The ones who were vaporized instantly, leaving nothing but permanent shadows on the walls behind them, they were the ones Shizuko Abe envied.

Mrs. Abe, then an 18-year-old newlywed, was one of the unlucky survivors, broiled, irradiated and flayed, skin peeling from their bodies but not quite dead, who were witnesses when the United States ushered the world into the nuclear age 50 years ago today.

At that moment, at 8:15 on the sunny morning of Aug. 6, 1945, when the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima, Mrs. Abe was with some junior high school boys almost a mile from the epicenter. The blast burned her clothes off, seared her flesh and hurled her 30 feet, knocking her unconscious.

"When I came to, I looked around," she said, gently waving the claw that remains of her right hand. "The boys had been so cute before, but now their clothes were burned off and they were nearly naked. Their skin was cut up and ripped off. Their faces were peeling off as well."

Though she did not know it, Mrs. Abe was herself so hideously deformed that her own parents would urge her to show mercy to her husband and leave him forever.

As fire raged nearer, Mrs. Abe joined a parade of survivors trudging down the road in the dusk left by a mushroom cloud that blotted out the sun. Blackened, bleeding, wearing only tatters of clothing, they moaned and held out their arms to lessen the pain -- looking like ghosts.

Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.