Pretty much the only thing left standing on the ground after the blast was the Industrial Promotion Hall. Ironically, it is situated right next to the T-shaped Aioi Bridge, which was the pilot's visual target from the air on the day that the Enola Gay all but removed Hiroshima from the face of the earth 67 years ago. The bomb detonated about 600 metres above the actual building and it has been left just as it was when the city was decimated on 6th August, 1945.
The Atomic Bomb Dome, (as it is now known), stands opposite the Peace Park, which is itself home to the Peace Museum and countless memorials to commemorate the victims. These include the Atomic Bomb Memorial Mound, containing the ashes of 70,000 unidentified victims of the bomb, as well as the statue of Sadako Sasaki holding a golden crane. Sadako became an international symbol for peace after dying of leukemia at the age of 12 in 1955. Aged just 2 at the time of the blast, she was a mile away from its epicenter, but the walls of her house could not protect her from the threat of the radiation. After contracting the disease before reaching her teens, she tried in vain to fold a thousand paper cranes in the belief that this would help her to recover. She died before she could complete them.
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