Images by Sylvester 'Silver' Nosewicz of the devastation after the bombing of Nagasaki will now be in the archives at the Onondaga Historical Association. Credit: Courtesy of Dan Nosewicz

Dan Nosewicz says the moments for conversation had to be exactly right. His father never spoke casually of what he witnessed in the ruins at Nagasaki, where — eighty years ago today — an American B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on the city.

Still, there were times when his dad quietly shared those memories in pained and unsparing detail. Listening to those accounts, Dan soon realized that Sylvester “Silver” Nosewicz spent most of his life carrying one great fear:

“People forget. They don’t learn. That’s the problem we have in the world.”

Meaning: As living memory fades of the horrific magnitude of what those weapons actually did in Japan, it increases the risk of the unthinkable somehow happening again — especially in a world with as many flash points and bitter conflicts involving nuclear powers as we’re seeing right now.

With all of that in mind, Dan is giving the Onondaga Historical Association permission to add images to its archives that were taken by his father, Silver Nosewicz, in Nagasaki, where Silver arrived as a young American sailor in September 1945. That was about a month after an A-bomb was dropped on the city, on Aug. 9, 1945 — three days after another atomic weapon was used against Hiroshima.

“That these images still exist is incredible,” said Bob Searing, curator of history at the OHA, of the photos Silver brought home. Searing shares the same belief that led Silver to capture those images, in the first place: World history changed in a way 80 years ago that human beings had never faced or contemplated before.

For the first time, warring nations demonstrated the existence of weapons that could devastate the species — and Silver’s photos are a hard testament to exactly what that means.

The way Searing sees it, this period in early August ought to provide a time of annual worldwide reflection on the imperative of avoiding nuclear conflict, which requires contemplation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the generations that remember those blasts first-hand are almost gone from the landscape, and Searing said he’s increasingly surprised and worried by the number of people he meets who have no true realization of what that destruction represents.

Sylvester ‘Silver” Nosewicz, as a young sailor. Credit: Nosewicz family photo

In the immediate aftermath of the bombings, Searing said documentary evidence of the extent of the devastation was “kept under wraps” in both the military windup to the war, and the American occupation that followed in Japan. Images of those cities shortly after the bombing, Searing said, are extraordinarily important — and hard to find outside of government sources.

Yet an 18-year-old from Syracuse went to Nagasaki, and somehow brought home photographs.

Forty thousand people died when the bomb fell on that city. Another 100,000 would die within five years, from injuries or in the radioactive aftermath. In our conversations before his death, Silver recalled how he was a teenage sailor on the USS Graffias — a Navy supply ship — when the vessel docked near Nagasaki, a few weeks after the Japanese surrender, and his officers made an offer:

The crew would be allowed to go on a tour of the city, in the wake of the bomb.

The sailors were warned against bringing cameras. Silver — with a gut-level understanding that what he was about to see was of staggering importance — smuggled a small Kodak “Brownie” camera onto shore. Until his death, he wondered if he and his shipmates — who were checked by a Geiger counter later that day — had served as living experiments as to the lingering impact of radiation.

He told me that story when we first met, 30 years ago, in 1995. At the time, Silver was repairing the furnace at a friend’s house on my street. Silver and my neighbor, fellow veterans of different eras, began talking about their years of service. In distinct and life-changing ways, they both had experience involving atomic and nuclear weapons.

The raw emotion of how Silver described Nagasaki led my friend to introduce the two of us.

We connected. Silver’s life in many ways reminded me of my own dad, also a combat veteran of the Pacific theater, and that perspective seemed emblematic of what so many young Americans endured in World War II.

The staggering difference was what Silver saw in Nagasaki. After we talked, he decided to allow me to write a column about the images — and his recollections — for Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard.

Even then, Silver did not want to focus on the historical debate about whether President Harry Truman should have used atomic weapons in 1945. He believed the bombs — and the subsequent Japanese surrender — prevented an American invasion that would have been a bloodbath, for both sides.

