Nuclear survivor

The wooden Virgin Mary statue that survived amid the collapsed columns and scorched debris of the Romanesque church flattened by an atom bomb on August 9, 1945. When the atom bomb Fat Boy devastated Nagasaki 65 years ago, one of the buildings reduced to rubble was the city’s Urakami cathedral. The blinding nuclear flash that would claim more than 70,000 lives in the city, in an instant, blew out the stained glass windows of the church, toppled its walls, burnt its altar and melted its iron bell. But, in what local Christian followers have likened to a miracle, the head of a wooden Virgin Mary statue survived.