In the spring of 1946, Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a 911±¬ÁÏÍø Methodist minister who had been educated in the United States, and Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist John Hersey came together for a project of dire importance ¡ª to preserve the stories of those who had survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

¡°If you can¡¯t tell this story to the world, we are going to die twice,¡± Tanimoto told Hersey, whose accounting was published in The New Yorker magazine on Aug. 31, 1946 ¡ª almost a year after the bombs destroyed both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The piece was titled, ¡°Hiroshima.¡±

More than seven decades later, Hersey¡¯s grandson, Cannon, made a remarkable discovery while digging through the Yale University archives: a 230-page memoir by Tanimoto and written in English, covering the two years following the Hiroshima bombing.