Seventy years ago, on August 6^th, 1945, the United States dropped the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, they bombed Nagasaki.

At the time, that much was clear. Also clear was that tens of thousands of people had died from the flash, the fire, the radiation. Buildings had collapsed on civilians. People’s skin and eyes had burned.

There were other details that were less easily accessible, though. In the years since, we’ve been able to gather data about the effects of the bombs, but directly after the fact, it was hard to get reliable information. Scientists from the U.S. Government interviewed eyewitness survivors, trying to put together a more complete picture.

One such survivor was Kaleria Palchikoff, a medical missionary born in the Soviet Union in 1922. She was living in Hiroshima at the time. Her family had moved into the outskirts of town just before the bomb fell, following evacuation warnings, but she was close enough to see the events unfold.

In this recording, we hear an excerpt of a U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey interview with Palchikoff, conducted after the fact.

Palchikoff describes the flash, and the sandy glass particles that stayed in her eyes for days.

She talks about the burial practices. People dug a hole in front of the regiment headquarters, threw bodies in, and covered them up. They did this, she says, about five times. There were thousands of bodies.

The unidentified men questioning her want more specific information, though. What color dress was she wearing at the time? Did the buildings with steel or reinforced concrete frames do better than others? Who did the Japanese hold responsible for the bombings?

Her answers are partly description, partly speculation and hearsay. None of the white people lost their hair after the attack, she says. She also claims that the Japanese looked up to white people “as Gods,” or at least as highly educated people that they strove to emulate or “live up” to.

As for the attitude of those who were burned, it was “pure jealousy,” Palchikoff says, with young women and men looking at their unburned friends and wondering, “Why me and not you?”

The interview is an interesting mix of fact and rumor, and an indication of just how hard it was to get specific, verifiable data from a disaster zone, even if it was man-made.