Sadako Sasaki

Sadako Sasaki was born on January 7, 1943, in Japan. On August 6, 1945, at two years old, she survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima but was severely irradiated. For a decade she appeared to recover. Then the damage caught up. She spent her final months at the Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital folding origami cranes — more than one thousand of them before she died on October 25, 1955. She became one of the most widely known hibakusha, the Japanese term for bomb-affected person, her story carried forward by the cranes she left behind.