Kate Chisholm

The divine spark

‘You have to live.

issue 23 July 2011

‘You have to live.

‘You have to live. You have to find a way to live,’ a Japanese woman told the 15 elderly people who were trapped on the third floor of a concrete building in one of the small towns worst affected by the natural disaster in March. She had gathered them together after the earthquake, and in fear of a tsunami she kept urging them to struggle up the stairs to the third floor: ‘Move up. Move up.’ Then suddenly she saw that the telegraph poles were ‘popping’ out of the ground and a sea of black water was surging towards them. ‘Am I going to die now?’ she thought. But she didn’t, and it was her optimism, her human spirit, that allowed them all to survive as they waited for four long and terrifying days before rescue came.

Justin Webb was talking to Masako Shirade for the Today programme on Radio 4 last Friday in a series of reports from the earthquake-ravaged region.

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