former head of an atomic bomb museum.
Later that day, a woman grabbed Mr. Harada, then just 6 years old, by the leg and asked for water. He stepped back in horror to find a chunk of flesh from her hand sticking to his leg.
As the 70th anniversary of the world's first nuclear attack approaches, many survivors still find it too painful to talk about. But with their ranks dwindling, others are determined to pass on their experiences to younger generations.
"The number of survivors will be shrinking and their voices getting smaller," Mr. Harada said. "But Hiroshima needs to keep on sending a message to the world that things like this should never happen again."
Shortly after the bombing, 15-year-old Shigeo Ito was hurrying home and was asked by a woman to help rescue a person trapped under a collapsed house. He ignored the plea since fire was approaching the bridge he needed to cross to get home.
"Even long after that, I could not help feeling ashamed of myself every time I saw that bridge," said the 84-year-old Ito, who now lectures to school children about his experience.
Shuntaro Hida, 98, was an army surgeon at the time of the bombing. When he first went out after the explosion, he saw a woman with what he thought were tattered clothes hanging from her torso. Then he realised he was seeing her sloughed-off skin.
For Mr. Hida, however, the real horror of the nuclear attack lay in its often invisible health effects. "The cruellest aspect of a nuclear attack is not the savage destruction of human bodies or visible burns, but its life-destroying after-effects," said Mr. Hida, who treated and advised some 10,000 atomic bomb survivors.
