Fukuromachi Elementary School Peace Museum

This guide to the Fukuromachi Elementary School Peace Museum in Hiroshima traces August 6, 1945, when the school stood barely four hundred sixty meters from the atomic bomb's hypocenter and only its reinforced-concrete west wing kept its shape. It follows how, in the chaos afterward, survivors turned the wing's scorched stairwell into a message board for the missing, writing in chalk with no paper to spare. It also follows how those words vanished under decades of plaster before renovation work brought the wall back into view.