Since Silver almost certainly would have been part of that invasion, he said he might owe his own existence — and thus the existence of his children and grandchildren and eventual great-grandchildren — to the Japanese surrender, after the A-bombs fell.

All of it only added to the weight of what he saw. He often thought of how thousands and thousands of people, including the children of Nagasaki who were so much on his mind, were simply living their lives when they saw the flash. The idea that he survived the war, and made it home, only intensified his focus on the human suffering and destruction he saw in that city.

There was one essential message he wanted conveyed: If you’d walked those streets, you’d know such weapons should never be used again.

Silver’s photos showed a city turned to ruins and ash, on a scale that seemed unimaginable. He said there was almost no sign of civilian life, except for a few survivors digging through the rubble or asking anyone who passed by for food. Some of what he saw remained too difficult to share, but the memory that never left him is when he went to a high place to look down on the city.

This was the quote he gave me, for The Post-Standard, in an attempt to relate that devastation to his hometown:

“Imagine you’re standing in the State Tower Building, and you turn in every direction … Nedrow. Fairmount. Solvay. Liverpool. Eastwood … and it’s gone. Dead. Burned.”

He told me he had wondered — before he carried his little camera to shore — if the photos might be something he could sell someday. He never did. Some, too unbearable to see, he destroyed. Others he kept in a metal box, pulling them out in 1995 for use with my column.

What he witnessed in Nagasaki, he told me at the time, put every second of the rest of his life into perspective.

“I see kids, little kids, running around happy,” he said in the column. “And I don’t think we know how lucky we are.”

A decade ago — in the week marking 70 years since the bombing — I met Silver again, at the then-Jamesville home of his son Dan, and Dan’s wife Mary. Silver was 88, and the intensity of his message about collective memory felt more urgent than ever. Not long afterward, I left my job in Syracuse to spend nine years as a columnist in Buffalo, which is where I was working when Silver died, at 92, in 2018.

I never forgot the guy — his intensity and soul and sheer humanity. Dan and Mary live now in Florida. This week, I reached out to them and also spoke with Searing, who said the OHA would see it as profoundly important to add those images to its files — an idea Dan embraced. As Searing described it, the photographs were taken by a quiet sailor whose life illustrates the World War II sacrifice of everyday Americans — many of whom never made it home, and countless others who had to live with what they saw.

Silver and his late wife Muriel had four sons, and the couple would eventually become great-grandparents. What never changed, Dan said, was his father’s fundamental ethic and his constant sense of humility: “Dad grew up in the Depression. His family was very poor and they knew what it was like to go without.”

Silver went to school through the sixth grade, then left to find work. He always knew “a phony” when he saw one, Dan said, and he always appreciated the simplest joys about everyday life, after the war.

His father held onto those photos from Nagasaki. Muriel, his wife, used to tell Dan that his father was a “restless sleeper,” and Dan doesn’t need much reason to guess why. Silver would occasionally reflect on how “radiation is so deadly … you can’t see it, you can’t hear it, and it sticks around for years,” a lethal truth that he knew would be immeasurably worse if a nuclear blast — amplified by 21st century technology – ever occurred today.

This summer, 80 years after his father walked the streets of a city incinerated by an atomic bomb, Dan looks around and sees a world preoccupied by its phones, which people use to repeatedly stoke angry divisions and grievances. Dan knows his dad would have seen it all as ridiculous, compared to the merciless truth of what he witnessed.

Dan likes the idea of his father’s photos being preserved — and hopefully seen over the years by countless visitors – at the OHA. The mission is reinforcing the simple imperative Silver Nosewicz brought home from Nagasaki, the lesson he hoped we might share with our own kids, who then would pass it on.

Please. Never again.

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Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Central Current. He has been an Upstate journalist for more than 50 years. He held his first reporting job as a teenager and worked for newspapers in Dunkirk, Niagara...