August 6, 1945

"At exactly 8.15am, on August 6 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.

This week 60 years ago, Fat Man and Little Boy took out Hiroshima and Nagasaki. John Hersey's classic article on the survivors of Hiroshima ran in August 1946 across the New Yorker; The Guardian reprints an abridged version in commemoration.