Ren Taoda couldn't get over the regret she felt about denying her badly burned son water as they fled the fires in Hiroshima sparked by the atomic bomb.

On Aug. 6, 1945, Taoda, then 30, was on her way home from visiting her husband at the naval hospital in Kure when the A-bomb detonated while she was headed toward the streetcar stop at Hiroshima Station in Matsubara (now part of Minami Ward) with second son Hiroo on her back.

After being blown toward the station by the blast, nearly 2 km away, she lost consciousness momentarily but came to at the sound of Hiroo's crying. Both had been badly scorched from behind by the heat wave generated by the blast.